The Wave

by Susan Casey

  Such grandiose plans delighted many big-wave surfers and rankled others. Hamilton, who had spent more time thinking about tow-surfing gear and rescue procedures than anyone (not to mention stunt-doubled for 007 himself, surfing sixty-foot Jaws in Die Another Day), was foremost among the latter group. To him Sharp’s vision amounted to a craven media play made for all the wrong reasons. “This one-hundred-foot-wave thing,” he said. “I resent it. The intentions were never truly genuine. It was always about ‘How can I exploit this?’ and ‘How can we maximize our marketing dollars?’ ”

  Hamilton’s irritations were compounded by the fact that, in the contest’s early days, far from scouring the world for new waves, whenever a big swell came along, everyone headed straight for the sure thing: Jaws. “In 2002,” Hamilton recalled, grimacing, “they all came out of the woodwork. There was more wiping out in one day than there had been in ten years. I watched a guy lose two brand-new Jet Skis in less than five minutes. After that, on any big swell we were like, ‘Hey, the crash test dummies are here!’ They’ve pulled up a truck full of them and they’ve sent ’em out. Crash, crash, crash—‘send the next ones in!’ Crash, crash, crash. ‘Okay, send the next ones!’ ”

  As hordes of marginally qualified bounty seekers poured into Jaws, tempers frayed to the point where Dave Kalama, encountering Sharp at an event called the Waterman’s Ball, expressed his frustration physically. “It was at the time when he was claiming everything, like ‘I’m the big-wave blah blah blah,’ ” Kalama said, describing the incident. “I saw him at the bar and I went, ‘Hey Bill, come here. I want to talk to you.’ So he walks over and he goes, ‘Oh, hey Dave, how’s it going?’ and I said, ‘Good.’ ” At which point Kalama reached for Sharp’s outstretched hand and instead of shaking it, folded him into a headlock. “And I said, ‘You represent everything I hate about big-wave surfing.’ ”

  Things had mellowed in recent years, most likely due to the fact that there hadn’t been any big days at Jaws for people to fight about. Sharp had adopted a lower profile, making fewer hyperbolic claims. But hell would still have to sprout icicles before Hamilton, Kalama, Lickle, Emory, or Doerner would ever show up on the XXL red carpet. “I’d rather clean toilets. I’d rather step on a nail—a big, fat, rusty one—and then have to get the fifteen-year tetanus shot,” Hamilton said, listing things he would rather do than stroll down Billabong’s floodlighted stretch of velvet rope lined with photo blowups of the year’s nominated waves; occupied on this night by clusters of men in surfer black tie—dark jeans, dark T-shirts, the occasional sport jacket—flanked by young women in as little as possible.

  It was a surf-industry night out, a convivial frat house where the mark of inclusion was to be known by your nickname. “Yo, Rippy!” one attendee yelled. “Shasta—wassup!” Many of those strolling into the theater wore sunglasses, even as darkness settled and the royal palms that flanked the entrance became noble silhouettes. Camera crews roamed, documenting the event for an eventual ESPN2 program and a live webcast. Bill Sharp was omnipresent, clad in head-to-toe black, his tall frame and spiky white hair making him easily visible as he circulated.

  One of the red-carpet interviewers, a striking blonde in her twenties, held out her microphone to a young man in wraparound shades. She welcomed him to the event and asked his name. “My name is Rat,” he said, revealing with his first words a state of deep inebriation. “I just got out of jail,” he added in a celebratory tone, “and I’m totally good.” The interviewer, looking flummoxed, turned away, while the cameraman suddenly cut to a trash can. “Hey, get your ass back here!” Rat yelled as they retreated.

  By eight p.m. most of the nominees had emerged from the pink and black Billabong tour bus parked out front and could be seen milling around beside their photographs, doing video interviews. A delighted-looking twenty-one-year-old Australian named Mikey Brennan, nominated for both Monster Tube and Ride of the Year, talked about his home wave, Shipsterns Bluff, a seething slab off the Tasmanian coast, with a Billabong interviewer nicknamed G.T. “I live there, so I’m always there,” Brennan explained. “It’s nice to surf there, especially when there’s waves.”

  “Well, trust me, mate,” G.T. informed him, spotlights glinting off his sunglasses. “There are a few girls here who will want to meet you, especially if you win.”

  You had to root for Brennan, with his tousled mop of hair and mouthful of braces, but he had some serious competition: Shane Dorian, fresh off the plane from Fiji; Ian Walsh, in from Maui; and Tahitian star Manoa Drollet. All three men were up against Brennan for their performances at Teahupoo the previous October. Brazilian rider Carlos Burle was the fifth finalist in the Ride of the Year category, for a wave at Ghost Tree, on December 4.

  A few yards farther along the red carpet, Garrett McNamara stood surrounded by well-wishers. “I’m on my way for a monthlong mission somewhere,” he said and, when asked for specifics, responded: “That information can’t be disclosed yet.” Tonight McNamara was nominated for the season’s Best Overall Performance, and also Wipeout of the Year, for a head drop he’d taken at Mavericks. Right behind him, Brad Gerlach described his December 4 experience at Ghost Tree for a video crew. “It was foggy and weird,” he said. “But God, what an exciting wave. It’s fun because it’s so scary.” He laughed. “Well, it’s more fun when you’re done riding.” In the background, clusters of surf fans drank beer and cans of citrus-flavored Monster, spiked with vodka.

  Looking at the posters of the nominees, it was clear that the 2007–8 big-wave season had produced an excellent crop. Giant waves had raged from Tahiti to the Basque Country, from Oregon to Mexico to Ireland to Spain to Tasmania to South Africa. Hawaii, as always, had its moments. California was surreal. “The first five days of December were possibly the best five days in the history of big-wave surfing,” Sharp proclaimed. This year’s winners had been chosen from about five hundred entries, each of them scrutinized by judges who used protractors and other measuring tools to gauge the waves’ height.

  As the crowd began to filter inside for the ceremony, G.T. and his cameraman stopped a woman with blond hair rippling down her back, wearing a black minidress. This was Maya Gabeira, a twenty-one-year-old Brazilian and the leading contender for the dismayingly named Girl’s Best Performance award. This year Gabeira had ridden all the biggest swells, turning heads with her beauty and her dauntless pursuit of waves that terrified most male tow surfers.

  “You’ve been a busy little lady,” G.T. said greasily. “Are you single?”

  Gabeira graciously ignored him and began to speak about her season in a lilting Brazilian accent. “I spent most of the winter between Hawaii and California. Then I—” G.T. cut her off. “You’re so hot,” he said. His hands swam through the air, gesturing at her. “How can you be so feminine and ride big waves?” Gabeira flinched backward and disappeared into the crowd as quickly as possible.

  Delivery aside, the question was an interesting one. While the women’s professional surfing tour was filled with contenders, there was an undeniable shortage of female tow surfers. In fact, as a team rider for both Billabong and Red Bull, Gabeira was one of a kind. Her two fellow big-wave nominees, Jamilah Star and Jenny Useldinger, both with talent and guts to spare, focused on paddle surfing rather than towing. Neither woman had attained Gabeira’s level of sponsorship.

  I’d met Gabeira in Tahiti, where I watched her take two life-threatening wipeouts on Teahupoo, dust herself off, and head right back out there. Towed by Raimana Van Bastolaer and her mentor, Carlos Burle, with Hamilton patrolling the sidelines, she went on to ride four waves in the same conditions that had also gotten Dorian, McNamara, Walsh, and Drollet nominated tonight.

  As far as big-wave careers go, Gabeira’s had followed a steep and improbable trajectory. When she learned to surf at the (relatively advanced) age of fourteen: “I was scared of one-foot waves. It was challenging just to be in the ocean. So when I accepted the fact that I was able to surf one-foot waves, I went to tw
o-foot waves and then three-foot waves. I’ve kept going until now.” There were dozens of reasons why she might not have succeeded, but Gabeira had at least one advantage: as the daughter of Fernando Gabeira, a famous dissident against Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s who went on to become a crusading politician, she had the right genes. “Yeah, my dad’s crazy,” she told me. “He’s a tough man. Like really, really tough.”

  Despite the accolades that were flooding in, Gabeira knew she had a long way to go before she achieved her goal of being one of the best tow surfers—male or female. She wanted to master Jet Ski driving and rescue techniques. She needed to get out in even larger waves. And she had to reckon with the limitations of the XX chromosome when it came to such intractable things as body mass. “Even as much as I train I’m still not that strong,” she said. “Big waves are already aggressive if you’re paddling in, but when you’re in there with a machine like a Jet Ski—it goes so fast and it’s so heavy—that just makes it in reality a man’s sport. There’s a lot of impact. My body suffers when I do a tow session even in small waves.”

  Determined to change that, Gabeira had recently added Bikram yoga, weights, and mountain biking to her endless surf practice. In the future, she hoped, her example would bring more women to tow surfing. “I don’t know how many years it will take to change,” she said, sounding slightly wistful. “It’s hard, you know, being the only girl. You get a little bit intimidated. The whole lineup, the wave, is dominated by men. You think, ‘Hmmm, can I really do it?’ ”

  Inside the theater a video montage of the year’s noteworthy rides commenced on a giant screen above the stage, forty-five minutes of surfers on megawaves and beach girls in thong bikinis set to a heavy metal beat. People were seated at long tables, a type of supper club arrangement that enabled The Grove to serve its audiences drinks throughout the entire evening. Blue and red lights played in the darkness, and everywhere you looked there was a logo: an XXL stamp or a floating, disembodied M or a nod to Verizon or Surfline or Hawaiian Airlines.

  The video wrapped up and the event’s host, Australian surfer Mark Occhilupo, stepped onto the stage. Compact, with shoulder-length, sandy brown hair and a sly smile, the 1999 world champion was known affectionately as Occy. Standing at the podium, he drew loud, heartfelt cheers. “What a year!” he began in a thick Aussie accent. “This thing’s getting so big. We’re getting entries from all over the planet.” Occy faltered, looking down for a moment. “Um, I just want to say a quick thing with Peter Davi. He was a good friend of mine. I’ll miss him. He was so cool.” A subdued cheer rose up, a collective shaka. Many of the attendees had known Davi too, and as a big-wave surfer who had died in the ocean his name was now inscribed into the sport’s sad pantheon of casualties. “Apart from that,” Occy veered abruptly, “we’re gonna move on to the Monster Tube award. It’s definitely one of my favorite experiences, tube riding. But these guys are fishing with longer poles.”

  Presenting the award was an Australian snowboard announcer known as Dingo, and a pro skateboarder named Rob Dyrdek. Dressed in a green hooded parka, a scarf, a Monster baseball cap, and a huge pair of sunglasses with powder-blue frames, Dingo screamed into the microphone, “You guys are the craziest motherfuckers I ever met!” before opening the envelope and declaring Manoa Drollet the winner. Drollet came up onstage, greeted by two hostesses in miniskirts, stiletto heels, and wraparound smiles who handed him a giant cardboard check for $5,000.

  The festivities rolled on. Wipeout of the Year was awarded and the prize, a Samsung phone, seemed cruelly insubstantial. Gabeira, to no one’s surprise, won her category for the third year in a row. (“Congratulations, Maya,” Occy said as she left the stage. “And grab me a beer, will you?”) Greg Long took the Monster Paddle Wave award for a fifty-one-footer at Todos Santos; he thanked his friends and family for putting up with his “obsessive-compulsive behavior chasing these swells” and apologized to his mom for choosing a big day at Mavericks over Thanksgiving dinner. They didn’t come any more charismatic or talented than Long; only twenty-four, he was already at the top of the game—and still rising. Ten minutes later he also won the Best Overall Performance award.

  The hooting grew louder as the Biggest Wave finalists flashed up on the screen. Ghost Tree had produced two: Gerlach’s ride, and that of another rider named Tyler Fox. Over in France, a wave called Belharra Reef had made surfer Vincent Lartizen a contender. But it was the last two nominations that caused everyone to lean forward in their seats. Both rides had taken place at the Cortes Bank on January 5, 2008, under haunting conditions. Only a handful of photographs existed of these waves and the surfers on them, South African star Twiggy Baker and big-wave veteran Mike Parsons. Not a single frame of video had made it back from the session. When you heard the story of how that day had gone down, you could understand why.

  “I knew it was going to be huge, but I didn’t expect it to be quite that big.” Mike Parsons looked at me across the table of a quaint San Clemente café and took a bite of his sandwich. His face was distinctively angular, his eyes a piercing pale blue set off by his tan. He was tallish and lean, casual in a Billabong T-shirt and jeans. But the most noteworthy thing about Parsons’s presence was that despite his many triumphs, his career longevity, and the respect he commanded in his sport—he gave off a vibe that could only be described as gentle. Experienced tow surfers stressed the importance of humility when faced with the waves’ overwhelming power, but Parsons exuded it even on land. There was zero flash and bluster about him.

  “They were definitely the biggest waves I’ve ever seen,” he continued. “The ocean was just so alive. I mean, we knew it would look spectacular, but the playing field and the amount of chaos and commotion on that reef was amazing. I think there was probably a mile and a half of whitewater out there.”

  The day Parsons was describing, January 5, 2008, was destined to go down in big-wave history as a seat-of-the-pants moon shot in which—somehow—everything went right. Parsons, along with Brad Gerlach, Greg Long, Twiggy Baker, and photographer Rob Brown, had braved one of the ugliest Pacific storms in years, one during which West Coast residents were wary of even leaving their houses, to head out to the submerged mountain range known as the Cortes Bank, one hundred miles offshore from San Diego. After driving a small boat and a Jet Ski for six hours through squalls and heaving seas, they’d spent five spooky, exhilarating hours alone on the bank, ridden seventy- and eighty-foot waves and seen hundred-footers breaking farther up the reef, tantalizingly close but not properly situated to ride. Then, as night fell, they had turned around and spent six more hours gunning home in the dark with another Pacific storm breathing down their necks. When I’d learned about this expedition I was anxious to talk to the men, so I drove to San Clemente, Parsons’s home base, to hear about it in person.

  Back in 2001 Parsons and Gerlach had been the first tow team to ride Cortes in extreme conditions. For years various wave aficionados, including Sean Collins and Bill Sharp, had kept an eye on the place after being tipped off by Larry Moore, the former photo editor of Surfing Magazine, who in turn had heard fishermen marveling at the huge waves they’d seen out there. Throughout the 1980s Moore’s curiosity built to the point where in January 1990, when a promising swell arrived, he’d chartered a plane to fly out and look around. Upon arrival he saw perfect, deep-bellied, fifty-foot waves; 100 percent rideable and utterly unlikely, given that they appeared to be breaking in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

  Below the surface, however, many factors contributed to the existence of what Collins referred to as “one of the Seven Wonders of the World if you’re a surfer.” From the Pacific seafloor five thousand feet down, the underwater mountains that form the bank rise to within six feet of the surface at a spot called Bishop’s Rock. It’s on the same geological spine as the Channel Islands, farther north: Cortes was simply another island in the chain until a few thousand years ago, when the sea level crept higher, slowly drowning it. Emergin
g from the depths, it acts as one long trip wire for swells that have stampeded down from Alaska, focusing wave energy onto the bank like a giant magnifying glass. This refraction is so dramatic that when a swell hits Cortes under the right conditions, it can jack up to quadruple its size (meaning that a twenty-foot swell can churn out eighty-foot waves). The bank’s unique location, surrounded by abyssal waters and with nothing to buffer it from the full force of the open Pacific, made it a top candidate to produce not only a clean one-hundred-foot wave but, according to Collins, “definitely a very good, rideable 150-footer.”

  Surfers described the spot as creepy and otherworldly, and yet it exuded an irresistible pull. “There’s a lot to do out at Cortes,” Hamilton had said, noting its potential. The previous summer he had arranged to have access to an oceangoing jet boat that was moored in Malibu, and I knew he was just waiting for the right time to go. Problem is, the ideal conditions for Cortes came along only once in a blue moon. “You really need a stable environment out there,” Collins explained. “That’s a very hard thing to get for a spot that’s so exposed. You don’t want to be riding a sixty-foot wave and have a thirty-foot wave coming at you from another direction.”

  The submerged bank was twenty miles long—on par with Catalina Island—and with such a wide span of swell and wind directions there were countless wave scenarios. “There are three different takeoff spots depending on the day,” Collins said. “You’ve got swells circling around the reef everywhere and currents going in different directions.” Even if conditions looked pristine to a rider examining buoy readings and weather predictions from shore, one hundred miles out to sea anything could be happening: thick fog, banshee wind, dead calm, sudden squalls. Of the ten times Parsons and Gerlach had made the voyage to Cortes since 2001, they’d scored big on only three occasions. “Once you get past San Clemente Island everything changes,” Parsons said. “It’s almost as though Cortes has its own climate system.”