Hound of the Sea

by Garrett McNamara

  The next few waves tossed me around some more and I wound up in the lagoon. By the time I paddled from there all the way around the reef and back out to the boat, I was tired. I decided to take a little break, get some water, and climbed aboard. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a ten-to-twelve-foot set rolled in. I forgot all about my thirst. Liam was still in the water, and I watched while he frantically stroked away from the curling wave. I’ve never seen anyone do this. One of the first lessons of surfing is to paddle toward the oncoming wave, but here was my brother paddling like mad toward shore, trying to outrun it. I understood the logic. The wave here is that heavy. Better to be thrashed in the white water than sucked up by the wave and smashed onto the reef. I prepared to go rescue him, but he managed to escape the worst of it. I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath.

  There were also a few locals in the lineup that day, notable Tahitian pro Manoa Drollet and his friend Briece Taerea. Everyone was surprised by this sudden twelve-footer. Manoa and Briece duck-dived, and Manoa made it but Briece was sucked over the falls upside down and backward and slammed headfirst onto the reef.

  From where I stood on the boat I saw Briece’s board tombstone. As I watched Manoa paddle to the board, I grabbed my board and started to paddle over in case someone needed help. Just as I reached Manoa he pulled up the leash till he reached Briece’s limp body. His face looked as if it had been gone over with a meat tenderizer. He had a hole in his head. One massive gash had ripped apart his jaw.

  Somehow I managed to get his body on the boat, where I administered CPR. Someone else’s hands were reaching in, holding together the bottom of his face. Briece started breathing on his own, but he never came to. He was wheezing and coughing up bloody foam. Then he stopped breathing again. I kept doing CPR, kept pumping his chest until my shoulders ached. My own feet were in shreds from my earlier reef dance. I was sloshing around in Briece’s blood. When we reached the shore someone ran to call the paramedics. We put Briece in the back of someone’s truck and I jumped in with him. Once again he stopped breathing. I started back in with the CPR. We bounced down the narrow, rutted road toward the nearest hospital and were met halfway by an ambulance.

  Briece was breathing when the paramedics, who spoke French to me, and whom I couldn’t understand, loaded him in the back of the ambulance. I remember patting the top of his foot before sending him off. They put an oxygen mask over his face. We would learn that he’d broken two bones in his neck and severed his spine. He died three days later from a lung infection and cerebral edema, swelling of the brain.

  TWO YEARS later it’s a different story. Everyone’s towing in now. It’s busy out in the lineup. Jet-skis, boats in the channel loaded with photographers. The waves were twelve to fifteen feet. One set nearly capsized a boat in the channel. I should have been scared, but I knew I could feel Briece’s presence. I had done my best to save his life. I thought about our blood mingling at the bottom of the boat. We were blood brothers.

  The best waves of the day came right to me.

  I made five covers, including Surfing.

  BARRELED

  AS THE MONTHS OF 2002 passed I forgot how scared I’d been during the Jaws contest, how my goal then had been simply to survive. Fear was slowly replaced by a desire to feel that rush again. Like any other junkie, I now lived with a twitchy, obsessive need to return to Jaws. It was far from my favorite break. I wasn’t sure I liked it at all, but during the next giant swell I was determined to show up and get barreled on a sixty-footer. Hell, a seventy-footer. I wanted the wave of the day, the biggest monster barrel Pe’ahi could deliver, and I wanted to get so deep inside it I could set up housekeeping. I may have forgotten the fear, but I hadn’t lost sight of how I’d run across the waves to the channel during my heat, fleeing the massive barrels breaking behind me.

  Getting barreled is the peak surfing experience. My memory has never been the best, but I still recalled Brock Little’s epic tube ride at Wai-mea in 1990, and how for a long time that was all I wanted. Now, this was all I wanted, and I wanted it bad.

  At the end of November, one of those once-in-a-lifetime swells rolled into Jaws. There are storms that bring larger than average waves in all winter long, but once in a while there’s one for the history books. This one came from Siberia, 60-knot winds, forty-five-foot swells heading straight to Hawaiʻi. By the time it reached Jaws on November 26, there were twenty-five-to-thirty-foot swells—fifty-to sixty-foot faces.

  I couldn’t escape feeling I had some unfinished business.

  My new tow partner was Ikaika Kalama. There are a few so-called royal families of surfing that produce generation after generation of great watermen. The Kalama name can be traced back three centuries, with roots on O’ahu and Maui. I never felt my age much, but Ikaika was just twenty-three years old and already an accomplished surfer and respected Hawaiian waterman. We flew to Maui and looked up Roy Patterson, hoping he might once again lend me his ’ski. When he heard it was me he said, “Not the Garrett McNamara. Again.” That Roy Patterson, always clowning around.

  “Yeah, bro, I’d be stoked to take you out there,” he said. He showed up at the gulch. He was just as I remembered him, big bulging eyes, going full speed, as if he’d just had ten cups of coffee.

  We put in at five o’clock in the morning, early birds catching the worms. It was still dark. We needed flashlights to see. The gulch was more eerie than before. Waves had rolled all the way into the valley and the ground was drenched, the air heavy with salt, debris scattered everywhere. Smell of wet earth, leaves rotting, gas fumes. We put our flashlights down and pulled on our wet suits.

  It’s tough as hell to get the ’ski in the water during the day, and in the pitch dark it should be impossible. But we get lucky and between sets we’re able to feed it right between the rocks. We drive out to the break. We’re the only watercraft as far as the eye can see. The moon has set and the sky is dark, the water is dark. We cruise down the coast. The only light is the occasional blink of our red running lights. Later we would hear that the crowd assembling on the cliff to watch were tripping to see us out there navigating the swells in the dark.

  The sky turned from black to dark blue, same color as the sea. An orange glow in the east. Light enough.

  Roy asked who wanted to go. Ikaika, as usual, said “You go first.” Roy whipped me into a few waves, clean and glassy, just perfect. No chop, no bumps, the white water a tidy line atop the lip. Usually Jaws was brutally windy—Ho’okipa, about five miles to the west, is the windsurfing capital of the world—but this morning there was no wind.

  I caught a few waves. Perfect rides from start to finish. Couple of under-the-lip snaps but alas, no barrels. Now it was Ikaika’s turn.

  I floated in the channel, resting, watching the sun climb the early morning sky, trying to be grateful for this day and this life. I watched while Roy towed Ikaika into fifty-footers. They were so smooth and glassy it was like we were surfing in a wave tank in Hollywood.

  Every tow-in team that could get itself to Maui would be there, so we wanted to grab whatever waves we could before the crowds showed up. Tow-in surfing, once thought to be some weird surf nerd fad, had become huge, and the paddle-in problems we once avoided—too many boards and bodies on too few excellent swells—had caught up with us.

  While I floated there in the crowd, Dane Kealoha drove by. Dane was the son of a pure-blooded Hawaiian and a fierce power surfer, a North Shore god in the late seventies, early eighties, a huge gnarly wave-ruling presence when Liam and I were still surfing straight on the white water at Army Beach. He made the Pipeline Masters finals four times, the Duke Kahanamoku Invitational six times, and won both of them in 1983. Dane had one of those faces that looked as if it was carved in stone, and a crazy mop of curly hair. He kept to himself, silent in the lineup and scowling on the beach. I worshipped the guy.

  He sat astride a little Yamaha old-school jet-ski.

  “Hey, Uncle Dane!” I hollered.

  He
scowled in my direction.

  “You driving anybody?”

  “What, nobody driving you?”

  “No, you like tow me?” I said in the Hawaiian pidgin I’d naturally adopted over the years.

  He answered by throwing me the rope. The handle landed right in my hands.

  “Can you drive?” I was so stoked to be towing in with the Hawaiian hero, my idol, the great uncle, I had bumbled my words. He gave me a classic Dane Kealoha black-eyed glare like, What the hell, stupid haole, you’re asking me if I can drive? Of course I can drive!

  “No, no, no, please, please, yeah I know you can drive! Let’s go!”

  His answer was not to drive over and give me a slap, which was one possible scenario, but to turn away from me, gun the ’ski, and drive back toward the lineup.

  This had to be one of the most crowded days in Jaws history. It was like Waterworld out there, at least thirty tow teams, which means about fifty ’skis and fifty boards and the photographer power boats and a few safety boats for good measure. We’re rising and falling in the huge swells and everyone’s zooming around jockeying for position. I have to consciously take some big deep breaths and tell myself to relax.

  Uncle Dane was intense, but he was chill. We would be fine. We would take our time. We would respect everyone. We would be humble. We would go to the back of the line and we would wait.

  We were approaching the crowd as a set started rolling in so I was prepared for Dane to drive down past where the peak was likely to form, so that we could wait our turn. But Dane is royalty out here and royalty does what royalty pleases. Suddenly he makes a big, showy U-turn in front of God and everyone and I thought, All right, this is it then; we’re going.

  He eyeballed the wave, gunned the ’ski, and slung me right into the spot. For the past two years I had been surfing Backdoor, training for just this moment, getting barreled while towing in. That was my sole purpose in putting in, I guarantee you, the most hours out there. I chose Backdoor because every time you paddle into a wave there’s a late drop that requires you to fall in, then pull in under the lip at the last second and drive through the barrel. It was a break that forced me to put it all on the line to get the ride of my life.

  It isn’t just the thought of massive sixty-foot walls of fast-moving water bending themselves over you that fuels the impulse to either kick out (as I did on my first wave during the Jaws contest), or make a madman run to the channel, fleeing the exploding white water behind you (second and third waves). It’s also the thought of what’s inside the barrel. As the wave breaks and the lip starts to close out, the mix of air and water creates spit, which sounds like something only a little annoying, but it feels like being on the receiving end of a fire hose, blinding, stinging, and sometimes with enough force to throw you off your board.

  I drop the rope and take off. I’m flying down the face of the wave. I get to the bottom and start to turn. I can easily play it safe and run for the channel, but I can see the lip folding over, and way up ahead, the wave starting to bend. Everything is coming together. The barrel I have been dreaming of for years, all the hours at Backdoor and at Pipeline. I stall and fade back to the left a little. The lips starts to fold over. I wait and wait. At the last possible second I turn under the lip, and it hits me, brushes the top of my head, tsh tsh tsh. Later my wife will call these three kisses. They blind me, these water kisses. I’m traveling through the barrel of my dreams but I can’t see a thing. My world goes silent. I imagine myself in the eye of a hurricane. Even though I can’t see I think, I’m making it! I’m making it! I’m making it! Suddenly I feel myself getting sucked back up the face. I’m starting to fall backward when I hear a roar. What must be a gale-force wind lifts me off the water. Luckily tow boards have foot straps. I stay on my board and the wind flies me through the air, out the end of the barrel, and lets me down in front of the wave.

  I put my hands in the air, not as a claim. I put them up to God, in thanks for this gift.

  Buzzy Kerbox was in the channel and saw the ride. “It’s not going to get any better than that. You should call it a day.”

  Uncle Dane drives up and says, “Oh, brah, thought I was going to have to come rescue you, trying to figure out how I was going to do it on this turtle.”

  Kelly Slater came by and said, “That was the heaviest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  It was the best feeling I’ve ever had in my surfing life.

  DRYLAND LIFE

  IN LATE SPRING 2003 I was finally able to close the shop and “keep surfing.”

  Earlier that year Ikaika Kalama and I took first place at the Jaws Expression Session. I also caught two of my most famous waves, epic barrels at both Jaws and Teahupoʻo, which earned me two covers of Surfing magazine in one year and countless other magazine covers. The wave at Jaws was by far the best barrel I have ever experienced. Inside the tube I was blinded and couldn’t see anything. It felt like the hands of God lifting me up and placing me neatly out of harm’s way. The Teahupoʻo session was right after Briece passed away and I could feel him looking after me, every perfect wave kept coming right to me. It gives me chicken skin just thinking about it.

  I was proud of myself, felt so grateful and so blessed. But life on dry land was exasperating and complicated. Like every surfer I know, I secretly believed if I could just be in the water every waking moment, life would be perfect and trouble-free.

  I’d made my goal, was making my name and doing all the things Lowell advised me to do, and yet still I had money troubles. I paid my bills, but anything extra had a way of disappearing to things that didn’t serve me and my family. Sometimes I just sat down and scratched my head. How had I not anticipated this? I’d gained more sponsors and was earning more money than ever before, but my expenses had also kept pace.

  My full-time job was now chasing the world’s biggest swells. Everything depended on it. Supporting our family of four, my mental health, the “Gmac brand” (as Lowell called it). Before, if I couldn’t afford to drop everything and jet off to Brazil or Australia or Tahiti at a moment’s notice, no one much cared. I was small potatoes. My sponsors were cool with the occasional nice photo of me surfing here and there on the outer reefs. Now that I’d upped my game and public presence, now that I was sponsored by bigger corporations with bigger expectations of me, I couldn’t risk passing up any monster swells. They didn’t come around that often. Sometimes entire seasons would pass with no historic waves. Sometimes my sponsors would foot the bill, but mostly it was on me to get myself and my boards to the swell. The cost of last-minute plane tickets was out of control. I’d bought used cars for less.

  That summer, to makes ends meet, I took a real job where you show up at a certain time, put in a set number of hours, and go home. It was the first straight job I’d ever had, the first one where I didn’t have to figure out how to drum up business. I was on the pickup crew at the military base. A government job, $35 an hour with benefits. That seemed like an incredible amount of money. Our task was to do the detail work left undone by various contractors with fat military contracts. First night we had to relocate a big propane tank that had been installed in the wrong spot. I got to man the jackhammer. Freed the tank, moved it to the right place, re-poured the busted-up concrete. Regular guy work.

  When a monster swell was predicted in the Southern Hemisphere the boss let me have the time off. How could I beat that? But I was grumpy when I got home from work. I was that guy who walked straight to the fridge and got a beer, then turned on the TV and yelled to the wife in the other room, “When’s dinner?”

  I felt too tired to train when I came home after work, so I eventually stopped training altogether. I started partying a little. Just a little! Connie wasn’t happy. How could she be? She’d thought my wild ways were behind me. She was proud when I wrote my blueprint, trained like a maniac, cooked our healthy dinners, and was in bed every night at 8:30 like a third grader. Now, when I wasn’t at my job, I was glued to the computer checking the swell foreca
st—something, with the explosive growth in both storm tracking and computer technology, I could now do twenty-four hours a day—or in a strategy meeting with Lowell Hussey; or dropping everything on a moment’s notice, leaving before the birthday party, the holiday celebration, the eagerly awaited vacation, on a plane flying somewhere for a ton of money to meet my next monster wave.

  Meanwhile, Liam had suffered a terrible wipeout at Pipeline. He was crazy in love with that wave, but it was a punishing mistress. He’d already endured fifty stitches in his head from being dragged along that brutal, shallow reef during what would have been a normal wipeout anywhere else (except Teahupoʻo, where the reef was sharper and even shallower).

  In October, a month to the day before I got barreled at Jaws, he took off on a normal faster-than-you-can-blink Pipeline wave and dropped in a second too late. When his board pearled he was flung into the air, bounced once off the face, then was smashed onto the reef. He broke his right femur and had to be airlifted to Queen’s Hospital in Honolulu. During a long surgery the doctors put a rod in his leg that extended from his knee to his hip. Just like me, Liam was now a family guy. His wife, Brandee, owned a clothing shop of her own on the North Shore, took care of their two kids, and was also now taking care of my now out-of-commission brother. He was pissed and frustrated and no picnic to be around. Connie and I tried to help out when we could, picking up kids from school events and taking them overnight sometimes. His doctors were not optimistic that he’d be surfing anytime soon. There was talk that this might be the end of his Pipeline career. But they didn’t know my brother. Two and a half years later, in 2005, he would land a wildcard entry in the Billabong Pro Tahiti at Teahupoʻo. Three years after that he’d be back at Pipeline, up to his old tricks.

  One November day late in the afternoon, Second Reef Pipe was firing so I took my stand-up paddleboard out, just messing around. I was alone out there. Then I saw someone paddle up. Liam. We claimed and bragged and razzed each other like we always did. When the next set came in Liam called his. I cackled like a movie super-villain. He started to drop in but I swooped past him on my red paddleboard. Got totally tubed, poised my paddle out like an Uzi.