Hound of the Sea

by Garrett McNamara

  Bill Sharp, onetime editor of Surfing magazine, realized this and came up with the XXL awards (now sponsored by Billabong) as a way to point a big red flashing neon finger at big-wave surfing, to acknowledge and honor the accomplishments of surfers who are risking their lives to follow their passion, and also to capitalize on an ever-growing sport. The categories have evolved over the years: Biggest Paddle, Tube and Wave; Ride of the Year; Best Overall Performance for both men and women; and one I have won several times, the Golden Donut, for the most artistic wipeout.

  Measuring is now taken very seriously by the XXL organizers. No more underestimating in the interest of false modesty. Every year a panel of surf photographers, filmmakers, journalists, and big-wave surfers and surf-world legends convene to examine photos and video footage of the nominated waves and rides. Their task is to measure the height of the wave from the trough to the crest. The biggest challenge is figuring out where the trough is—that’s the bottom. Once everyone agrees on that, it’s a matter of comparing the crest with the height of the surfer, usually in a crouch, taking into consideration how tall he is in his stance, no easy feat. There are hundreds of entries for Biggest Wave every year, and a lot of times the difference between winner and also-ran is a matter of inches, the decision sometimes unduly influenced by who sponsors the surfer, who he rubs shoulders with, and who might be his champion on the panel of judges. To say this is subjective is an understatement as big as the waves being judged.

  It would be a few months before the XXL experts judged the 2011 waves, but in the meantime we sent footage of my ride in Nazaré to a few people whose opinion we trusted, including a former XXL judge (who pegged it at eighty-five to ninety feet), an oceanographer, and Kelly Slater and Greg Noll, who were and are fair and unbiased. Everyone said it was big, possibly record breaking. I said nothing, went about my business. Surfed Nazaré for the rest of November, mostly paddling out by myself, then returned to the North Shore for the rest of the season.

  The surfers’ code is that you surf your wave and let the world discuss it as you move on to the next one. That I was doing exactly that was lost on people. I never said a word about how big or small I thought the wave was. I didn’t ask the good Kelly Slater to toss a tweet out there, nor did I know anything about any public relations firm. I didn’t have a publicist. I had my love Nicole helping me. Still, it was generally assumed that I or someone I’d hired was breaking the code and claiming, bragging, about my ninety-foot wave.

  Weirdly, I was also held accountable for the awkwardness of the mainstream media people who covered the story. CNN sportscasters don’t generally report on surfing, and I think they can be forgiven for sounding dorky when they say “That was completely gnarly!,” but many in the surf world found this to be heinous. By surfing my big, strange, off-the-beaten path wave I’d drawn the attention of kooks and outsiders. The surfing media made their feelings known about the whole thing by ignoring both the wave and my ride. I was upset by this not at all. My goal was simply to ride the biggest wave I could find, and also to show the world, not just the small surfing community, that Nazaré was (and still is) the only place on earth where an average person can experience the power and energy of a wave of this magnitude safely from shore.

  Then, in May 2012, the jury came back and my ride won the XXL Award for Biggest Wave of the Year. The final measurement was seventy-eight feet, a mere foot taller than Mike Parsons’s 2008 Cortes Bank ride.

  Biggest Wave isn’t the biggest in terms of payout. (I won $15,000, which I split with Cotty.) That distinction belongs to Ride of the Year, at $50,000; in 2012 Nathan Fletcher won for barely surviving a heavy close-out tube at Teahupoʻo. But along with Biggest Paddle it’s the most coveted and the most potentially career changing because they are recognized by the Guinness people as official world records.

  The Guinness Book of World Records is one of the best-selling books in the world. People from all walks of life buy it and love it and swear by it. If you’re a surfer with a world record, you’re a surfer whose name and accomplishments will be recognized by people outside of surfing. That crossover appeal is the holy grail of corporate sponsors. You, along with perhaps two or three others, are now the face of surfing. To everyone who rents a board at Waikiki during their weeklong vacation or has to buy a pair of shorts for their kids, you are The Surfer. That I, who’ve never been the most popular guy on the block, should be granted this by God or the universe or whatever manages good fortune struck a lot of people as an example of how anything in life is possible.

  I WAS honored and humbled that the panel didn’t let politics cloud their ability to judge me fairly. After I made my comeback in 2002 and won the Jaws Tow-In World Cup, the eyes of the surfing world were on me in a way they’d never been before. When I took off on nearly vertical waves that no one else would touch, people assumed I had no fear. When they watched me suffer epic wipeouts then come up smiling, it was decided I had a screw loose. When I explored Childs Glacier, I got a bad rap as a crackpot and attention seeker. The truth is I’m afraid of a lot of things. Horses. Skydiving. The thought of rappelling down the side of a mountain. I just feel more at home in the ocean than on land, living among the world’s big, barreling waves.

  The politics of place must have also been tricky among the judges. Mike Parsons, the record holder before I came along, rode his winning wave at Cortes Bank. This felt right. Conventional surf world wisdom holds that Cortes Bank has the biggest rideable waves on earth. Part of it is location—the outermost point of the California Channel Islands chain with no land in sight, nothing but blue water, blue sky all around, pure wild ocean. A hundred miles due west of San Diego, Cortes is a submerged seamount, part of the Channel Island chain. During the last ice age it was an actual island, a sandstone and basalt mesa with a few high spots, about eighteen miles long. The shallowest peak is called Bishop Rock and rises up between three and six feet beneath the surface, depending on the tide, and this is where the monsters break. It takes all night to get there in a powerboat, an adventure in itself, and everyone believed—not without good reason—that someday when someone tows in or paddles into a hundred-foot wave, it will be at Cortes Bank. This was before Nazaré was put on the map.

  To acknowledge that the biggest wave in the world might be a shore break off a little Portuguese town no one has ever heard of flies in the face of what passes for reason in the surf world. That it was ridden by Garrett McNamara, daredevil-cowboy–action figure–future Fear Factor contestant–brother-of-etiquette-challenged Liam (I’m missing a few adjectives, but you get the picture), is to commend the integrity of the judges. I was and am grateful.

  STILL, THERE was something else. Since I’d met Nicole I’d begun thinking more deeply about my life and my place in it and about my desire for worldly success. I’d spent my entire adult life thinking that if I just got a magazine cover, just placed in the money in that contest, just won that XXL award, just got invited to the Eddie (actually, it’s still an honor to be invited, and every year I get amped like a little kid before Christmas in the weeks before they announce the invitees), I would feel successful and whole.

  During the week we spent together in Las Vegas, Nicole started reading Deepak Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws of Success to me. She would read a chapter every morning. I was crazy in love by then, completely entranced by this woman who was beautiful and warm and smart and deep. And full of surprises. No one, outside of maybe my kindergarten teacher at Malcolm X Elementary, had ever read aloud to me.

  There was and is so much to absorb. About non-judgment, giving, karma, intention and desires, least effort, and the one that struck me immediately—dharma, our purpose in life.

  My dharma in life was to surf. It was my abiding passion, the thing I was devoted to above everything else, the thing I excelled at. Aside from the love I have for my children and for Nicole, there was nothing else. But was that it? Securing new sponsors and winning prizes and being invited to surf in the Eddie?


  I didn’t think so. I thought about my upbringing, not just the poverty, but the lack of guidance, the lack of any adult taking any genuine interest in nurturing my brother and me. I ran wild and got into trouble and could have ended up in prison. But for some reason I didn’t. I kept moving forward, kept surfing, kept trying to make a living surfing, my great passion. I failed time and time again, made bad decisions and did stupid things and hurt people and shot myself in the foot. And yet, I kept on.

  And now I found myself here. Guinness Book of World Records holder for riding the biggest wave on earth, sought after by sponsors who would have never taken my phone call. And marrying my true love.

  November 22, 2012, was a perfect day. Surfed all morning in glassy twenty-foot swells, then took a shower, put on a pair of white pants and a classic patchwork Nazaré shirt designed for me by Nicole, then married her on top of the lighthouse. My hard-luck life and now all this good fortune. I followed my heart, and this is where it had led.

  INCIDENT AT CORTES BANK

  WE RENTED A LITTLE house in Praia do Norte. It had a 180-degree view of the Atlantic from the living room. We turned it into the master bedroom so we could lie in bed in front of the fireplace and watch the waves. Celeste had become our Portuguese mother and her niece, Maria Ana, an attorney in town, joined our close circle of Nazarean friends. We were starting to think of the village as our second home. Every day I continued to monitor the swells from around the world, and in December, not long after the wedding, there was a promising forecast for Cortes Bank.

  Cortes Bank doesn’t break very often. In a good year there might be three chances to ride those eerie, open ocean waves. In December 2012 the forecast was promising, so Nicole and I flew from Portugal to California. Once we arrived, I called Greg Long and we set about chartering a boat. Even though Cortes has traditionally been a tow-in spot, our mission was to barehand it, and I couldn’t have been more excited.

  Paddling into big waves was deep in the middle of a comeback. I was amused by the turn of events. The old way of catching a wave was now the new way. Towing in, once a genius solution to both the problem of overcrowding on the inner Hawaiian reefs and a way to ride waves thought to be unrideable, was now out of style. It still solved the same problems—inner reefs were still crowded, and a wave with a seventy-foot face was still largely unrideable—but surfing technology had evolved since the early 1990s. With the advent of inflatable flotation wet suits and life vests and the WaveJet—a surfboard equipped with battery-powered jets that gives you a little more speed—in order to grab that much faster moving wave, tow-in-only waves were now being routinely paddled into by the best of the best. Even as I write this the Pe’ahi Challenge, the first ever big wave paddle-in contest, is being held at Jaws, formerly the tow-in capital of the world.

  Within a day, word of a paddle-in assault on Cortes Bank had gotten around, and other friends wanted in. Greg Long and I decided that I should charter another boat. My unpopular attitude has always been the more the merrier. I hate crowded lineups as much as the next guy, but this swell at Cortes was likely to be historic, and I didn’t want good friends to miss out. Kealii Mamala, Chappy Murphey, Kohl Christensen, Danilo Couto, Alex Grey, and Dave Wassel all quickly signed on; and also Liam’s kid, Landon. At sixteen, he was already charging in the big waves.

  Despite my reputation as a daredevil I am a freak about safety. Surfing Cortes carries with it more risk than surfing any other spot in the world. You’re in the middle of the ocean and there’s no calling an ambulance if something goes sideways. I hired Shawn Alladio, founder of K38 Water Safety and the best big-wave safety person in the business. She brought along her five most trusted medics. The day before we launched, we double-checked to make sure we had everything we’d need to ensure our safety—extra flotation gear, oxygen, defibrillator, backboards, trauma kits, and six ’skis for safety patrol and rescue, designed specifically for the job.

  It was Christmastime in Southern California, clear and cold. We left Dana Point harbor at 3 a.m. Everyone was bundled up in jackets and knit caps. Keyed up a little. The forecast wasn’t perfect. It would be windy out there—15 miles per hour was predicted—but the waves would be perfect for a big-wave paddle challenge, fifty feet, give or take.

  The water was silky smooth to San Clemente Island. Past that, it was open ocean and the chop began. Five miles this side of Cortes Bank there was a bright flick of something against the early morning sky. I looked through the binoculars and saw waves cresting and breaking.

  We stopped at the buoy at Bishop Rock. Brown California pelicans and seagulls wheeled around overhead. Despite the chop the visibility was good. I could see fish swimming among the long tangled ropes of bull kelp. Cortes Bank was also a big fishing and diving spot—yellowtail tuna, black and white sea bass, and huge schools of baitfish were all down there, as well as sea lions and the sharks they attracted. There were a few shipwrecks down there too.

  The boat rocked and the buoy bonged and we staggered around the deck trying to pull on our wet suits. Greg Long’s boat was stationed maybe fifty yards away. His photographers and videographers and safety crew were already in the water. Eventually, everyone made his way to the half-mile-long lineup, around fourteen surfers in all.

  It was partly cloudy and cool. The waves a little mushy due to the wind. Nothing but ocean, 360 degrees of it, far as the eye could see. Sitting in the lineup at Cortes was just plain bizarre. Surfers typically use landmarks on the shore to position themselves—lifeguard towers, public restrooms, tall trees, cliffs, boulders, homes, snack shacks. Out there are only your very tiny-looking boat and the clanging buoy and miles of rolling blue seas straight to the horizon in every direction. That, and instinct.

  ESPN HAS called Greg Long the best big-wave paddler of the twenty-first century, and I can’t disagree. He’s won every big-wave paddle award there is to win, including the Eddie, in 2009, in fifty-foot waves. He’s won more Billabong XXL awards than anyone else. Born in San Clemente, California, where his father was a lifeguard, he was named for Greg Noll, another excellent citizen of the sport. Like all of the greats, he started surfing seriously when he was in grammar school. In his teens, he started surfing Todos Santos off the coast of Baja and Dungeons off Cape Town, South Africa, both gnarly, complicated waves that take no prisoners.

  Greg Long is also a really good guy. He’s smart and well-spoken and fair. Many say he’s the most decent guy in surfing. If the lineup is like high school, with prom kings and jocks and soshes and nerds, and troublemakers and stoners who are one infraction away from getting expelled, then Greg Long is the popular student-body president and star football player. When he wins the awards that he keeps winning, year after year, the applause is always loud and heartfelt.

  We are spread out across the break, hunkered down on our boards in our wet suits and black hoods. The waves are miles long here, since there’s nothing to impede or steer their progress. The takeoff zone changes from set to set, sometimes by as much as fifty yards, and I’m trying to gauge whether I’m in a good spot for the next set. The first wave rolls in but I’m not in position so I let it go. Greg Long is paddling past as Landon takes off.

  “How old is he?” Greg asks, laughing. When I say sixteen he says, “That kid just became a legend.”

  We lose site of the pack and find a spot at the end of the lineup. A few minutes later there is a set on the horizon. I paddle as fast as I can toward the channel, thinking there is no way Greg can keep up.

  Another set arrives. I let the first one go, but when the second wave rises up I paddle as fast as I can. There’s no holding back in waves like these, no room for second thoughts. Once you’ve begun to move you’re committed. It’s second nature, and we’re all trained this way. There’s no “after you; no, after you” in big-wave surfing. These waves are so long several people can share them and do, all the time, but from my vantage point I am alone. In front of me I see only the steep, bumpy face and the rough cobalt-blue sea, no sou
nd aside from the low roar of the wave pulling itself up to its full height.

  I’m trying out my new WaveJet. It seems perfect for these waves. An average big wave moves at 25 miles per hour, but out here they move faster, more like 40 miles per hour. All morning long guys have been missing waves they’d paddled for because they simply aren’t going fast enough. The wave is an open ocean right. I skitter over the chop to the bottom, start to make my turn when over my shoulder I glimpse the heavy lip curling and about to crash. There’s no doubt that this isn’t going to end well. I jump off my board, take a few deep breaths to prepare myself. I’m wearing two flotation devices—a Body Glove survival suit and a Patagonia vest. I deploy my vest and pop up after the expected heavy pounding.

  After I catch my breath and get my bearings I see something that’s not quite right—two jet-skis idling nose to nose, a rescue sled in between and someone in the water pulling Greg Long onto the sled. His eyes are closed and he looks a little purple. I figured he must have gotten worked on the wave after mine.

  Once he was secured on the sled they drove him back to his support boat, leaving one of the jet-skis bobbing nearby. I drove it over to his boat to find him lying on the deck looking dazed. He’d just regained consciousness, and as he came to he turned his head and started vomiting blood and water. One of his safety people was tending to him, but I didn’t think it would hurt to have more hands on deck. I drove over to our boat and picked up an EMT and our backboard, just in case. When we returned, Greg was conscious and alert, but clearly traumatized. He bore the signs of someone who’d nearly drowned. They decided to radio the Coast Guard, and three hours later he was airlifted to a hospital in San Diego.