TOW-SURF LAUNCH. LAIRD HAMILTON AND DARRICK DOERNER IN THE BOAT, BUZZY KERBOX RIDING, NORTH SHORE, 1992.
A motorized solution to huge waves first came up in 1963, when Makaha powerhouse Buzzy Trent suggested that “the surfer might be towed into the wave much like a waterskier.” In 1975, a few older North Shore vets, including Flippy Hoffman and Ricky Grigg, were towed into some midsized waves at Kaena Point and Sunset behind a friend’s Boston Whaler. Alec Cooke and Mark Foo also gave the idea some thought. With a running start, Cooke mused, you’d be “flying down the line [before] the wave starts to pitch . . . matching speed with the wave.”
In 1987, Herbie Fletcher used a modified Kawasaki 550 Jet Ski and a long nylon tow rope to guide a handful of world-tour pros into some towering Second Reef beauties at Pipeline. Watching from the beach, North Shore lifeguard Mark Cunningham said it was like “seeing something from the future.” But Fletcher’s idea didn’t catch on. Most surfers hated personal watercraft (which came to be known simply as PWCs, or skis), and they had ever since Fletcher began hot-rodding across waves near his Southern California home in the mid-seventies. The PWC was loud, smoky, bad-smelling, and left a trail of unburned fuel in its wake. More than that, surfers were proud of their sport’s innate simplicity—that it was by and large composed of nothing more than waves and a light, portable, nonmechanized board. As a recreational tool, the PWC stood for everything surfing wasn’t.
Australian surf journalist Derek Hynd was also on the beach at Pipeline in 1987, when Fletcher and the ASP pros were buzzing around Second Reef, and he captured the inherent conflict of tow surfing. It looked “funner than a day at Magic Mountain,” he wrote. It also seemed as if the surfers had “prostituted themselves.”
In late 1992, retired world-tour surfer and Ralph Lauren model Buzzy Kerbox looped a waterski tow line to the back of his new Zodiac inflatable boat and invited fellow Hawaiians Laird Hamilton and Darrick Doerner out to a little-surfed break called Backyards, just east of Sunset Beach, where they took turns motoring each other into some fifteen-footers. It was the first time any of them had tried tow surfing, and they quickly established a routine. The Zodiac driver circled slowly, about two hundred yards past the lineup, with the rider already standing on his board, holding the rope while being pulled. When a likely-looking wave rolled in, the driver aimed for shore and gunned it, matching the wave’s speed. About fifty yards beyond where a conventional surfer would begin paddling, the rider dropped the rope and was off to a gliding thirty-mile-per-hour start. The boat then veered off to the shoulder and kept pace. When the ride was over, the surfer dashed toward the boat, grabbed the rope, and was quickly towed back outside. If the right wave came along, he was off and running again just two or three minutes after the last ride ended.
Tow surfing caught on this time around. The photos of the Backyards sessions were astounding. Also, Kerbox, Doerner, and Hamilton raved about the experience, and they carried enough weight to blunt any criticism. Kerbox had been the highest-ranked American pro for two years running in the late 1970s; California-born Doerner was a consensus pick as the world’s best big-wave rider; and Hamilton, while never an ASP competitor, had been out-surfing the top pros on the North Shore for years. Kerbox and Doerner were in their midthirties, Hamilton was twenty-seven, and all three were tired of doing battle against crowds that grew bigger with each passing year. As Doerner recalled, their original motivation with tow surfing was to find a way to ditch the mob: “I’ve been surfing the North Shore for twenty years, and I don’t want to be part of the zoo anymore. I just want to go way out there and ride with my friends.”
The advantages were enormous. By motoring out to breaks that generally weren’t suited to traditional surfing, Doerner and his friends indeed beat the crowd. They also caught ten times as many waves per session. No energy was wasted on paddling; everything got put into the ride itself. Getting caught inside was nearly impossible, as the Zodiac, if it had to, could turn around and race ahead of the wave, toward the channel.
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After just two or three sessions, it was obvious to Kerbox and his friends that they had in fact reinvented big-wave riding. At that point the tow project took on a new urgency. By late 1993, the PWC—specifically, the brutish 650cc Yamaha Wave Runner III—had replaced Kerbox’s Zodiac as a power source. Also, they changed the base of operation from the North Shore to Maui, with an eye toward a thunderous cliff-fronted break called Jaws, located a few miles from the sailboarding capital of Hookipa.
Jaws made its surf-world debut a few months before Mark Foo died at Maverick’s. Of the two breaks, Jaws was marginally less terrifying, just for being set in the tropics. (Mainland big-wave riders loved visiting Hawaii, but the feeling wasn’t reciprocated. “You’re reduced to nothing over there,” one Oahu surfer said after riding Maverick’s for the time. “First there’s the fog, so I can’t see. Pretty soon it’s so cold I can’t feel anything. You lose all your senses.”) Jaws breaks less often than Maverick’s, Waimea, or Todos Santos, and the water surface can easily be turned into a meringue of whitecaps by Maui’s renowned valley-funneled offshore winds. An entire winter season can pass without Jaws hitting peak form.
Under the right conditions, though, it produces a classically perfect wave. Unlike Waimea, which is front-loaded and short, or the weirdly lurching rights at Maverick’s, the wave at Jaws is long, tapered, and hollow from start to finish. Of all the world’s big-wave spots, only Jaws would still be considered A-grade even if miniaturized to normal size. More to the point, when the tow-in pioneers assembled in Maui in 1993, Jaws’ upper limit extended well beyond that of any charted break at the time. How big? Jaws was still a largely unrevealed spot—nobody really knew just how much size it could handle. Half-again bigger than Waimea, at least. Maybe double.
A second tow-in breakthrough, nearly as important as the PWC itself, was the creation of a new kind of big-wave surfboard. Up to now, paddle speed had always been the primary design objective. With paddling scratched from the equation, all that mattered was riding performance. To that end, Laird Hamilton and his shapers came up with a new design—modeled in large part on wave-riding sailboards—that was radically smaller, narrower, and thinner. The idea was to get the board sitting low enough in the water that the ride could be directed and controlled, even at maximum speed. Weight was added for stability. To give the board more “stick,” the midsection rails were made nearly parallel, and the rocker was brought down until the bottom was nearly flat. Footstraps were bolted on, which allowed the surfer to stay connected while flying over bumps and ridges. The straps also doubled the surfer’s leveraging power during turns. After a few years of refinement, the standard tow board was about 7 feet 6 inches long, 16 inches wide, 2 inches thick, and 25 pounds.
With its reduced size, pinched outline, and clunky nylon footstraps, the tow board looked like something whanged together from leftover bits of surfboard, snowboard, and sailboard—it had none of the pure aesthetic beauty of a traditional big-wave board. For instance, in 1988, Surfer ran a photo essay called “Gun Club,” in which fifty notable big-wave riders individually posed with their favorite board. Each man threw a proud arm around his long, slender, graceful board and looked into the camera like a high schooler who’d hit the jackpot on prom night. The tow board would never be so adoringly flaunted and displayed.
Yet nothing in the sport’s history, including the short-board revolution, represented a more radical design leap. Survival had always been the goal of big-wave surfing. On the new boards, with a motorized start, the wipeout rate was reduced by 75 percent, and the huge up-tilting wave field was now open to high-velocity turns and cyclonic tuberiding. There was a big increase in speed. Those elliptical trough-to-crest moves allowed the tow surfer to cover a lot more ground than his paddle-in counterparts. Thirty miles per hour was the top end for a surfer at places like Waimea and Makaha; at Jaws it was pushed to forty mph.
“You can’t even fuckin’ believe the sp
eed,” Darrick Doerner rhapsodized, early in the tow era. “And the distance. The wall stretches out a mile long in front of you. The wave is twice as big as Waimea, and five times better. Fifty-yard bottom turns. Fifty-yard top turns. Close your eyes and mind-surf that, man. It’s a totally different world out there.”
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The tow surfers set new big-wave height records continually. On the smoothest big swell of the year at Jaws in late 1993, Laird Hamilton rode three or four waves that were maybe a shade smaller than Greg Noll’s benchmark thirty-footer in 1969. In 1994, three days before Mark Foo’s death at Maverick’s, a brick-shaped Maui regularfooter named Dave Kalama—already a legend among sailboarders as the first person to land a forward loop—charged across a Jaws monster that was five or ten feet bigger than Noll’s wave. For the next few years, Hamilton, Doerner, and Kalama took turns as the surfer who’d ridden the biggest wave—although nobody claimed the title as such. This just wasn’t done, and it never had been. Noll himself had spent the past thirty years carefully avoiding any “biggest ever” declarations for his Makaha wave.
In 1998, at a North Shore break called Outside Log Cabins, forty-five-year-old silverback Ken Bradshaw found himself riding a wave so big that it blew a fuse on the sport’s wave-height measuring scale. According to the new tow-in performance standard, Bradshaw’s ride wasn’t especially radical: a gliding drop, a careful turn off the bottom, one midface swoop, then an easy cruise to the channel. But at the peak moment, just as Bradshaw leaned into his first turn, the wave’s trough-to-crest height was in the neighborhood of seventy feet. It was mind-boggling. The ride had been captured on videotape, blurry but legible. Surfers everywhere hit “pause” on the VCR, estimated that Bradshaw himself was crouched down to about five feet, and with that unit measurement did the math. Seventy feet. At least.
LAIRD HAMILTON.
The big-wave cognoscenti, using the old “Hawaiian scale,” had so far refused to ID any wave height greater than thirty-five feet. They didn’t budge to acknowledge Bradshaw’s Log Cabins ride, either—but people were beginning to sound a little defensive at all the size-shrinking. “You can’t even say how big it is at that point,” Dave Kalama shrugged. “After twenty-five feet it’s all just ridiculous.”
Bradshaw’s wave was still reverberating the following March when a panel of judges met in Newport Beach to pick a winner for the K2 Big-Wave Challenge—a $50,000 winner-take-all event, where each competitor submitted a photo of himself on what he hoped would be declared the year’s biggest ridden wave. Only paddle-in surfers were eligible. Traditional big-wave riding hadn’t gone out of fashion with the advent of tow surfing. Dropping into a huge wave without assistance remained the sport’s greatest challenge, and the K2 event honored that. However, judges not only had to select a winner, but offer their best collective estimate as to the wave size for each of the six finalists. And the numbers couldn’t be downplayed, cooler-than-thou, Hawaiian-style throwaways. Contest officials wanted a genuine base-to-peak appraisal.
World-tour pro Taylor Knox won the K2 Challenge for riding a Todos Santos wave precisely identified at fifty-two feet. From that point on, in giant surf at least, two forms of measurement were used. Big-wave pros themselves mostly continued to describe waves at about half their actual size. K2-style competitions, and a small number of surf journalists, used what Surfer editor Sam George coined the “face value” system.
“There’s Laird, and There’s the Rest of US”
Tow surfing required practiced, high-functioning teamwork—a concept as new to the sport as pistons and footstraps. Equipment ideas were shared. New techniques were openly discussed. Partnerships were formed, usually based on joint PWC ownership, and the two surfers traded off driving chores. Intricate maneuvers were practiced: the tow-in itself, the reconnection in the channel—drivers learned to do pickups on the fly, so the surfer often remained on his feet from one ride to the next—and the snatch-and-grab impact zone rescue after a wipeout. Tow surfing went as far as it did, as fast as it did, in large part because it was a team effort.
Bradshaw, Doerner, Kalama, and another dozen tow-in originals, in just a few years’ time, moved almost as a unit into the deeper reaches of Foo’s “unridden realm,” yet never for a moment was tow surfing thought of as a project of equals. “There’s Laird,” one Jaws regular put it, “and there’s the rest of us.”
The adopted son of longboard icon Bill Hamilton, Laird was raised in a total-immersion surfing environment, first on the North Shore, then on Kauai. Even without a blood tie, father and son looked alike and surfed alike—except Bill was of medium build, while Laird, through genetic good luck and brutal daily workouts, was six foot three and weighed a muscle-packed 220 pounds. He was a leading North Shore power surfer in the mid- and late-1980s, as elegant in motion as he was indestructible. He was also ambitious and competitive, but recognized early on that he was too big, and too unwilling to grub around in beachbreak waves, to make a serious run on the world tour. Hamilton instead out-gnarled everyone—mostly in the surf, but he could pick up an adrenaline fix nearly anywhere. To make a downhill skateboard-luge run more interesting, he took off head first, instead of feet first. He broke a rib and coughed blood after a 125-foot cliff leap into a pool of water, then went back three weeks later and did it again. Risk and danger weren’t always involved. Hamilton’s favorite summer workout was to yoke himself like a draft horse to a huge piece of driftwood, then spend an hour dragging it up and down the beach.
In the mid-2000s, Hamilton also became the point man for stand-up paddleboarding—or “beachboy surfing”—a new-old variation on the sport where the rider uses a long single-blade paddle to drive a huge tandem-sized board while standing the whole time. In the stand-up paddleboard craze that followed, most people went for long flat-water paddles or glided their way across tiny waves. Hamilton did, too. Of course, he also powered his enormous craft into churning twelve-foot barrels.
LAIRD HAMILTON, JAWS, 1995.
Hamilton could be funny, generous, or contemplative as the mood struck, but he was as a rule gruff and domineering and ferociously intense. “The grinding stone knows only one thing,” he told writer Dan Duane in a flat voice. “To grind.” As a teenager, he fought constantly. As an adult, he broke both hands from punching walls. He had legions of admirers, and dozens of partners and associates, but few close friends, and perhaps none whom he met on equal terms. As Hamilton often put it, the yardstick he’d grown up with was to “be a man”—which he took to mean the toughest surfer in the neighborhood, the island, the world—and that seemed to preclude male closeness.
If Hamilton, as The Surfer’s Journal carefully worded it in 1997, was “not a particularly well-liked man” among his peers, he was by far the most respected. When he went aggressively shorter with his tow boards in 1993, the idea of riding a seven-footer in huge waves seemed as logical as playing baseball with a yardstick instead of a bat. And with his feet strapped into a wide, stable, open-knee stance, he quickly owned every new big-wave performance marker. Nobody turned harder or ran higher along the cornice. Nobody disappeared further back inside the tube. “He can flow with the power,” fellow big-wave surfer Brock Little said. “But he can also just screw with it. He’ll challenge a giant wave, just growl back. The rest of us just try to ride it.” Another surfer described Hamilton in five words: “Big and crazy. Perfect timing.”
Hamilton did for big-wave riding what Kelly Slater did for performance surfing. Slater was the bigger star, but Hamilton wasn’t far behind, and both rode their celebrity to a place well beyond that of any surfer before them. National Geographic put Hamilton on the cover, as did Outside. He did ads for American Express. He was a guest on the David Letterman show. Because Hamilton never won any official titles or awards, the way Slater did, there was some confusion as to how to present him. In a single Men’s Journal article, he was described as the “greatest big-wave surfer of all time,” “the greatest surfer ever,” and the “world’
s greatest athlete.” He was certainly the world’s most innovative surfer. Just as he’d done with tow-in, Hamilton led the way in kiteboarding, foilboarding, and stand-up paddleboarding.
Critics spoke out against tow surfing. The “cheating” argument was made; writer and former world-tour pro Dave Parmenter memorably compared it to hunting rhinos while strapped into a safari pursuit truck. Tow-in was also believed to be a lot easier than traditional big-wave surfing. San Francisco big-wave rider Mark Renneker likened the tow-in surfer to a circus clown who gets shot from a cannon. Environmentally, Hamilton and the rest of the tow surfers clearly didn’t have a leg to stand on. When confronted, they just shrugged, or shot out self-justifying one-liners, as when Darrick Doerner said, “The ocean is made for pistons.”
In the end, none of the anti-tow-in arguments gained any real traction, and this was mostly due to Laird Hamilton. He and the other tow-in pioneers wisely chose to present their new form of the sport not as an extension or replacement of traditional big-wave surfing but as an alternative. True enough, with each passing year it was more obvious that tow surfing—especially as practiced by Hamilton—was in fact a separate discipline. It would only ever be taken up by a tiny number of surfers; as of 2009, there were still less than a hundred serious tow-in partnerships worldwide. It would also be performed almost entirely in conditions that were entirely out of bounds for paddle-in riders. The unwritten rule was, and still is, that tow-in surfers had to remain on the sidelines as long as paddle-in surfers were still riding.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that the arguments against tow surfing never resonated with wave-riders in general. It had become the sport’s own Apollo program, and Hamilton was its Neil Armstrong. There would be a minority who believed tow surfing was a betrayal to surfing’s core values. But everyone else couldn’t help but look on with awe and fascination.
The History of Surfing Page 68