AND SO SEVEN INSANELY accomplished athletes inhabit a New Zealand beach usually visited only by driftwood. There's 28-year-old American freeskier Sage Cattabriga-Alosa, the gap-jump honcho and ski-film star (winner of Best Male Performance at the Powder Magazine Video Awards). A college art major before his ski career took off, Cattabriga-Alosa is busy drawing landscapes and still lifes of beach detritus in a sketchbook. With the surf flat (and very, very cold) and the heli-skiing currently impossible (more on that later), he is bored. Soon he joins in the dune-hucking, pulling a series of inhumanly athletic inverted aerials.

Swedish snowboarder Johan Olofsson, 31, who made the Guinness Book of World Records after ripping a raw, 40-degree-plus, 3,000-vertical-foot Alaskan mountainside in just 35 seconds, is poking at a smoldering bonfire with a stick. Hawaiian Jamie Sterling, 26, tow-in-surfing prodigy and winner of Billabong XXL's Surfline Performance Award, throws various burnables on top—confirming that, at heart, all men are pyros. Neither the crackle of the fire nor the yelps of the aerialists manage to roust Queenslander Mark Visser, 26, a stud with 6 percent body fat who surfed one of the biggest waves ever in Australia (a 55-foot monster born of a freak swell). He almost never leaves his tent, because of a debilitating case of the stomach flu. Presiding tirelessly over it all is Harrington. He's known to friends and family as Harro. It's a puppies-and-kittens world Down Under, and most names get tagged with cutesy suffixes: either an -eee sound (sunglasses are "sunnies") or an -o (thus "Harro"). His blog is even WheresHarro.com.

Harro was born on Australia's Central Coast and grew up skiing Thredbo Mountain, a major commercial ski resort. Though predominantly a surfer (he was sponsored by local surf shops as a teenager), Harro became a good-enough skier to finish in the top three in a few New Zealand extreme contests. He also worked as a resort photographer at Thredbo, smiling at tourists as they skied off a lift and asking, "Hi, I'm Tony, can I take your photo?" In 1995, at age 29, when few international freeskiers knew who he was or had any familiarity with Down Under skiing, Harro brought them to New Zealand for the World Heli Challenge, a one-of-a-kind ski contest he organized in which choppers whisked competitors up the unmanaged, chairlift-deprived Southern Alps.

Though he stands six feet tall, with the powerful torso of a linebacker (or someone who's spent his life paddling into big waves), Harro comes across as a gentle soul. He never raises his voice—not even during the herding-cats frustration of moving a ten-person cluster of healthy egos and a thousand pounds of gear. A big scar traces across his right cheek, but it's from a childhood accident, not a bar fight.

Harro has spent his recent months chasing storms. He resurrected the Heli Challenge after several years off, got married in October, and two days later "took off to Tahiti and shot some epic images" of surfers at Teahupoo. This past December, he followed one swell from his part-time home in Oahu (where his Jet Ski stalled when a 25-foot wave broke right in front of him) to Southern California to the west coast of Mexico (where six months earlier he was pulled over and searched by militia at gunpoint). Ever cheerful, Harro regards the trip as "the biggest adventure of my life."

Here in Big Bay, plans also derail. Though Harro was told otherwise before the trip, we find out at camp that we won't be able to heli-ski from the beach, because the fuel tab to reach the peaks is prohibitive and the snow conditions are too sketchy up high. Meanwhile, only two of the snow jocks possess the will or the 4.3-millimeter-thick wetsuits to venture into the gray, ice-cold water: Johan Olofsson, who's Swedish after all, and Dana Flahr, who goes out only briefly. "Just paddling and getting smoked by waves," Flahr shivers. "Stood up a couple of times but just on the whitewash. My muscles were so cold I didn't have the energy to really ride."

Still, Harro gets his wave-riding shots. Surfers Jamie Sterling and Gary Elkerton head into the water, pointing their boards directly into rocky coves, dancing on the curl, and milking languorous 15-second rides out of six-foot chop. Harro, with a waterproof housing on his camera and booties on his feet, wades far into the surf and burns a few million pixels. Later, as wetsuits dry on tents and bushes, Harro sounds content. "It's funny with these adventure trips," he says. "How much can you truly plan? All you can do, really, is bring lots of food and toilet paper and let the trip happen."