Tim Hain has the easy-going demeanour of someone who has soaked up all the good stuff about the tropical expat lifestyle while avoiding all the bad stuff – like morning drinking, inability to get anything done and endless, spiteful gossip-mongering.

This is just as well, since Canadian-born Hain, 54, is one of the busiest men in Bali and his job requires him to toe a fine diplomatic line through the potential minefield of Asian surfing politics on a daily basis. (No, I’m not being funny. It’s easier to get screwed in a South East Asian boardroom than it is on Patpong 2 or Jalan Dhyana Pura.)

For nearly a decade now, Hain has overseen the fortunes of the Indonesian Surfing Championships (ISC) tour and more recently the Asian Surfing Championship (ASC) tour, alongside Indonesia’s most respected surfer, Tipi Jabrik, courting corporate sponsors, liaising with far-flung surf communities who are very new to the sport and culture, and placating the inevitable grumpy expats who have found their own little paradise and are not super-stoked about sirens and PA systems and tents on “their” beach. A revered figure in his own country and respected throughout the other Asian surf communities, Jabrik plays the flesh-pressing frontman with great skill, while general manager Hain puts up tents and puts out fires with equal enthusiasm and never-ending energy.

“Tipi and Tim make a great team,” says one travelling judge who has worked with both of them across Indonesia and in the Philippines. “They come in and create events where often none have gone before, and neither of them is afraid to get his hands dirty.”

Hain grew up in North County, San Diego, with the surf industry and culture all around him, and yet he says he never really felt that he was part of it. A recreational surfer, he was also building a career as a director of product management with a large tech company, pretty much a weekend warrior. Then in 1997 he made a life-changing first visit to Bali, realising there was more to it than climbing the greasy pole of corporate life. In 2001 he quit his job and returned to the island, planning to spend a year, but he soon met up with a young Indonesian who was struggling with limited English to put material together for the Magic Wave Surf Community newspaper. Hain helped him with an interview with a kiteboarder, and was soon volunteering as a translator at the paper a couple of days a week.

He says: “It was a lot of fun, and for the first time I felt connected to the surf community.”

Then the bombs blew up in Kuta and everything changed. The investor pulled the pin on Magic Wave and the project went under, like just about everything else that fateful wet season. But a few months later his Indonesian friend contacted Hain again and asked if he would help restart the paper and website. Tim saw it as a way of helping the Balinese put their broken world back together, and was to spend the next three or four years being jack of all trades at Magic Wave.

Through this association he got to know all the leading lights of Indonesian surfing, including Tipi Jabrik, who in 2004 had started the Indonesian Surfing Championships. Says Hain: “In 2006 he asked me to team up with him to grow ISC, take it to the next level and use it as a platform to prepare Indonesian surfers for the WQS, so I came on board as the media guy and secretary while Tipi did everything else.”

Operating from a tiny office at the rear of the Surfer Girl retail headquarters in Legian, ISC struggled to put small tour events on in different parts of the archipelago until a local expat put them in touch with the management of Coca Cola Indonesia. Hain presented a detailed proposal for sponsorship and Coke took naming rights to the tour. Says Hain: “Suddenly we had enough money to run a proper tour, with judging towers, computers, the whole deal. We started to run events all over Indonesia that also had an ecological focus, where we would demonstrate how to look after your beach, not burn plastics and so on. And things started to really take off.”

Spurred on by the growing presence of the big brands, surfing was starting to get a foothold in beach resorts all over Asia. At a Quiksilver event in Phuket, Thailand in 2010, Hain, Jabrik and Quiksilver’s Jake Patterson sat down with representatives of the Thai, Philippines and Malaysian surfing communities and realised that they all wanted a bit of the ISC magic wand. Thus the Asian Surfing Championship tour was born.

Since then the Coca Cola deal has run its course and, despite the continuing rise of the Asian middle classes and corporate wealth, ISC and ASC have struggled for enough funding to continue. This hasn’t stopped them growing the pond even further, with successful partnerships with the ISA and the new WSL, and events in India, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines as well as Indonesia, and Burma, Vietnam, Brunei and even South Korea now on their radar.

Says Hain: “The goals of both ASC and ISC are aspirational, to help surfers fulfil their dreams to make a living out of their sport. Because Bali has been the centre of the surf industry for such a long time, the surf culture has grown throughout South East Asia from here. Young surfers have seen these sponsored surfers from Bali going on all these trips and making $2000 or $3000 a month just to surf! They want the same thing, and it’s spreading.” //PHIL JARRATT