1. THEY'VE HAD A LONG DAY
For the Malloy brothers—Chris, 35, Keith, 33, and Dan, 29—going to work means, as Keith describes it, pursuing "the lost art of being a waterman."

"A waterman," explains Chris, "knows how to swim, surf, bodysurf, paddleboard, spearfish, and freedive—but really it's about having a rhythm of life dictated by the ocean's moods."

Which is to say being a waterman is a bit complicated. It can mean inventing new kinds of surf quests, like Keith and Dan's 2004 paddleboard mission along 50 miles of the central California coast. Or making movies with their surfer-artist crew, the Moonshine Conspiracy. Or lending a hand on a commercial fishing boat. Or designing products for their employer, Patagonia.

Take last year. In February, Keith packed up his biodiesel Dodge truck and surfed, climbed, and hiked from Bend, Oregon, to Cabo San Lucas and back again, meeting his brothers along the way for forays into everything from forest onservation to sustainable agriculture, which were documented in a book, Bend to Baja. Then Dan left for a monthlong bullet-dodging, wave-hunting sojourn through Liberia, while Chris went off to scout locations for a surf movie in Chile. In May, all three put together, literally, Patagonia's flagship surf store, in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California, painting the walls and installing the gear racks.

Next, they headed to Indonesia, partly to test Patagonia surfboards but also because the 2004 tsunami had crushed the northern end of Sumatra and the brothers had decided, as Dan puts it, that "the whole damn archipelago had given us so much that it was time to give something back." So they did: $162,000 via SurfAid International, comprising a $150,000 Moonshine Conspiracy donation (equaling the profits from their 2003 Indo-based film, The September Sessions), plus $12,000 from a benefit they hosted with Patagonia. They followed that with two days of labor in a community garden.

By the end of the year, the Malloys had surfed more than 330 days each in a combined 11 countries, including Panama, Fiji, and Micronesia. "Our lives are about perpetual motion," says Chris. "We don't ever sit on our asses."

2. YOU OWE THEM ONE
Last October, I paddled out into the lineup at Huntington Beach, California, with Dan Malloy. It was a perfect day of shining sun and overhead dream waves—except that we were at ground zero for surfing's hotdogging rude boys. Worse, the 2006 ISA World Surfing Games were just up the way, so the water was ego-to-ego with pro riders.

Which meant the only waves I caught were when Dan blocked for me. Dan was once a competitive pro himself: He won the 1996 OP Pro Junior and placed second in the 2000 U.S. Open of Surfing. The same is true of Keith, who in 2000 was one of just 44 surfers to qualify for the world championship tour. Even Chris, who's always eschewed contests to chase monster waves, once accepted an invitation to the Big Wave Invitational in Memory of Eddie Aikau, on Oahu's North Shore. And yet, one by one, they all dropped out. Dan explained why best in 2002, when his confession that competition was making him "lose my love for surfing" made surf-press headlines.

Unfortunately for me, Dan also grew tired of Huntington; after he went ashore, I couldn't even get scraps. Finally, I shoulder-bashed four takers out of the way and sailed down the line. To say I rode that wave with any noteworthy ability would be to ignore the guy to my left pulling a 360 aerial and the guy to my right ass-deep in a tube, but then the cheering started.

"Wow," said the guy closest to me, "that must have been some wave."

"It wasn't that great."

"Well," he said, pointing over my shoulder, "that's Dan Malloy making all the fuss."

"We always need to surf vicariously through everyone else, too," explains Chris. "That's why we quit contests. We'd get so excited for other people, we'd forget to compete against them."