WATCH: Good Clean Fun With Roby D’Amico & Kepa Acero

Back in the day, achieving surf legend status was as easy as going somewhere remote, hacking through a bit of jungle, surfing an empty reef pass and getting on the first boat or big bird outta there.

However, in our post-woke world of mass travel, having a positive impact on the places we visit has become just as critical as scoring crazy waves for the modern-day surf legend.

To learn more about how we can all do our bit, we hit up Reef ambassadors and bonafide global citizens Roby D’amico and Kepa Acero for a brief instructional video.

With over a decade of travel experience between them, Roby and Kepa understand the importance of sharing the stoke and giving back to the people and places they visit better than most. Anyone who has travelled with them will tell you that this approach has paid dividends for the pair, as everywhere they go, from deepest Sub-Saharan Africa to the shores of the Med, they are received with broad arms and even broader smiles.

Kepa’s youtube archive serves as a testament to his ability to form lifelong friendships on the road and much of Roby’s recent output has been similarly focussed on positive cultural exchange. One particularly heartwarming scene from his award-winning short ‘The Island’ features him sharing waves with the most stoked pack of groms you ever did see.

“The people with whom we interact in these new universes give us a lot,” explains Kepa. “But I think we can also contribute. We must think that, after all, for the locals, it is an opportunity to get to know the visitor and his way of seeing life. It is an exchange and an opportunity for the locals too, who in some ways also travels with you.”

As well as the focus on these meaningful encounters with local people, last year Kepa set up a scheme delivering donated surfboards to west Africa and the pair regularly help out with clean up operations in the places they visit.

Since 2018, Reef and its whole team of ambassadors have been working alongside the Surfrider Foundation to inspire beach-lovers to help keep our playground clean. To date, their ‘Better Beaches’ campaign has contributed to the removal of almost 100 thousand kilos of rubbish across 861 beach cleanups worldwide.

Good Clean Fun serves as a lighthearted reminder that doing your bit doesn’t have to be a bore, and by giving a little back, we can maintain the beauty of the places we visit for years to come.