by Susan Casey
“It’s an animal”: Laird Hamilton riding Jaws; Don Shearer flying safety alongside. (photo credit i.1)
Laird Hamilton and Dave Kalama (right) have been a team since tow surfing’s creation in the mid-1990s. (photo credit i.2)
“This is the Sport of Kings”: Hamilton on the Ski with Darrick Doerner (photo credit i.3)
Gang members: Brett Lickle (left) and Sonny Miller (photo credit i.4)
Hamilton drops in at Jaws, before flotation vests became a lifesaving addition to his gear. Without the vest, a rider’s chances of making it back to the surface after a fall are greatly reduced. (photo credit i.5)
The magenta blob: NASA weather maps capture Super Typhoon Nida as it spirals across the Pacific, kicking up giant seas. (photo credit i.6)
The RSS Discovery meets the North Sea—on a nice day. (photo credit i.7)
Dr. Penny Holliday aboard the Discovery on its ill-fated, but revealing, research cruise in 2000. (photo credit i.8)
Britain’s National Oceanography Center at Southampton is one of the world’s most acclaimed oceanographic institutes; along with its sister ship, the James Cook, the Discovery (shown in its berth alongside the building) roams the planet’s seas in search of answers. (photo credit i.9)
“Things were getting smashed off”: the oil rig Gullfaks C taking heavy abuse in the North Sea. (photo credit i.10)
“A lot of these ships are getting beaten to a pulp”: the Iranian oil tanker Tochal had its entire bow section torn off by giant waves in the Agulhas Current, off South Africa’s southeastern coast. (photo credit i.11)
“If he’d fallen he would have been a red stain on the reef”: Laird Hamilton makes history in Teahupoo’s meat-grinder barrel, shown on the cover of Surfer magazine, August 17, 2000. (photo credit i.12)
The ride of the day: Ian Walsh drops into Teahupoo on November 1, 2007. (photo credit i.13)
The Tahitian big-wave star Raimana Van Bastolaer (photo credit i.14)
Mesmerized by waves: Jeff Hornbaker (photo credit i.15)
A rare moment on land: ocean filmmaker Mike Prickett (photo credit i.16)
Game changer: Master underwater cinematographer Don King in his element (photo credit i.17)
The storm hunter: Harro on the beach (photo credit i.18)
“We’ve never surfed it this big”: Garrett McNamara barely escapes Mavericks’ dark jaws on December 4, 2007. (photo credit i.19)
A monster truck of a wave: Australian rider Justen Allport tries to outrun Ghost Tree, off the coast of Pebble Beach, California. Only seconds after this picture was taken the wave’s lip broke on top of Allport, snapping his femur into five pieces. (photo credit i.20)
Killers: Brad Gerlach catches a sixty-eight-foot XXL-winning ride at Todos Santos Island, off the coast of Ensenada, Mexico, in 2005. (photo credit i.21)
The moon shot: Mike Parsons rides a seventy-foot monster at the Cortes Bank on January 5, 2008. (photo credit i.22)
The “Ring of Fire”: the Pacific basin’s volcano-dotted perimeter, a region responsible for 80 percent of all tsunamis. (photo credit i.23)
“It looked as though the ship was heading straight for the white cliffs of Dover”: the lordly ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2 was hit by a hundred-foot rogue wave on September 11, 1995. Captain Ronald Warwick saw that the wave’s crest was level with the bridge (the row of windows between the flags). (photo credit i.24)
The Lutine Bell in its place of honor at Lloyd’s of London (photo credit i.25)
An artist’s depiction of the tsunami that razed Lisbon in 1755, upending life from the Mediterranean to the United Kingdom. (photo credit i.26)
“Ships had simply broken apart like a snapped pencil”: a freighter in heavy seas. If giant waves breach the deck hatches, a bulk carrier can sink within minutes. (photo credit i.27)
“And when that violence comes, it is overwhelming”: Lituya Bay, Alaska, a haunting place where extreme waves scour the landscape. (photo credit i.28)
The aftermath: in 1958 a 1,740-foot wave scalped the forest around Lituya Bay of trees and soil; it even stripped the trees of bark—with a force exceeding that of a pulp mill. This was only one in a series of epic waves that rampaged across its shores. (photo credit i.29)
Geologist Don Miller documented the 1958 wave’s damage, shown here from eye level. (photo credit i.30)
Bad Friday: on March 27, 1964, an earthquake measuring 9.2 rocked the Pacific Northwest, creating tsunami waves that obliterated parts of Alaska, Hawaii, and California. In Kodiak, Alaska, the entire hundred-boat fishing fleet was lost; boats were washed ashore, houses were washed out to sea, and fires raged. (photo credit i.31)
Bad Friday: on March 27, 1964, an earthquake measuring 9.2 rocked the Pacific Northwest, creating tsunami waves that obliterated parts of Alaska, Hawaii, and California. In Anchorage, an entire suburb slid into the sea. (photo credit i.32)
The Wild Coast: marine salvagers rappel from a helicopter to board the Ikan Tanda, a foundering Singaporean ship that was being pounded by forty-foot storm waves and gale winds near Scarborough, South Africa. (In the end, the ship could not be saved.) (photo credit i.33)
The hundred-year storm: in December 2009, a massive magenta blob descended on Hawaii. The biggest waves in a century were predicted; harbors and beaches were closed all over the state, but Hamilton (pictured riding Jaws on December 7, 2009), Kalama, and other tow surfers headed directly for the water. (photo credit i.34)
“Let’s get a wave”: Hamilton and Casey in Jaws’ lineup (photo credit i.35)
“Ultimately the objective is to ride the biggest swells the ocean can create”: Hamilton on the hydrofoil surfboard, an invention that he believes is the future of big-wave riding. (photo credit i.36)
A stormier, more aquatic future: the world’s oceans are increasingly volatile, with average wave heights rising dramatically. (photo credit i.37)
I NEED THE SEA BECAUSE IT TEACHES ME.
Pablo Neruda
SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND
Southampton, England, is a town that knows its ships. Located seventy-five miles southwest of London, it’s a natural deepwater port that has been a maritime hub since the birth of Christ (at least). Ships of all kinds have been built, moored, exhibited, repaired, loaded and unloaded there; the port has hosted Viking raids and Roman conquests and French invasions and sorties for both world wars. It was from these docks that the Mayflower shoved off for Plymouth Rock and the Titanic sailed to its grim fate. For decades, the lordly ocean liners Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth 2 began and ended their transatlantic journeys here. These days containerships come and go like clockwork, cruise ships are as regular as the tides, private yachts dot the marinas, and the town square is commemorated by an oversize anchor on a pedestal. When I visited Southampton, the place was beset by crowds who were there for its famous annual boat show, the showpiece of which was the tall ship from Pirates of the Caribbean III. But I was there on account of another vessel: the much-loved and well-used research ship, the RRS Discovery.
Along with its sibling ship, the James Cook, the 295-foot Discovery is berthed not in the port but directly in front of Southampton’s National Oceanography Center (NOC), the two of them like a pair of very bulky cars parked in a custom-made driveway. NOC itself is a three-story facility built of gold-colored brick, and it stretches along the wharf, elegant and utilitarian at the same time. This curbside closeness to the sea—visible through every window and never more than a baby step away—is fitting: NOC is one of the world’s most acclaimed marine research centers, home base for 520 scientists and staff, and 750 students from the University of Southampton.
One of those scientists is Penny Holliday, whose 2006 paper about the giant waves that bedeviled her research cruise aboard the Discovery had caught my attention. From the paper’s provocative title (“Were extreme waves in the Rockall Trough the largest ever recorded?”) to the bizarre incident it recounted (en route to Iceland, the Discovery, its crew, and twenty-five
scientists had been trapped 175 miles off Scotland for a week in maniac seas), what I read was captivating and chilling in equal measure.
Holliday and her coauthors spelled out the science: how the ship had been ideally equipped to measure the waves, its shipborne wave recorder charting the ocean’s every movement. They presented statistics for wind speeds, sea level pressures, and energy spectra. Charts and graphs plotted the wave heights, showing that the ship had run into several faces between ninety and one hundred feet tall. They put forth a theory as to why the seas had been so much crazier than the models predicted; it was due to an alignment of time, wind, and geography. The winds—strong, but typical for the region—had tracked the waves, traveling at the same speed and in exactly the same direction, relentlessly pumping energy into them across one thousand nautical miles. The result was a marauding, bulked-up gang of superwaves.
In her acknowledgments Holliday thanked the captain and crew for “enduring the terrible conditions” and “getting everyone home safely,” and I had noticed this because few scientific papers end with a footnote stating that its authors are happy to be alive. As I read it, I was also interested in what the paper didn’t say: how it felt to be caught in those waves and escape in one piece. Asking Holliday herself seemed the best way to understand the details of that ill-fated but revealing trip.
Penny Holliday handed me a cup of instant coffee and sat down at her desk, a scratched-up table in a bare-bones room. Reference books lined the shelves above it; a battered orange survival suit hung on the back of her door. At first glance, it was hard to imagine Holliday out on Discovery’s stern operating heavy equipment in fifty-knot winds. She was a tiny woman, strikingly pretty, with a sandy blond bob and ice blue eyes. Her laugh was light and bubbly. When she began to speak about her work, however, any inkling of fragility was gone.
Her specialty, the effects of climate change on ocean circulation, required her to spend extended stretches of time at sea, often at extreme latitudes. “Most of my research cruises have been in the stormy North Atlantic,” she told me, describing how the currents that flowed into the Arctic were of particular interest. Both the temperature and the salinity of these waters have spiked upward in the past thirty years, since scientists first began taking measurements. With this flux comes the fear that the Gulf Stream will alter its behavior, scrambling the weather patterns in highly undesirable ways.
The burly, fifty-mile-wide Gulf Stream, which charges north from Florida before veering east at Newfoundland and making for Ireland, transfers heat from its eighty-degree waters to the North Atlantic, moderating the climate. It’s part of a vast circulation system known as the Global Conveyor Belt, in which ocean currents loop around the planet powered by wind along with differences in temperature and water density, as they transfer the sun’s energy from the equator to the poles. (In the North Atlantic alone, this process disperses a million power stations’ worth of heat.) One of the white-knuckle questions about climate change is whether the Conveyor Belt will slow down—or even shut off completely—when the ratio of warm to cold water tips past a certain point. Scientists have found evidence that this has happened before, as recently as the mid-1800s, and that for much of western Europe the off-switch resulted in a wild and icy ride. (Provence, France, for instance, would become as wintry as Maine.) All of which puts new urgency into Holliday’s investigations.
Another woman who had earned her survival suit was Dr. Margaret Yelland, Holliday’s office mate, seated across from us. Yelland’s work called for an even greater dose of Dramamine, possibly an intravenous drip. She sought out the strongest winds available to perform her research on the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2, a critical function. “I’ve spent the last ten years of my career looking for high wind speeds,” she said in her soft, husky Manchester accent. “Being sick as a dog in the North Atlantic and Southern Ocean winters. We’re not really bothered where in the world we are as long as we get some good storms.” Though Yelland hadn’t been present on Holliday’s infamous cruise, she’d placed some automated wind-measuring instruments on the ship and could thus monitor conditions from afar. “We were getting the weather data as it came in,” she said. “I saw it and I just thought, ‘Oh my God.’ ”
Holliday laughed. “We kept thinking it was going to improve! The forecast kept telling us better weather was on the way.” To say the least, this did not happen. From its start on January 28, 2000, the trip was plagued by an escalating series of storms. “Several trashed cabins and one broken Mac monitor,” Holliday e-mailed a colleague after her third night at sea. “The worst Mac we had, but still, rather annoying.” Experiments were postponed while Discovery’s captain, Keith Avery, coped with conditions. No one had expected the winter North Atlantic to be a joyride, but neither did the ship’s passengers realize they had signed up for the Cruise of the Damned.
It was a route that Holliday had traveled many times before, a transect called the Extended Ellett Line, after David Ellett, the Scottish scientist who began it in 1975. The Line stretched 1,200 kilometers from Rockall Island to Iceland; at stations along the way Holliday and the others would monitor the water’s salinity, temperature, and composition. Scientists made the three-week trip annually, trying to understand the sublime balance of ocean and atmosphere, how things were shifting, and in general what was going on out there. “It’s very disappointing how little we know about the ocean,” Holliday said, echoing the sentiment of every marine scientist I’d spoken to.
Attempting to move from the Scottish shelf out to the deeper waters of the open ocean, Discovery made sporadic progress, the scientists getting a task or two done, only to be halted when the weather growled again. “We have not been able to work for three days now and have experienced quite extreme conditions,” Holliday wrote to a friend at the beginning of the second week. “Because of that we have just remained hove to, which means steaming slowly into the wind and waves, trying to minimize the motion of the ship.”
Confined to their cabins and the lower deck areas, the scientists attempted to work at their computers, but this proved both futile and dangerous as furniture and other heavy objects catapulted about. “Chairs would fling themselves at you from unexpected places,” Holliday recalled. “People were getting hurt. They were breaking ribs and getting covered in bruises and tossed around.” Sleep was out of the question. For the most part, so was eating. Holliday struggled with a persistent low-grade nausea, not seasickness exactly, more like “having a permanent hangover despite not drinking much.” But for many of the others, their discomforts exceeded the physical. “I think some people were struggling with the anxiety of actually being on the ship,” Holliday said. “But if you start thinking, ‘Oh my God, we’re all going to die!’ that’s no way forward.”
What came next wouldn’t have helped them much: in the already wretched North Atlantic, the thirty- and forty-foot waves began to build dramatically, rising up to sixty, seventy, eighty feet and beyond. “It was absolutely awful,” Holliday said. “We were being battered by waves that made the ship jump and shudder. The waves would loom up in front of the ship; we’d potter up them and seem to hover at the top before crashing down the other side. The scariest bit is when you are up there, looking into this enormous hole in the sea below. You imagine the ship might just continue down and not come up again. Sometimes we would drop suddenly and my eyes couldn’t keep up with the motion. I lost my visual grip on the scene in front of me and my head was spinning.”
Discovery emanated the creaks and groans of a haunted house, wood and metal stressed to the breaking point. Terrifying to be sure, but Holliday was also aware of a surreal magic to the scene, like being suspended inside an abstract painting made of salt water. Wind-whipped clouds of spray gusted from the wave crests, creating an aquatic whiteout, while seabirds spun eerily, like bats, overhead.
“There was violent movement on the bridge,” Captain Avery recalled in an interview later with Professional Mariner magazine. Although other officer
s and engineers on the ship had argued for beating a hasty retreat toward shelter, any kind of relief, Avery knew their only hope was to point Discovery’s bow directly into the waves. Maintaining this position in such confused and angry seas was easier said than done. “It was particularly serious at night,” Holliday said, “because the waves were not all coming from the same direction. So if you had a wave coming off from the left, you couldn’t see it until it was practically upon you.” For hours that stretched into two days, Avery battled with giants.
It couldn’t have boosted morale when a lifeboat sprang loose in the night during a thirty-degree roll and began hammering Discovery’s starboard side. Or when a six-foot lab window suddenly shattered. “To me, that was evidence that the ship was twisting,” Holliday said. “Which was very alarming because it had been lengthened in 1992. They’d cut it in half and welded in a new section. And so you’re thinking about that … ‘Hmmmm, this is the biggest test it’s ever gonna get.’ ” She laughed and looked over at Yelland. “I’ve seen the movie The Perfect Storm. Liked it. But I never thought I would live it.”
After nearly a week of maintaining the hove-to position, the seas subsided enough for Discovery to turn and dash for shelter. “We kind of surfed the waves back to Scotland and hid behind the Hebrides for a while,” Holliday said. But volatile weather met them even there, dishing up a mix of hail and gale-force winds. When another major storm loomed on the weather maps, threatening to unleash a fresh platoon of thirty-foot waves, it made sense to end the cruise early, before the next beating started. To stay out any longer would be pushing Discovery’s already remarkable luck. “It’s all gone to rat shit,” Holliday wrote bitterly to a colleague, lamenting the lost days at sea. Others were simply relieved that the scientists and crew had made it out of the waves without tragedy. “Looking forward to seeing you all back safely,” Holliday’s boss, Raymond Pollard, e-mailed. “That is the most important thing now.”