Hound of the Sea

by Garrett McNamara

  Meanwhile I noticed that all the safety ’skis were bobbing beside the support boat—all safety personnel having responded to the emergency—and that no one was watching the half dozen surfers still out in the lineup. I took one of the ’skis and worked safety until the last surfer was done for the day.

  It was after dark when I finally returned to my own charter. It was only then, when I looked at the footage, that I saw Greg and I had shared the same wave. He was behind me and I’d never seen him.

  Later, after we were back on shore and Greg had been released from UCSD Medical Center, where they kept him overnight for observation, I learned that his own flotation vest had malfunctioned and he’d tried to climb his leash back to the surface. He’d been held down for three of the four waves in that set and finally blacked out from lack of oxygen. DK Walsh had pulled him from the water, where he had been floating facedown. Photographer Frank Quirarte and firefighter and paramedic Jon Walla had resuscitated him.

  TWO DAYS later Greg issued an eloquent statement to the press explaining what happened and thanking everyone who saved him. He acknowledged the high level of risk involved in surfing big waves, and at Cortes Bank in particular. He never mentioned my name, but he didn’t have to. The surfing press was already buzzing, accusing me of dropping in—the most heinous crime in surfing—and further raking me over the coals for using the WaveJet, an invention I’ll always defend because it gives folks who might otherwise never have the opportunity a chance to experience the exhilaration and pure joy of riding a wave. Some surfers just need a little extra speed, but there are also people like Jesse Billauer, a California surfer who became a quadriplegic at seventeen when he broke his neck during a wipeout, who’ve been able to surf again unassisted using WaveJet technology. It’s also been adopted with enthusiasm by lifeguards, since the WaveJet allows them to reach drowning swimmers faster.

  Surfing purists, who would have us all surfing on planks of wood and wearing loincloths, despise pretty much all technological advances in the sport, and wanted my head. During interviews surf journalists, who are supposed to be impartial, prefaced questions with stuff like, “Garrett McNamara . . . essentially cut him off. And on top of that Garrett McNamara was riding a WaveJet. Those things repulse me. I am not a big fan of WaveJet at all. I don’t think they belong in the lineup. That’s just me. What’s your take on it?”

  The comment sections of every surf news report and blog post of the incident bristled with stories of what a monster I was, of how I’d dropped in on them in two-foot waves fifteen years ago at a place I’d never been to and practically killed them. If I’d dropped in on all the people who said I’d dropped in on them, I would have been banished from the sport long ago.

  Even though Greg kept reminding the world that big-wave surfing, especially at a place like Cortes Bank, is a high-risk activity and what happened to him was not unexpected and that he’d trained for such a thing for years, someone needed to take the heat.

  I issued my own statement telling my side of the story and apologizing for any part I may have played. It fell on deaf ears. Three weeks later, in early January 2013, Greg issued another statement saying that I wasn’t to blame.

  WHAT COULD I do? I was devastated that Greg, someone I thought of as a friend, had had to endure this. I was hurt that surfers whose opinions I respect thought I might have caused it. As for the legions of Internet haters, it gave me an opportunity—minute by minute!—to embrace the practice that “lions don’t care what sheep think.”

  After I said my piece I kept quiet and didn’t try to defend myself further. Nicole and I were still reading Chopra every morning. The fourth Spiritual Law of Success is the Law of Least Effort, part of which asks us to learn to accept things as they are. “Today I will accept people, situations, circumstances, and events as they occur.”

  It also calls for embracing an attitude of defenselessness. People waste most of their energy defending their point of view. By letting go of the compulsion to defend yourself, you free up enormous amounts of energy to do meaningful things and make the world a better place.

  I accepted everything that was said about me and tried to view it as the opportunity for growth it most surely was.

  BIG MAMA

  IT WAS LATE JANUARY, only weeks after Cortes Bank, and we’d just made our way back to Hawaii. In 2012 Nicole and I secured some property on the North Shore near Waialua, a few miles and worlds away from Cement City. It was a little under two acres, a long thin parcel of land off Farrington Highway. The main house looks out over Moku-lē’ia, an off-the-beaten-path break I used to frequent when I was still strictly a Six Feet and Under boy. It was built in the early 1960s and looked as if no one had done so much as slapped a coat of paint on since that time, and there were three four-unit apartment buildings that needed refurbishing.

  My mom still lived on the North Shore, in a condo near Turtle Bay, out past Sunset and Velzyland, at the other end of Kam Highway. Throughout her life she’s been on a spiritual quest and is now born-again. She’s found happiness with a Polish American, Bernard Rzeplinski. She plays Scrabble and bridge and has started golfing. She lunches with her friends from church. We laugh that she’s a hippie gone yuppie, with a lot of Christianity sprinkled on top. She finally settled on a name for herself: Malia, the Hawaiian name for Mary.

  Liam retired from surfing about ten years ago, having won more Pipeline trials than any other surfer in history. Once in a while he still competes, just for fun. He’s a North Shore legend now and something of a retail mogul, with three surf shops, two clothing boutiques, a shrimp truck, and a shave ice truck. His focus is on business and his three sons, my nephews. Makai is twenty-one and has become a top contest surfer. He was the standout surfer in the recent Volcom Pipe Pro and the crowd favorite. Landon plays ukulele and guitar, has just signed with Ford Models, and is still charging hard. Ledgen, the youngest, is good at everything. He adopts a sport, excels at it until he’s the best on the team, then moves on to another one. When he was born I told Liam he had to leave the d off because you aren’t born a legend, you have to become one. Guess he took my advice.

  We had been home only three days after four long months away when the forecast for central Portugal showed a thirty-foot swell was heading toward Nazaré. A low-pressure system moving from New York southeast across the Atlantic. This spelled huge waves, sixty-five, seventy minimum. Possibly even the rogue hundred-footer I’d been waiting for. It wasn’t quite the right direction we wanted, but it was the right height with a good enough interval. I couldn’t help but hope this would be Big Mama.

  My tow-in partner Kealii had coined the term. Big Mama was the big, perfect, hundred-foot wave, the wave of a lifetime, the wave that, once you rode her, if you never rode another one that would be okay, because you’d already experienced Big Mama. For me, she was the wave that was going to be massive enough and fast enough, a true moving mountain of water that gave me the rush I had once experienced the time I first rode big Sunset, or the first time I towed into Jaws.

  The Nazaré forecast is always unpredictable and this one was typical: One day perfect, the next day lousy, then perfect again, quickly deteriorating to lousy with maybe a three-hour window that morning, with light winds offshore and waves in the seventy-plus range. We decided it was worth driving to Honolulu and making our way back across the world to Nazaré. The chance that Big Mama would show up was always worth it.

  We arrived in Nazaré around midnight, in time to hear the swell starting to pick up. At dawn it was huge, and the tide was going out. I was on the rope. Kealii would tow me in; Kamaki Worthington, a firefighter friend from the North Shore, was on the safety ’ski; and Hugo Vau was on the backup safety. Game plan was to drive out into the channel and just sit and wait and only take the wave that has Big Mama potential, nothing less.

  It was a gray day, fully winter. Low clouds, gray ocean. We bobbed in the channel for two hours.

  Finally, a ridge starts to form. It goes up and up
. Doesn’t look as if it’s moving forward on its way to breaking, but like it’s rising up straight out of the ocean like some movie special effect. Up it goes, faster and faster. Kealii tows me onto it. We’re trying to find the spot where it looks as if it’s going to break, but it’s anyone’s guess.

  Kealii has an expert’s eye and puts me in the right spot, right in the middle, so I don’t have to cope with all the bump and chop. He’s driving full speed, turns out, and I let go of the rope. Must be going sixty miles an hour. But the wave keeps backing off. It just wants to go up. It doesn’t want to break. It’s like I’m snowboarding. Board chattering down the mountain, brain rattled, body rattled. My back foot comes out of the strap and I manage to jam it back in.

  And still the wave won’t break.

  I’m finally forced to kick out when I reach the rocks at the base of the lighthouse and the next wave is right there. Kealii tries to drive between them to pick me up and misses. The second wave breaks. The white water is roaring toward me. I push my board toward the channel and swim under the wave. I’m breaststroking in the dark, roar in my ears, under I go. Somehow, by the grace of God, I come out the back and turn to see the wave spill straight onto the rocks.

  Meanwhile, Kealii tries to outrun the wave. I surface to see him hit a big bump. He flies off the ’ski. He goes one way, ’ski goes the other. I’m in the impact zone, heading toward the rocks. Kamaki on the first safety ’ski grabs me. Hugo, on backup safety, grabs Kealii.

  Kealii takes his turn and surfs a handful of heaving monster waves, riding them with effortless Hawaiian ease. Then Hugo’s up and does the same. It occurs to me, watching them charge, that the best rush is when I can put my friends on waves they’ll be telling their kids about.

  When we make it back to shore Nicole is waiting for us. She had been standing on the cliff, watching. Her face is ashen.

  “For the first time, I had to look away,” she said.

  I was disappointed. What I rode that day was a huge, freakish swell that never broke. It crumbled a little at the top, then flattened out and disappeared. They say Eskimos have fifty different words for snow. Maybe surfers need that many for waves. We totally need one for what I rode that day in Nazaré.

  SOMETIMES I think back at myself with my little portfolio of surf-mag clippings, going from office to office in Tokyo trying to woo sponsors and marvel at how low tech it all was. The biggest media splash imaginable was landing a cover on Surfer.

  The thing I rode that January day was documented by a photographer I didn’t know. The picture was taken from behind and above the lighthouse. There are some phone lines in the foreground, the roof of the lighthouse with the light on the left and a few very tiny spectators on the right. In back of them, rearing up much higher than the lighthouse, is a huge gray wave/swell with a little foam on top, and me rocketing down the center.

  The photographer zipped it out to Surf Europe and the XXL Awards, and in a matter of days headlines on the Internet were screaming about how I’d ridden a hundred-foot wave. I was just like, What the hell are these guys doing? The wave barely broke.

  The picture is amazing. The angle makes it look bigger than it is and from a purely photographic perspective the Nazaré wave has an advantage that no other monster wave possesses—it can be compared to something other than the little surfer at the bottom of it. The viewer sees the lighthouse perched high on a cliff and thinks, What is that, eighty feet up? And the wave looks even taller. It requires no leap of the imagination. It’s something everyone can relate to. The viewer thinks, That could be me standing on the roof of that lighthouse. Holy shit!

  The picture went viral. The media kept pumping it up as the hundred-foot wave no matter how much I said that it was an intense swell to ride but I’m not sure it was even a wave, technically, and I have no idea how big it was anyway. Really, no one cared what I said.

  Predictably, the surfing world lost its mind over my “claiming,” even though anyone who cared to click around a bit for ten minutes would see I had nothing to do with it. Likewise, bitter, would-be surfers who sit in an office all day more or less dismissed Nazaré as having any kind of viable waves, much less a world-class giant. In fairness, some of the good guys stepped up and acknowledged that I’d achieved something most surfers dream about—discovering and pioneering a new wave and making a career out of surfing. South African big-wave charger Grant “Twiggy” Baker, 2014’s Big Wave World Tour champion and a regular at the XXL Big Wave Awards, admitted that what I’d accomplished was “every man’s dream.” But there was also the usual bad press. I was used to it by now. All that daily practice of acceptance. In April, Anderson Cooper did a segment on Nazaré and me for 60 Minutes, and I was happy that the town, and the sport of surfing in general, reaped all that international attention.

  Surfing as a sport also got a boost, too. I started getting e-mails from all over the world. People from the Middle East, Russia, and Timbuktu (literally) wrote to say how inspired they were, asking what it was like and saying they wanted to try it. I also started receiving invitations to give talks about my life, how I’d gone from scrappy semipro to washed-up at thirty-five to living my dream.

  The ride itself may have been a letdown, but it taught me something about expectations. By having them, we limit possibilities. What’s happened since I surfed the Wave That Was Not Big Mama has more than exceeded them.

  I’ve stopped searching for her. I’ve surfed that perfect big wave so many times in my mind I don’t need to do it in real life anymore. I’ve become unattached to the outcome.

  Well, mostly.

  I HAD been thinking for a long time about being more responsible about what I stood for. When I was getting my business education from Lowell Hussey, I didn’t think about what I was putting out there. Any corporation that wanted to sponsor me I wanted to be sponsored by; I didn’t care whether what they produced was harmful or not. I started looking at how impressionable my own kids were, how they looked up to this surfer or that singer and wanted to emulate them. I decided I didn’t want to do that anymore.

  With that in mind, in March I decided to pull the wave from consideration for the XXL Awards. In my statement I said it was because I was opposed to the event having an alcohol sponsor. I’ve been thinking a lot about what we really contribute to this world, and at the end of the day you’ve got to make choices. I don’t want kids to think that they’re going to be able to accomplish their goals in life by drinking alcohol. I didn’t want to be associated with that.

  I also said that I decided to pull it because I did not go out that day and surf for a world record or to win any XXL prize money. I was out there, I said, because I live to surf the big waves, and that was more than enough.

  DHARMA

  NO MATTER WHERE WE are in the world, Nicole and I still wake up in the morning and read a little from the Seven Spiritual Laws together, usually over some hot water with lemon. Sometimes we continue where we left off, rereading from beginning to end, and other days we just open it to any page. Then we talk about the day’s reading. We write down what we want to work on personally for the day, whether it be listening or accepting or non-judgment. We also discuss what we want to focus on business-wise. We write down what we want to manifest.

  THE YEAR Liam and I showed up on the North Shore in 1978, amid the cool local boys and fierce, competitive Aussies, there was a grinning, fun-loving, half-black, half-Hawaiian named Buttons Kaluhiokalani. His real name was Montgomery, but on the day he was born his grandmother decided his hair looked like black buttons against his scalp, and the name stuck.

  Buttons grew up in Waikiki where his heroes were Gerry Lopez, Jock Sutherland, and Eddie Aikau. But he also paid attention to what Dogtown’s Z-Boys were up to in Southern California and brought skateboard moves to the waves—the same ones Liam and I had practiced back in Berkeley. His carving 360s and spinners, roundhouse cutbacks and aerials made surfing look like a ton of fun. He isn’t called the father of modern surfing for no
thing—every flashy, radical maneuver we take for granted in twenty-first-century surfing can be traced back to Buttons.

  But that’s not what people loved about him. With his big Afro, sun-bleached at the tips, crazy snaggletoothed smile, and off-the-charts charisma, he was like no one else. For Buttons, it was always about having a good time. There was no lighter, brighter spirit in all of the islands.

  The highpoint of Buttons’s career was winning the Malibu Pro in 1979. He placed in a few other contests, but he didn’t have the fierce personality required for successful competing. He was a lover. Like so many surfers he struggled with drugs off and on, until finally getting clean once and for all in 2007.

  One day I was headed out for a tow-in session at Log Cabins with Uncle Dane Kealoha, and Buttons was hanging out on the beach doing nothing much. I convinced him to hop aboard. He was forty-nine, had been out of the pro surfing scene for a while, but he was game. The waves were firing out there, glassy and huge, a perfect North Shore day. Buttons had never driven a ’ski, never towed in, and the waves were getting bigger and bigger.

  “You got this, Buttons,” we said.

  “Are you sure? Are you sure?” Even as a grown man he was childlike and unashamed to ask for reassurance.

  “Yes, we’re sure. Just don’t drop to the bottom. You got to ride the face.”

  “Are you sure? Are you sure, Garrett? I don’t know. I’m scared, Garrett.”

  “No, it’s good! It’s going to be the best thing ever. You can win a double XXL. Just don’t drop to the bottom.”

  He hopped on the ’ski, shoved his feet in the straps, grabbed the rope, and off he went. We put him on a wave in the perfect spot . . . and he dropped straight to the bottom. He was thoroughly pounded, then popped up with silver dollar eyes, whimpering with fear. I quickly scooped him up and we headed back to the channel.