Ghost Wave

by Chris Dixon

  Fifteen minutes later, the LORAN seemed to indicate that the Black Watch was still on a correct approach to Bishop Rock, but the team still saw no breaking waves. Had they entered an incorrect course heading? Was the swell too small?

  “It’s gotta be out here,” Flame said, nervously staring through binoculars from the boat’s upper platform like a sailor on the Pequod. “It’s just gotta be.”

  Off the bow a few miles distant, weird ripples, a glint of sunlight, and a wisp of mist grabbed Sharp and George’s attention. A surfacing whale? A gap in the swells gave a full view as another humpbacked shape breached in the same spot—followed by geysers of offshore spray. “It’s a wave,” Sharp yelled. “Thar she breaks!”

  Flame began to unpack his camera gear, a flashbulb smile lighting the deepest creases of his face.

  “It was just the most fantastic feeling,” Sam George says today. “We had found Flame’s Moby Dick.”

  Within a few miles, they spotted Bishop Rock’s swaying warning buoy—Flame figured it was the same one he had seen from the air—and set a course that soon put them within earshot of what seemed the loneliest bell on the face of the planet. The tiny man-made island was laden with guano and inhabited by an argumentative posse of eight or nine sea lions. Sharp realized with shock that the buoy was big—maybe twenty-five feet tall. In the photographs, the white water from the broken waves completely buried the buoy, and thus must have been 40 to 50 feet high—bigger than any Flame had ever photographed. Yet that meant when the waves first broke, they would have been perhaps twice that high—bigger than anything anyone on board had ever imagined. What was this place?

  Sets of waves appeared to the northeast of the buoy. Sharp approached the edge of the apparent surf zone on pins and needles. “We came up real slow,” he says today. “We had no idea if there would be a rogue wave that might take us out, and so we just putted around for a while and watched. It wasn’t really booming, the sets came every five or ten minutes. But when we finally got close and one rolled through, we were like—whoa, that’s a rideable wave!”

  The breaking waves were glacier blue. Silhouetted against the sky, the mist in their wake lit up like a million tiny shards of rainbow ice. Most of the waves weren’t terribly steep, but they carried a great quantity of watery energy and seemed to approach the Bank at a terrific speed. They rolled, warbled, and peeled for a while and then disappeared back into the deep, continuing their march toward the coast of California. When a bigger one ran over what was obviously a very shallow spot on the reef, it reared up to vertical and threw out a beautiful, almond-eyed barrel. The surfers agreed that they seemed to resemble a cross between Oahu’s Sunset Beach and Pinballs, a righthander that breaks along the inside of Waimea Bay.

  This was going to be an exceedingly difficult place to surf. Every other wave they had ever ridden offered land-based points of reference—a hilltop, a dune, a palm tree, a lighthouse—some landmark that allowed a mental triangulation of position. Out here, it would not only be impossible to figure out where to sit in the water, but the featureless expanse greatly limited depth perception—making it impossible to judge the wave’s size. Find yourself in the wrong spot, and you might be steamrolled and tumbled until you drowned or slammed down onto some nasty pinnacle of reef.

  Hulse remembers, “You just had nothing to tell you where to be or how big the waves were. I was asking myself, is that 30 feet? Should I be writing out my will, too?”

  To everyone’s amazement Bill Sharp produced a bundle of bamboo poles, gallon plastic jugs, dayglo duct tape, and lead fishing weights from the hold and ordered the boys to get to work. “It was ingenious,” says Sam George. “We were going to set a series of our little homegrown buoys to help triangulate a lineup.”

  Today, the surfers have forgotten the name of the Black Watch’s wide-eyed, newly minted skipper, but now they handed him the helm, and Sharp and Flame worked mightily to convince him to reverse into position in the surf zone so the buoys could be laid. Backing in would allow for a fast forward escape should a set of waves lunge in from the deep at twenty-five knots.

  As Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir played over the stereo speakers, the team made fine work of tying the knots for the buoys. But when the roiling boat began to reverse, they inhaled greasy lungfuls of diesel smoke. Suddenly George began to feel queasy. “I thought, What’s wrong with me?” he says. “Then it hit me. Oh my God, I’m getting seasick.”

  George ran belowdecks to grab his wetsuit, the first waves of nausea washing over him. He would fight the seasickness by jumping into the bracing fifty-five-degree water. But in the cabin, as is the usual case, the feeling only intensified. George zipped up his suit, grabbed his surfboard, and leapt over the gunwale, simultaneously and spectacularly spewing his breakfast into the deep blue sea.

  The buoys stayed anchored, offering the surfers a point of reference and a measure of relief. When the next set of four or five waves broke, they showed that the surf was perhaps twelve to fifteen feet from top to bottom. It wasn’t gargantuan, and hopefully someone might actually be able to ride one. But that someone would not be George. He lay on his back, prostrate on his board, and staring up at the sky semidelirious, while the California current carried him south at one and a half knots. Sharp eyed his fellow editor with at least a small measure of concern, but he knew that George had been in worse positions, and besides Flame had taken a position on deck with his camera. He’d at least glance at George occasionally.

  “He’ll be back in a minute,” Hulse said. “Let’s get out there.”

  Sharp and Hulse leapt over the side and immediately started paddling across the two-hundred-yard gap between the boat and the wave. The freezing water seeped through the seams in their wetsuits, inducing an involuntary shudder, and the sounds of boat and buoy quickly faded into a strange, muffled silence so complete they seemed to have entered a cave. That is, until the first wave of the next set blurred the horizon just ahead and its concussion split the air like an artillery shell, vibrating the beads of water on the decks of their boards. This was the strangest paddle they had ever made.

  A jumpy Sharp kept telling himself not to turn around. He explains, “Surfers are used to looking out to the endless sea, but when you turn around you expect to see the shore. When it’s not there, it’s instantly disconcerting. Then you’d start to look down, and you realize you don’t want to do that either. The water was this deep cobalt blue. You could see thirty, forty feet down into the kelp, where you knew there were sharks the size of submarines. It was just so surreal.”

  “You gotta understand something,” Sam George says. “There was no shorebreak, no white water between sets. Nothing. It was silent and flat as a lake. Then these waves come in. It was like the scene from Jaws where the shark would come up and scare Chief Brody and then slide back down in the water.”

  Sharp and Hulse triangulated using their homemade buoys and took a position just to the east of a spot of water that boiled and surged ominously with the passage of smaller swells. You saw boils like this at most big wave spots. It meant the water was swirling around and through caves, boulders, or some other big obstacle. If you crossed one during a hard turn, your surfboard could slide out from beneath you like a snow ski hitting a patch of ice. A sea lion popped up a few feet outside, taking in one of the more bizarre sights in its open-ocean life and inducing a whimper in an already edgy Hulse. As it dove, a wave lurched in—an azure lump about the size of an Olympic swimming pool. They paddled over it and hooted. Another followed immediately in its wake, and another.

  “All the things you’re used to doing: taking in a lineup from the beach, measuring how far you’ve paddled according to the beach, duck diving, sitting on the outside because of a crowd—all the things you measure waves by—not one of those things was there,” says Hulse. “And you could not see the approaching waves very well—you had to use the top of the first wave just to see the second wave. It just lifted up right in front of you. And everything wa
s in motion—the boat and the buoys—everything. I remember just sitting out there after the set passed and thinking, We’re in another world.”

  As if to punctuate the unreality of the morning, the stillness was suddenly shattered by a deep roar. Sharp first mistook it for an undersea earthquake. “A-10 Warthogs,” he says. “Tankbusters. These military jets came roaring in, like twenty feet off the water and tipped their wings and turned past us. We could see the pilots clearly, and I was thinking, Man, those guys are crazy. But then, they were probably looking down, too, and saying what the hell are those crazy guys doing down there?”

  Sitting in the water, Hulse turned to Sharp and said, “I think we’re just going to have to see one break, get to that spot, and catch the next one. Just go for it, and see what happens.”

  As if on cue, the horizon darkened again. Hulse paddled over the first wave, using the point where it had crested and a particularly big boil to line up for the second. Then, raw instinct took over. He grabbed the outer edges of his 8-foot 3-inch board, sunk the tail vertically, and then, using the boost of his board’s buoyancy, scissor-kicked and whipped around 180 degrees to launch himself in the direction of an imaginary shoreline while immediately windmilling his arms. To lasso a swell moving at twenty-five to thirty knots, you need at least five knots of self-generated velocity—preferably more. The wave overtook Hulse a few short seconds later and angled him straight down a rapidly steepening foothill. Acceleration was instantaneous, and the smooth fiberglass base of his board rose to a plane. With two final explosive strokes to seal the deal, Hulse leapt straight to his feet, immediately placing most of his weight on his back leg. This prevented the board from nose-diving and allowed for a quick, sharp turn to his right. He angled hard off the bottom of the wave, unwittingly allowing his right hand to skim along the mirror surface. He rocketed along, staying just ahead of a maelstrom of white water gnashing at his heels. George Hulse was surfing at the Cortes Bank.

  “It wasn’t a heavy, adrenaline wave,” Hulse recalls. “But there was definitely this feeling of incredible speed—of how quickly you were moving down the Bank—like moving down a conveyor belt. I guess because the waves were coming out of the open ocean.”

  In fact, the waves were moving around 50 percent faster than even comparable waves at Todos Santos or spots along Oahu’s infamous North Shore.

  Hulse carved and swooped and S-turned for a couple hundred yards. After passing the boat, he kicked out, amazed at how far the wave had carried him along Bishop Rock’s shallow perimeter. Sharp scratched into the very next wave and rode nearly as far.

  Hulse paddled over to Flame, not sure what to make of the ride. The wave had been astonishingly fast—faster than anything he’d ever ridden at a comparable size. Hulse only wished it had been steeper and more critical, which would have given the world’s most demanding surf photographer a more radical shot. But Flame looked as happy as a clam. “You got it,” he said, offering a big high five before Hulse paddled back out to the lineup.

  Triumph was soon overshadowed by alarm. A set of waves marched onto the reef far outside and bore down. They were impossible to catch and would be impossible for the surfers to avoid. Flame’s captain gunned the boat’s engine and ran for deeper water just off to the west of the peak, while instinct again took over for Sharp and Hulse. Being caught inside involved the same drill whether you were a hundred miles out to sea or at Waimea Bay. They took three or four short, shallow breaths to fill their bloodstreams with oxygen, cast their boards to the side, eyeballed the craggy bottom and dove deep, saying a little prayer that the thin urethane leashes that bound ankle to surfboard would hold.

  The first drubbing was lengthy but not as severe as they feared, a fact Sharp attributed to the deep water beneath the waves. After about twenty seconds in a violent spin cycle, each surfer corked to the surface with lifelines still attached and eyes wide open. Yet when the next wave came and the cycle repeated, Sharp had a panicked recollection. The chart guide had indicated a shipwreck right here. Maybe he was somersaulting right above it. He and Hulse were tumbled and spun down the reef, a good hundred yards farther inside from where they started. Another came. Eyes open, Sharp dove for the black bottom—he decided it was better to find what was down there on his own than to meet it involuntarily. With the churning foam, though, he couldn’t see a damn thing. When the fourth wave had at last spent its energy, he and Hulse sputtered to the surface, reeled in their boards, and paddled back to the lineup, quaking with adrenaline.

  Three or four more midsize sets offered up a few more rides in the ensuing twenty or so minutes, and then the conveyor belt simply, inexplicably shut down. The most likely explanation was that the tide had risen too high for the swell to break.

  Sharp and Hulse returned to the boat in silence while the truth sunk in. They had surfed the Cortes Bank on the smallest wave it was capable of producing. If a swell was any smaller, it would simply roll over the Bishop Rock without breaking. A swell even five feet bigger, with ten or fifteen waves per set, would present a frightful, perhaps unconquerable challenge—at least given the current state of technology. Not only would the swirling water make it incredibly difficult to position yourself to catch a wave, but the biggest waves would break so far out that the surfers would face deadly walls of smothering white water and a trip to the bottom. Cortes Bank wasn’t just a secret big wave spot. It was a big wave spot that only broke at a minimum of 15 feet. The surfers were left to speculate about the maximum wave height Cortes Bank could generate. If the photos Flame took in January were any indication, this might be the biggest wave on Earth.

  “You know, even at that relatively small size, it was beyond any scale of any surf spot I have ever seen—like something out of Waterworld.” Sharp says. “It was obvious to me that paddling into a really big wave out there was going to be incredibly difficult. But God, the potential. If it had been even 40 percent bigger, we would have gotten our clocks cleaned. There was a kind of recognition that if you went and tried to paddle out on a big day, you would die for sure.”

  George and Sharp were itching to tell their readers the story of their first sighting of surfing’s great white whale. But when the Black Watch reached Newport Harbor early the next morning, Flame faced everyone and said, “Look, I want this mission kept secret.” He was already planning a return with a crew of A-list big wave surfers in a bigger swell—little did he know that that mission would not happen for better than a decade.

  “You can just imagine the angst,” says Sharp. “Sam and I basing our entire lives around sharing these experiences with the entire world. To have gone out and done this landmark thing—but we can’t tell anyone.”

  George laughs. “Bill and I have the two of the loudest voices in surf history, and we said nothing.”

  George Hulse, December 1990, on what was long thought to be the first wave paddled into at Cortes Bank with Bill Sharp paddling on the shoulder. “There was definitely this feeling of incredible speed—of how quickly you were moving down the Bank—like moving down a conveyor belt,” said Hulse. “I guess because the waves were coming out of the open ocean.” Photo: Larry “Flame” Moore/A Frame Photo.

  Chapter 2:

  ONCE

  UPON

  AN ISLAND

  “Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.”

  —Ishmael, from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, 1851

  Is it possible that what drives big wave surfers to hunt their quarry at Cortes Bank—a dangerous, monstrous confluence in the open ocean beyond human reference or scale—resembles the impulse that drove the first people to ever visit it? We can’t know. Evidence of the very first people to settle along the Southern California coast ten thousand years ago is modest, and written accounts of their culture are virtually nonexistent. It may be that no ancestor of California’s indigenous peoples ever set foot on Cortes Bank, but it would have been possible. And if
big wave surfers are any guide, if it was possible, no matter how difficult, it’s likely that someone tried. Until it was steadily submerged by the slowly melting glaciers of the last ice age, Cortes Bank was an island, and we know just enough about the region’s original inhabitants that we can speculate what a voyage to it may have been like.

  In constructing this imagined journey to the ancient Cortes Island, I am deeply indebted to the following researchers: oceanographers Gary Greene and Rikk Kvitek; geologists Judith and Paul Porcasi; archaeologists Roy Salis, Ellis T. Hardy, Collin O’Neill, Andrew Yatsko, Clement Meighan, Michele D. Titus, and Philip L. Walker.

  Around ten thousand years ago, seafaring peoples established a permanent community on what is today known as San Clemente Island, around sixty miles west of the mainland town of San Clemente. These original inhabitants probably called their island home Kinkingna or Kinkipar, and they were the ancestors of contemporary Tongva and Chumash Indians in Southern California. Their home was an arid, twenty-one-mile-long volcanic uplift whose dinosaurian spine remains easily visible from the mainland and winks like a mysterious beacon for wave-hungry surfers along the crowded California shoreline.