The Wave

by Susan Casey

  Killers wasn’t the world’s most fearsome wave. It didn’t have Teahupoo’s cantaloupe-hitting-the-pavement fear factor or the Mack-truck-on-steroids power of Jaws or Mavericks’ devilish soul. Regardless, no wave was to be trifled with when it rose to the size of a middling office tower, and on the right day Killers could punch above its weight. Early in his career Parsons had broken his nose, blown out his knee, and endured a wicked hold-down here, a wipeout that after ten years he still rated as his worst ever. And in 2005, in almost identical conditions to today’s, Gerlach had ridden a wave here that measured sixty-eight feet tall.

  They sat on their Jet Ski, assessing the waves and the crowds. Clearly, it was amateur hour out there. I saw one tow team that consisted of a gray-haired man and a kid who looked to be about thirteen. The waves were simply too small for towing to be the honorable approach; the only people who would tow onto a twenty-foot wave were those who shouldn’t have been towing at all. In tow surfing’s earliest years there was much sniping about its legitimacy, mainly because people guessed, correctly, that scenes like this would result.

  Used to be, it took years for a surfer to build the experience and paddling skills he needed to launch himself into a big wave. Now anybody with a credit card and a partner could do it. But that didn’t mean he should. “The best surfers are the slowest ones to tow,” Hamilton had said. “After boot camp you don’t immediately become a general. Unless you can ride thirty-foot surf paddling in on your stomach, there is no way in the world you should be behind a Jet Ski.” The corollary was that, if a wave could feasibly be paddled into, and there were riders trying to do that, then the Jet Skis stayed in the channel. Tow surfing, Hamilton emphasized, had been created for one purpose only: “Waves that would otherwise go unridden by the best surfers in the world.”

  Those were not the waves that were breaking at Todos at this moment. With the arrival of Mitchell, Watson, Greg Long, Rusty Long, Jamie Sterling, and Mark Healey, some of the most accomplished paddle surfers around, the father-and-son Jet Ski duos were about to be sidelined. If Killers hit fifty feet, then they’d have a discussion; in the meantime the waves would be caught by humans rather than by machines. Mitchell and Watson grabbed their guns, long sleek boards with pointed noses, made specifically for paddling into big waves. Prickett, meanwhile, decided that conditions were manageable enough to swim, to tread water on the wave’s shoulder holding his forty-pound camera housing, ducking underwater when catastrophe threatened. He pulled on his wetsuit and fins and disappeared over the edge.

  Gazing at the break, I was underwhelmed. Killers didn’t seem very killer-esque. But as I climbed onto the bow and sat down to watch, a forty-foot set came in and suddenly the wave revealed a less easygoing nature. The face stood up tall, and in its center a large circular boil appeared like a trapdoor. Caught inside the cascading peak, surfers dumped their boards and dove off to the side. The lucky ones punched through to the back and were able to recover quickly; the unlucky found themselves washed into the spiky rock field. Just a little wakeup call to remind everyone: the ocean could deliver a stiff backhand any damn time it pleased.

  Throughout the morning the swell lurched in, coughing up hairballs and gems with an emphasis on the former. In the water, people were frustrated. The waves hovered in the fifty-foot range, right on the border between towing and paddling, and because of this, most of the best waves were empty. The paddle surfers couldn’t quite catch them, although Greg Long and Jamie Mitchell both scored impressive rides. As long as the paddlers were out there trying, however, the Jet Skis couldn’t swoop in. I saw McNamara and Mamala drive by, looking bored. Sitting on the deck watching failed attempts to catch a wave, I heard a bitter voice from a nearby Ski: “Well, well. There goes another paddle surfer not making his wave. What a surprise.”

  It was a day that couldn’t make up its mind. The waves were formidable; then they were not. The sun would come out, only to disappear. The temperature alternated between bathing-suit hot and ski-jacket cold. The fog lifted and then oozed back in. After a few hours of this, Prickett swam back to the boat. Hoisting himself over the gunwale, he held up a battered object the size and shape of a large telephone book, mummified in black gaffer tape. “Look what I found,” he said, holding it up and laughing. Clearly it was an orphaned brick of something illegal. Prickett described how, while swimming, he’d felt a hard object bump him. (In the ocean, this is never a comforting sensation.) He batted whatever it was away and kept going, nervously. “So then I get hit again!” This time he saw the object suspended near the surface and scooped it up out of curiosity. We gathered on the stern to examine it.

  “Cut it open!” someone yelled. “Yeah! Let’s see what it is!” A box cutter was located and Prickett sliced open his contraband. Inside: a soggy, tight-packed mess of marijuana. We were all bent over it, discussing whether it was still smokable, when the captain, wondering what we were doing, wandered back.

  When he saw the ten-pound lump of weed, his eyes bugged and his mustache quavered with fear.

  “¡No en el barco!” he shouted, making a frantic hurling gesture toward the water. Get it off the boat! “¡Peligro! Ay!” He clutched his head. If the drugs so much as touched the deck, he said, Mexican customs would seize his boat.

  We took some photos of it and then quickly set it adrift, spilling open and primed to become fish food. Prickett watched it float off. “I wonder what the story is,” he said. “How it all played out. Was it a drug deal gone bad? A smuggler’s boat that sank?”

  “I guess we’ll never know,” I said. “But you do wonder what else might be out there bobbing around.”

  Prickett ate a quick lunch and then prepared to head back out. “What’s the water like?” I asked. He thought for a moment. “It feels angry,” he said. “There’s a current and a lot of chop. You can tell the waves have come from a huge storm.” The filming was difficult, he added, because of the extreme peaks and troughs. “When you fall down in a hole, it’s hard to make a judgment call about where to swim to get your shot.” He said this cheerfully, and then he jumped over the rail and swam off.

  Afternoon commenced. I sat on the bow, sheltered from the wind and with a direct sight line to the wave. The sets became more sporadic, good waves few and far between, and I began to feel drowsy. The swell appeared to be fading, nothing dramatic had happened in hours, and I drifted into hazy inattention. Out of the wind, the warm sun sparkled on the water. Seagulls and frigate birds soared overhead. It was all very picturesque if you ignored the discarded plastic bags, assorted garbage, and jettisoned narcotics swirling in the currents.

  Then out of the blue, a horn sounded, blaring an emergency warning to everyone in the channel: massive set on the horizon. There was a sudden scramble, boats motoring up in case they had to flee, surfers frantically clawing their way toward the incoming waves to avoid getting caught inside, Jet Skis roaring to life. I jolted upright, staring—and I could not believe what I saw.

  A wave unlike the others had arrived: a true freak. It was the result of God knows what trickster energies in the Pacific, an eagle rampaging through a parade of chickens. Instinctively I flinched as it rose into a sheer cliff, flicking the surfers off its face with casual violence. It was the biggest wave I had ever seen, later estimated to be on par with Gerlach’s sixty-eight-footer, and watching it I felt amazement and fear and humility, and through that prism of emotions, I recalled something Hamilton had said: “If you can look at one of these waves and you don’t believe that there’s something greater than we are, then you’ve got some serious analyzing to do and you should go sit under a tree for a very long time.”

  By this point I had seen plenty of waves in the fifty-foot range, and though they were truly impressive, until now I hadn’t felt the kind of awe that this wave inspired. Because, I now knew, when a wave grows beyond sixty feet tall, it does something different. As the wave stood up to its full towering height it hung there, poised on the brink, and instead of immediately be
ginning to break, the lip plunging over the face and expelling the energy, it advanced as a vertical wall. It was the ocean’s ultimate threat, and so the ocean let it hang out and show off and strut for an extra few beats, its crest feathered with white spray and its face booby-trapped with boils, bumps, and turbulent eddies. And as the wave hung in the sky, suspended between beauty and fury, those seconds stretched like elastic, like a terrible void into which all things could be swallowed up forever.

  When it finally did break, that too seemed to happen in slow motion, the whitewater rumbling toward the cliff. Perhaps the human brain becomes overwhelmed when trying to process so much power all at once, defaulting into circuit overload unless things unfold at a more reasonable pace. But whatever caused this suspension of ordinary time, it was felt by everyone who encountered giant waves, especially the riders. Brett Lickle had described it as “like a car accident. A ten-second experience that takes two minutes in your mind.”

  When the lip landed with a whomping roar, the whitewater explosion alone was taller than many of the waves we’d seen today, a forty-foot geyser of aerated water. Because water is eight hundred times denser than air, a surfer trapped beneath a thick layer of whitewater—which is essentially foam—had only one hope of making it up for a breath: his flotation vest. This was precisely why the vests had saved so many lives. Without one a surfer could try to claw his way back to the surface, but it would be like clutching at mist. The superbuoyant vests changed the rules, popping up a two-hundred-pound human despite the lack of water density to support him. There, at least somewhat above water, he might get a gulp of air before the arrival of the next annihilating wall. It was also possible to suck a breath out of the foam, should it come to that. “If you’re on the surface and you find air, baby, you’re taking it,” Lickle said, outlining the method: “You keep your teeth closed and then make like you’re sucking through a straw.” In the aftermath of Killers’ giant sneaker wave, several surfers had the opportunity to try this technique. As the men who had been caught inside began to surface, perilously close to the rocks, nearby Jet Skis shot in to help.

  Everyone was so busy gaping at the wave that it took the captain a moment to notice that the surge had ripped the anchor off the boat, and we were drifting fast toward the impact zone. As he rushed to the wheel to right our position, the second wave in the set appeared, an only slightly smaller sibling. This wave had a rider on it: Coco Nogales. He’d been ready to tow and in the right position, so to everyone’s delight the Mexican star got the star Mexican wave, and even if it was only the day’s second biggest, it was still a pretty sweet consolation prize.

  To meet Nogales and to hear his story was to root with all your heart for his success. A homeless runaway in Mexico City, he’d supported himself by selling gum on the street until, at age eight, he heard talk of a place called Puerto Escondido. It sounded idyllic, a small oceanside town south of Acapulco where kids could play in the surf, far from the urban zoo. He began to save up for a bus ticket. It took him seven months to earn the money. Upon arrival, he discovered that along with a less frightening existence, Puerto Escondido offered something else, something that, for him, would prove equally valuable in time: a wave that was a near replica of Hawaii’s Pipeline.

  From those beginnings, Nogales, now twenty-six, had scratched an unlikely path to professional big-wave riding, sponsored by Red Bull and others, and inspired a new generation of Mexican surfers. “Coco’s really humble,” Prickett said. “He lets his surfing speak for itself. I think he’s gonna go a long way.” Puerto Escondido, Prickett added, was such a hazardous wave, a ferocious, shallow beach break, that its riders had learned to be especially ocean savvy. “They’re in bad situations all the time and have gotten used to handling them.”

  Now the waves were pumping and the tow surfers got their chance, but the rogue set was not to be repeated. Conditions stayed respectable, but the day’s rhythm was erratic, a sudden blurp of energy followed by the doldrums, all of it shifting like quicksilver over the reef. There was general wariness; there were accidents. Brad Gerlach drove up on a Jet Ski and deposited Jamie Sterling at the boat, reeling from a burst eardrum. This injury, while painful and discombobulating—it destroys a person’s equilibrium—was an ever-present hazard for surfers. It happened when a rider fell off a wave in a particular way, smacking down on the water ear first. The situation was potentially dire because when a surfer was trapped underwater with a cracked eardrum, he had no idea which way was up, and if someone wasn’t right there to pull him out, he might not get out at all. On top of that the healing process was tedious, and the effects lingered. Spooked by the experience, some surfers took to covering their ears with duct tape whenever they were in the water. Sterling, his face pale, staggered onto the deck, accepted the offer of a Vicodin, and disappeared into the bunk area below.

  By late afternoon the light was fading and so were the waves. Gathering our crew, we prepared to leave. Harro stood on the bow balancing a three-foot-long 600mm lens that looked like a piece of the Mars Rover. “It’s all about being different,” he said, showing me the unusual way the lens framed the wave. “Getting a take the other photographers don’t have.” He smiled, his face shiny with sunburn. Prickett climbed out of the water and set down his camera to take the icy Corona someone handed him. “So much chop,” he said, shaking his head and drinking a gulp of his beer. “Man, did you see that one wave? It was getting scary out there.” Jamie Mitchell, his wet suit replaced by a tracksuit, nodded. “All of the water energy was aimed toward the rocks,” he said. “Like Jaws.”

  I turned and watched the wave as the boat steered toward Ensenada—and likely arrest for ignoring the harbor closure. No one seemed very concerned. The Mexican Coast Guard had surely seen its share of outlaw behavior, Prickett’s floating package attesting to that, and anyway, big-wave surfers were troubled by legalities only before they’d gotten their rides. Afterward was another story: they were punch-drunk on adrenaline, blissed on endorphins, friends with everyone. Jail for a few nights? A four-figure fine? Hagas lo que debes hacer, amigo: Do what you gotta do, brah.

  On the ride back I sat alone, staring absently at a pelican that had appointed itself our escort and replaying the monster wave in my mind: the defiance with which it kept rising and rising, far past the point where I expected it to stop, and the strange dreamlike way it moved, with a distinct aura of purpose. This too was part of the chase. During every big session there was always one wave that stunned everybody and would be remembered in years ahead. It represented what had been possible that day, and the man who had ridden it—if there was one—he would be remembered too. Every rider wanted that wave, even if he didn’t say it quite so baldly, but he needed luck as much as skill to catch it. He needed to be in the precise spot at the exact time, ready to take off when The Wave appeared on the horizon. If he had just finished a ride, or he was rescuing his partner, or someone else’s partner, or was in any of the wrong places he could be, doing any of the countless things he might be doing, that was just too damn bad.

  When Hamilton caught his famous wave at Teahupoo, he’d been delayed getting out to the break because he stopped to help a friend who had misplaced his sunglasses. To fumble around on land for an extra twenty minutes on that day must have been excruciating, but if Hamilton hadn’t done it, he might have been elsewhere in the rotation, not primed at the moment his singular wave raised its gorgon head.

  We neared the marina and the pelican touched down, gliding onto the water. The wind had quieted again, and the sky was a rich cocktail of blues and golds. A spectral moon was on the rise, pale as smoke. Stepping onto the dock, I felt the woozy sensation you get when your feet hit solid ground after a day in the waves. Prickett, Harro, Mitchell, and Watson—up now for seventy-two hours and counting—were joking and laughing, replaying the highlight reel, as we made our way back to the trucks. “Everyone’s just like overgrown kids when it’s big,” Harro said with a grin. “This has been a whirlwind.�
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  After a shower and a nap, there were more planes to catch and new swells to track. Prickett was headed back to Hawaii to work on a feature film called The Warming. The movie, he explained, was an eco-thriller about climate change. “The waters rise and rise and people die from big waves,” Prickett said. “We’re shooting dummy bodies getting trashed by surf on the rocks.”

  Harro was en route to Alaska, then Hawaii, and on to Australia, and those were only the stops he knew about. Tomorrow another megastorm could pop up and rip the tablecloth from under all of his plans. “Mother Nature rules all,” Prickett pointed out. “You can’t schedule anything, you just gotta wait for her to bring it.” If she pointed you toward bandito-land, then that is where you went. Ensenada was a fairly unlovable location, a sprawling city of scruffy barrios, heavy traffic, gruesome time-shares, and bars that smelled of stale alcohol and armpits, but now it was also the place where I’d seen one of the ocean’s grandest spectacles.

  While they loaded the trucks, I checked my phone messages. Hamilton had called. He would be dismayed, I thought, by the accounts of this swell and what he had missed. His voice came on: “Got your message, just getting back to you …” There was a pause, as though he was grasping for words. “Uh, we’re still kinda recovering from our big day. Mentally, emotionally, physically. Spiritually. Intellectually.” Another pause while he took a long breath: “Hopefully. Anyway, um, see you soon.” I listened, startled. Still recovering? From what? When and where and how was this a big day? Hamilton’s voice had sounded drained, and the cadence of his speech was different, subdued. I stared at my phone. What on earth had happened in Maui?