by Susan Casey
“Ah, cuz,” Shearer said when I mentioned this. “The weather was just shit. Totally ridiculous. It was like, ‘Where’d this come from?’ Visibility less than a mile, clouds lower than three hundred feet. The airport was IFR—only one aircraft in the airspace at a time because they have to land on instruments. Hardly ever happens.”
“It was spooky,” Emory agreed. “Because it was overcast and dreary and gray and we didn’t think it was that big. We rolled up to the beach thinking, ‘Ah, it’s nothing.’ We got out there and it was like, ‘Woah! Wake-up call! Holy shit!’ ”
Knowing the surf was rising, Shearer had picked up the injured Kalama, and the two headed out in the helicopter to fly safety for Hamilton and Lickle. First, though, they took a quick pass over Jaws. “It was all disorganized and funky,” Shearer recalled. “I’d never seen it like that. It was really screwed up.” They buzzed back over Egypt but in the veiled light they didn’t spot the surfers—and they couldn’t hang around to look because they were sitting right in the airport’s landing path. “We could see big waves on the horizon north of Spreckelsville,” Shearer said. “And we could tell there was something going on that we’d never ever seen before. I kept asking the tower for clearance to stay out there—they’re all my buddies—but they couldn’t approve it.” Reluctantly, he and Kalama turned back to land.
Casil reached into the cooler and passed out another round. “That whole day just sounds cartoonish,” he said.
“Oh, it was,” Lickle said, popping open a can. “The bigger it got, there was no reality to it. It was the friggin’ Twilight Zone.”
From somewhere back in the garage, Hamilton chimed in: “It was another scale! Other scale. Metric scale.”
When Hamilton and Lickle made it back out to Egypt, they were floored by what greeted them: snarling faces as large as any they’d ever seen at Jaws. And improbably, a left break farther out—a wave they had never known existed—was exploding at even greater sizes. Egypt, Hamilton said, was “taller than tall,” with an oval lip that flared at the top like the hood of a cobra, extending the face. “It has a big pyramid shape,” he’d explained. “It’s really steep at the top and then it’s just bottomless.”
Amazingly, on December 3 there was little wind, leaving the water chop-free, with an oily, glassy surface. “They were the most perfect big waves I’d ever seen,” Lickle said, shaking his head. “What’d you call it?” he yelled to Hamilton. “Butterball turkey butts?”
“Butterball turkey butts!” Hamilton yelled back, above the clanking of tools.
“Something went wrong with my board for the second session,” Lickle said, adding that he’d picked it up to launch and noticed the fins had somehow gotten crinkled and bent. “I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ And Laird goes, ‘Here, take mine.’ ” Lickle laughed wryly. “I’d ridden his board once before so I had the confidence to jump on it. But it was a whole other animal: my board’s a Corvette, but Laird’s board—it’s a Ferrari. When you kick out of a wave you’re going fifty.”
Given that Lickle was a good five inches shorter than Hamilton, the foot straps were a stretch. But he went for it—“I can’t tell you how scared I was”—and rode what, even now, he referred to as “the wave of my life.”
“When I kicked out of it,” Lickle continued in an incredulous voice, “I said to myself, ‘You’re out of your fucking mind, buddy, you’re cut.’ ” He made a curt slicing motion with his hand. “I remember just looking at Laird and going, ‘Done.’ ”
“You scared yourself out of the water,” Shearer said with a nod.
“That wave scared me out of the water,” Lickle agreed. “I barely made it. I mean it was by the friggin’ hair of my ass. But I was ready to watch Laird ride some of these bombs. ’Cause you don’t get to see it while you’re doing it.”
Meanwhile, right before Lickle’s ride, unseen in the mist, Emory had taken a fall at precisely the wrong moment—and most definitely on the wrong wave. “I was in exactly the worst spot,” he said. “Dead center.” A spooked look passed over his face as the memory resurfaced. “It was the biggest wave I’ve had on my head. A heavy, heavy one. I got on the sled and I’m seeing spots and stars. And it’s dark and John’s driving in circles looking for my board and I’m going, ‘Which way is the ocean? Where’s land?’ ”
“How big was it?” I asked.
“You know, in the moment I don’t pay attention to the size of the wave,” Emory said, deflecting the question. “Some are scary big, and some are just big.” He looked at Lickle, his eyes wide. “Brett, my board—as fast as it is—I was going backward. The wave just got bigger and bigger and all I could do was keep going straight. It was as good as it could be, dead smooth, nuts clean, and I still couldn’t go.”
Lickle nodded. “And whole sections have gotten blipped out of your memory because things were so intense. You really don’t know how big that wave was.” He raised his eyebrows. “But that’s good. You don’t want to see too much, or you’ll never get on the rope.”
“I haven’t had a schooling like that in a long time,” Emory said, flinching.
“Well,” Lickle said, turning to me, Shearer, and Casil to underscore what he was about to say, “his wave was a monstrosity. I remember looking at him on it. Laird and I were towing back out. Sierra was in the middle, and I could have stacked ten people above him and ten people below. Little stick figures in my mind.”
At that point none of the four surfers could have imagined that Egypt was only getting started, that however harrowing Emory’s spill had been, it was a warm-up act for what was yet to come. While Emory and Denny regrouped, Lickle had turned to the matter at hand: putting Hamilton on the craziest wave he could find. Even in the poor visibility he could make out the darker depressions as they approached, shadows etched into the ocean, the thundering energy like an approaching drumbeat of troubles you were destined to have but didn’t know about yet.
Gunning the Jet Ski, Lickle watched over his shoulder as Hamilton released the rope. For a moment, although Hamilton was moving at least forty miles per hour, it looked as though he had come to a dead stop. Lickle watched in astonishment as the wave rose and rose and then, absurdly, rose again and rose some more, until Hamilton was in that ultimate place—Ant Man on the Great Pyramid of Giza—and the drop was a plunge of such dimensions that even catching the wave was a challenge. “It was all I could do,” Hamilton had told me. “I was just focused on making the drop.”
The singular concentration required to survive the vertical top of the wave made it impossible for him to race horizontally through the barrel to outrun the falling lip; the drop was so endless, with so much water rushing back up it, that he simply ran out of time. Realizing he was about to be swallowed, Hamilton deployed a last-ditch tactic to avoid being crushed: “I got as high up as I could and dove into the face.” The good news was that when this maneuver worked, the surfer escaped an imminent beating by punching through to the backside. The bad news: he would surface directly in front of the next wave in the set. And in Hamilton’s case, the wave that was bearing down on him measured at least eighty feet.
Lickle, as always, was on it. He raced in to pick up Hamilton and then boomeranged out at full throttle, clean grab, everything flawless. “GO GO GO GO GO!!!” Lickle recalled Hamilton screaming. The two men couldn’t see what was behind them but they could feel it gaining, gaining—WHAT THE FUCK???—gaining. Then reality tipped sideways, upside down, inside out, as the wave blew them off the Jet Ski in a manner that suggested extreme finality. “That wave ran us down like we were standing still,” Hamilton said. “I have never been hit by anything that quick. I can only describe it as a visual of a house when an avalanche comes. You see stuff go blowing by. Well, that was what happened. We were looking at the shore and all of a sudden we were just looking at whitewater.”
As the two men and the Jet Ski blasted into the air, Hamilton felt a rope wrap around his ankle. Somehow he managed to reach down and flick it off,
but in doing so his shin slammed the back of the Jet Ski with such force that it cracked a baseball-size hematoma straight to the bone, almost splitting his skin. Lickle, however, was about to top that injury and raise it by an order of magnitude. Everyone at the picnic table subtly leaned forward to listen as Lickle described what happened next: “It was like being shot out of a cannon. I was blown into the sky, where I was up and over the whole whitewater—forty, fifty feet—literally flying.” He chuckled darkly, no humor about it.
Behind him, Hamilton, barefoot and clad only in surf trunks, came out of the garage carrying a seventy-pound bag of pig feed. He set it down next to the barbecue. “It was a pounding,” he said flatly.
“That it was,” Lickle agreed. “I still get sick to my stomach talking about it.” But he took the fresh beer Shearer handed him, and continued.
As Lickle landed in the tumult, he felt something hit his leg “like a sledgehammer. BOOM!” In the next instant everything went dark, as he was driven deep by the whitewater. The wave’s impact rocked him so hard that when he came up, “I had no idea why I was in the water.” He found himself facing shoreward, his vest holding him on the aerated surface, “but I didn’t really know where I was or what I was doing.” Hamilton, meanwhile, had also come up. He’d been dragged farther inside and caught sight of Lickle, seventy yards away. At that moment he also saw that the whitewater around Lickle was no longer white.
It was crimson.
But there was a more immediate problem. “I’m looking at Brett,” Hamilton said, “and all of a sudden I see a fifty-foot whitewater behind him. Like at least. It was a whitewater as big as a lot of big waves I’ve ridden.” Hearing this, Emory nodded, his face somber. He’d been chased and caught by a similar beast.
“It was round two,” Lickle said. “Just ragged. Blasted everywhere. Head up, down, you don’t know where down or up is. That second wave freakin’ annihilated me.” It hit with such force that Lickle and Hamilton were hurtled about five hundred yards underwater. “It was just black down there,” Hamilton said, spitting out the word. “Pitch-black.”
Once again the vests did their job and the two men popped up—just in time to face another wall of whitewater. This third wallop was then followed by a fourth and a fifth. “We had five good whalings,” Hamilton recalled. “They began to blur together. Blown in, blown in, blown in. And then finally we were pushed to the inside, into the deep zone.”
The two were still more than a mile offshore, still caught in wicked surf, but they’d been washed out of the worst danger and miraculously they were still near each other, only thirty yards apart. Hamilton, now freed from a survival mode in which thoughts and plans were luxuries that didn’t exist, recalled the bloody water he’d seen and yelled to Lickle.
Turning his head slowly, Lickle stared at him with blank eyes. “Tourniquet,” he said.
“Fuck, cuz, I was dying at that point,” Lickle said, picking up the story. No one had budged from the picnic table. It was as though Lickle had just returned from Pluto and was describing the scenery. After Hamilton had assessed the injury—“Brett’s leg looked like two curtains just hanging there”—and then stripped off his wet suit to make a tourniquet, he turned to what was now a life-or-death proposition: finding the Jet Ski. Fearful of leaving his friend but aware there was no other option—Emory and Denny would never find them amid the chaos—Hamilton pulled off his flotation vest and strapped it around Lickle. Then he turned and began to swim.
He spotted the Ski almost immediately—a needle-in-a-haystack sighting—but he also realized with a sinking heart that it was more than eight hundred yards away, ripping out to sea on a six-knot current. He put his head down and sprinted.
“Were you weak from losing blood?” Casil asked Lickle.
“Yeah, but I didn’t go there,” Lickle replied. “I just tried to keep myself together, tried not to go into the gutter. I mean as far as I knew, the Big Guy was gonna come eat me before I bled out.” (Spreckelsville was, after all, the place he and Kalama had seen the fifteen-foot tiger shark.)
“At that point did you know how bad your leg was?” I asked.
Lickle nodded. “Dude, it felt like the hot jelly innards of an ahi—you know, when you’re chumming with it. When you cut up a big one to use the meat.”
“You felt it?” Somehow I found this fact more disturbing than the injury itself.
“I had to!” Lickle said. “I was dying. And I just knew something wasn’t right with my leg.” That something, he believed, had occurred when the thin metal fin of a tow board razored into him while they were tangled in the whitewater. “It went into the calf, straight to the bone.”
While Lickle hung on, Hamilton somehow managed to chase down the Ski, fifteen minutes of hard swimming in the froth and churn, against the current. But that was only the first challenge. Lickle had been wearing the wrist lanyard—the mechanism for starting and stopping the engine—and it was irretrievably lost. Rifling through the glove compartment, Hamilton found a pair of iPod headphones that he used, MacGyver-like, to hot-wire the ignition. To his relief, the battered machine started up immediately. As he gunned back to Lickle he radioed a coast guard alert; he wanted to make sure an ambulance would be waiting at Baldwin Beach.
He found Lickle semiconscious, in shock, and floating in a pool of blood, but he was still alive. Hamilton managed to get him onto the rescue sled in a sort of half-kneeling position. Holding Lickle in an armlock so he didn’t slide off, Hamilton headed for shore.
“When Laird shot up onto Baldwin Beach,” Lickle said, “he was stark naked. By then I had lost most of my blood. I had no idea that he had pulled his whole wet suit off to tie the tourniquet. Even when I was on the Ski and my face was in his ass, I still never put anything together.”
The swell had sent waves washing through the parking lot, two hundred yards from the shoreline. A beach rescue vehicle had been swept up there and the lifeguards were milling around, Hamilton recalled, “kind of flipped out.” As he tried to lift Lickle off the Jet Ski, the ambulance pulled into the flooded lot, then the fire department, and finally the police. “I had to scream at one guy,” Hamilton said. “He saw the wound and it tweaked him.” While the paramedics attended Lickle, someone handed Hamilton a T-shirt to cover himself. Someone else passed over a pair of surf shorts. As all this was going on, Shearer and Kalama pulled up. Only moments later Emory and Denny arrived back on shore.
“Put the shorts on,” Hamilton said, “made sure Brett was in the ambulance and everything was okay and then we went, you know, ‘Okay, back at it.’ ”
“Wait a minute,” I said, wanting to make sure I understood correctly, what with the vague pronouns and all. “You went back out?”
Before he could answer, Shearer cut in. “Dave and I got to the beach and the ambulance was just leaving. And Laird’s eyes are like friggin’ lightbulbs. I mean he’s jacked beyond jacked. I’ve never seen him more jacked—and we’ve been through a lot. He can barely walk; his shin is all blown up. But he’s just so on a mission. And he looks at me and says: ‘You have to see it.’ ”
“What do you mean!” I stared at Shearer, startled by this information. Until that moment I’d felt a kind of semidetached third-party horror about December 3, a rubbernecker’s fascination. But now something new burst in: jealousy. “You were out there? You saw those waves too?”
Shearer nodded vigorously and leaned forward for emphasis. “Have you ever seen The Poseidon Adventure? Well, this was my personal Poseidon Adventure. Times ten.”
Emory headed home for dinner and Gabby called Hamilton upstairs for a moment and Shearer kept on with his story. He had gone back out with Hamilton, and Emory—now partner-less since Denny had stayed on shore—had accompanied them, driving the other Ski. “So I’m holding on for dear life,” Shearer said, “and we couldn’t really see, there was so much salt spray and moisture in the air.” He leaned back at the table. “I mean, you had to really want to get out. We had to continuall
y attack and retreat, attack and retreat. We’d see what we thought was an opening and then we’d have to run away. Just to get through all the whitewater.” By that time the entire coast was a fifty-foot closeout: “The foam was four feet thick!” “At one point I got knocked off the Ski,” Shearer recalled. “Laird grabbed me and said, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Then we started getting glimpses of what was out there. Unreal.”
“Wasn’t Lake Havasu, was it?” Lickle said, with a smirk.
“Listen,” Shearer shot back. “I’m used to looking at stuff. I’ve seen every big swell in Hawaii since 1986. I’ve filmed almost everything that’s ever happened as far as surfing goes. I’ve been first responder at a plane crash with twenty dead bodies. But as we tried to get out, I was just totally tripping.” He looked at me. “Finally, we got out. And it was like, ‘Oh. My. God.’ ”
“So how big was it?” I asked again.
Shearer paused. The wind had taken a break for a moment and his silence seemed bigger. He fixed me with a searing look, straight in the eye. “I fly every day with a hundred-foot line on my helicopter,” he said. “I can tell you when it’s inches above the ground or a foot above the ground or two feet above the ground. I can tell the difference between a hundred-foot cable when I’m flying or a hundred-five-foot cable or a ninety-five-foot cable. I am very good at judging height. I have to be.” He continued, his voice ratcheting louder. “And I know for a fact—I KNOW—it was over a hundred feet out there. GUARANTEED. I’m even saying one-ten, one-fifteen. And I would go out on a limb and say that some of those waves were one-twenty.”