by Chris Dixon
Ealey spent that winter surfing Waimea. He recalls dropping into mammoth waves alongside Butch Van Artsdalen and Greg Noll. As we talked, he pulled out a big photo of himself sketching into a Waimea bomb next to Buzzy Trent. “Waimea was just scary,” he said. “You stay down, tumble, roll, break the surface, and there’s so much foam just to get through. Then you have to go through another set or two. If you lose your board, you can’t get in. That’s how guys were killed. The current would take them down toward Haleiwa, and they’d find their bodies a few days later amid the coral.”
Another buddy of Mel Fisher’s and the first person known to have surfed the Cortes Bank is Harrison Ealey of Oceanside, California. Ealey reports that he accomplished the feat during the summer of 1962 on a big south swell. Here, Ealey holds up a photo of himself dropping in just inside of Buzzy Trent at Waimea Bay, Hawaii, in 1963. “If I’d never surfed in Hawaii, I would have been scared to death out there,” Ealey said. Photo: Chris Dixon.
When Ealey sailed to and from Hawaii or Mexico, he always made it a point to sail past Cortes Bank during the day. That way, he could avoid the Bank’s shallowest reaches and see if big waves might be breaking above Bishop Rock.
“Sometimes we’d hit big patches of kelp and just go, ‘Whoa,’” he said. “Sometimes you’d see this smoking thing out there. You knew it was big, and just to stay away. When the wind was blowing, you could see this fog cloud from the wave. With the bioluminescence it must have been a beautiful sight at night.”
In the following summer of 1962, Ealey made a passage from Hawaii back to California with a Canadian couple. They reached the Bank in July. Ealey was surprised to find relatively smooth seas, a sizable long period southern hemisphere groundswell, and a beautiful breaking wave. The Canadians were game for a closer look.
“It was glassy,” he said. “Otherwise we wouldn’t have stopped. We anchored in a questionable spot, though, on the backside of the wave. There was a lot of kelp and rock. We didn’t have fishfinders or anything that tells you the depth, and we didn’t find sand. We rehooked and rehooked the anchor and finally caught on something down deep. Then we went snorkeling. The water was so clear. It was just beautiful down there.”
Afterward, Ealey left the Canadians on the boat and decided to paddle his big board around to check out the chilly wave. It was inconsistent, and far from huge, at least by the standards to which he had become accustomed. “I’d been surfing Makaha and Waimea, so it didn’t look scary. But then again, it wasn’t fifty feet either. It looked like it was maybe eight feet. A good-size wave, well overhead. I used the boat to line up. I watched it and watched it before I tried to catch one.”
With his big board and low-key confidence, Ealey stroked into his first wave. It was a long and remarkably fast righthand point break wave that deposited him safely in deep water before continuing on its way to California. He paddled back out, rode a few more, and when the tide began to stir the current, simply paddled back to the boat and pulled anchor.
“If I’d never surfed in Hawaii, I would have been scared to death out there,” Ealey said. “It was the middle of nowhere. But it just wasn’t that big. I mean, sure, I knew something could pop up. I knew it could get big. It was in the back of my head while I was surfing. That’s why we didn’t spend the night there. We went in, anchored, spent four or five hours, and split.”
I asked Ealey why he never told anyone in the surf media about the episode—particularly after the wave burst into the consciousness of the surfing world three decades later. Ealey just shrugged. “I mean, I just wasn’t all that associated with the surfing world. I kind of got away from the group when they became more financially interested in shirts, retail stores, clothing. They went one way and I went the other.”
Ealey never stopped surfing or traveling. At one point while his boat was hauled out for repairs in Miami, he even befriended treasure hunter Mel Fisher.
“I never married either. No one could put up with my lifestyle. I just wasn’t ready for the diaper service and the white picket fence. I mean sailing, surfing, it’s exciting. It’s an adventure. It’s one of the few things left around where you’re totally responsible for your own outcome—except for maybe going across the Mojave with a donkey and a canteen. Everything else is stoplights, or follow the yellow line, or do this but don’t do that. Surfing’s one of the few things left.”
The circle of sailors, divers, and surfers was relatively small during Ealey’s heyday from the 1950s into the 1970s. Smaller still was the troupe of hard-core watermen who included Cortes Bank in their perambulations, either to satisfy a jones for serious free diving or to provide a nice, if terrifying living spearfishing or harvesting abalone in the middle of the deep blue sea. One of these was an Aussie who once crewed with Harrison Ealey named Rex Bank. When Bank wasn’t sailing, he would don a deep-sea drysuit and pry abalone off the seafloor off San Clemente Island, Catalina Island, and occasionally Cortes Bank. Six months of four-hour hunts for the big monovalves would leave him with enough money to sail or chase fresh powder in Colorado for the rest of the year.
One winter’s day around 1967, Bank and a dive buddy named Kenny Cohen journeyed to Cortes aboard Cohen’s twenty-eight-foot abalone boat. “I’ve been a surfer and a diver and consider myself a waterman,” a ruddy and well-weathered Bank told me recently during an interview at his home in Long Beach. “I lived on the North Shore for a couple of years. That was terrifying. But to surf Cortes? I mean, those guys have got some balls. Diving out there, it was stupid. The place just always struck me with fear. There was a guy named Larry Doyle. He was a big guy, and he could really swim. One day he decided to go diving—to see what it was like under those huge waves. He just got beat to shit.”
Bank recalled his own near-death experiences. “You go down these sixty-foot-deep canyons where the abalone live,” he said. “One day, I was walking on the bottom and a big white shark appears. There I was blowing bubbles, and sitting down there in this bright green suit completely helpless. I was shit scared. When he turned, I climbed the hose and got the hell out of there. God, it was terrifying.”
One night after a solid haul of sixty dozen reds and pinks, the men anchored above the Bishop Rock alongside another boat beneath a stellar full moon in sixty feet of water. The air was utterly still, the light off the ocean wondrous. Bank turned in, content in the knowledge that they’d have another banner take tomorrow and a fat paycheck. Some hours later, he awoke to feel the boat free-falling through the air. She slammed onto the ocean’s surface, and a crash like artillery fire exploded from astern. Bank ran on deck to find a giant black monolith looming above her bow—a wave more than 40 feet high. It was the most terrifying thing he had ever seen in his years at sea. “It came out of absolute nowhere,” he said.
The boat climbed the wave for an eternal few seconds, reaching near vertical, before yet another free fall. Cohen fired the engines while Bank yelled to the skipper of the other boat. “Guys, get up, get up! We’ve gotta get out of here.”
Yet no one stirred as another wave, twice the length of Cohen’s boat, carried them up its face. Bank hurled a ten-dollar abalone through the window of the neighboring boat, and her crew finally awoke, then screamed. Bank sliced the anchor line while Cohen turned the boat 180 degrees and ran like hell, the neighboring boat in their wake, a stampede at their heels. “The foam from the broken waves, it was above the top of the boat,” Bank said. “We couldn’t even see.”
After they cleared the foam and collected their thoughts, Bank and Cohen realized the waves were only breaking atop the Bishop Rock. They wanted to see them closer. “The full moon,” said Bank. “The calm air. The wave. It was just, just beautiful.”
Bank continued: “Kenny later shot himself to death in Sun Valley. The man was crazy. He had a death wish. I don’t. I never went back to Cortes Bank.”
Kenny Cohen took at least one more waterman out for his very last dive above the Cortes Bank—a compact, powerfully built Hawaiian w
ith a perennial smile on his face named Ilima Kalama. Like Rex Bank’s, his story is a lesson in how a big wave surf spot builds its reputation—by humbling the toughest characters in a small world built on pride and guts.
Kalama was born on Oahu and now lives on Maui. He comes from a long line of Hawaiian heavy watermen. His son Dave is a highly regarded surfer who for a decade and a half was the low-key towsurfing partner of big wave legend Laird Hamilton. Ilima’s father, Noah, was also a renowned waterman who, in 1958, loaded up the family and moved to Newport Beach, California, bringing the sport of outrigger canoe racing to the mainland. Ilima rabidly surfed Orange County’s chilly water through high school and won the West Coast Surfing Championships in 1962.
In 1963, while working as a lifeguard, Ilima was asked to pen the liner notes to a genre-defining album by the Ventures, a work of blazing guitars simply titled Surfing.
Surfing is more than just a sport…it’s a fever. Surfing has become a state of mind…a wild, uninhibited existence that revolves around the sun, the surf, and the sand…Plummeting down a hill of moving green water and being able to move your board right or left—up or down—is a feeling akin to flying, to skiing, and to sailing. The difference in surfing is that not only are you moving, but the force you’ve harnessed is also moving…
The life of a surfer has a definite rhythm and beat to it…the beat of the surf and the beat of the wild, driving music he listens to. More than any other group, the Ventures have this sound…the beat of the surfer and the sound that he associates with the driving ride through the curl…a wipe-out…the life of the beach.
In 1966, Kalama joined a big, solid waterman named Larry Doyle on his first abalone dive out to the Cortes Bank. “I met some friends who were ab diving out of San Pedro,” he said. “Hawaiian boys—former black coral divers. Oh, there were lots of pinks and reds at Cortes Bank. They were fetching about five dollars a pound, and there was lots of money to be made. The diving out there was amazing. I mostly remember how the water was just the most beautiful blue. Along the bottom it was rocks and sand and where we mostly dove, the surface was fairly flat and regular. There was no big tree kelp, more just small palm kelp. We went out probably three to four times on calm days and had good experiences.”
A bat ray soars through the teeming kelp forest atop the Bishop Rock—directly beneath the surf zone. Photo: Terry Maas
On a placid morning in early 1971, Kalama climbed aboard the Sea Way, Larry Doyle’s twenty-seven-foot cabin cruiser. When they reached Cortes Bank, they found four other abalone boats scattered around, and set anchor in thirty-five feet of water with the clanging Bishop Rock bell buoy in the near distance. It was still daylight, so they both decided to climb into their gear and dive. “We found a hot spot,” Kalama said. “I brought up twenty-four or twenty-five dozen. Larry made a dive and came up with about the same.”
Around midnight, Doyle awoke Kalama to tell him that the seas were getting rough. Other boats were leaving and Doyle thought it prudent to do the same. Kalama thought otherwise. He told Doyle that despite steep wind waves that were lapping over the boat’s bow, they should just wait till the next morning so they could lever another motherlode off the rocks.
“Five hours later, he wakes me up again and says, ‘Ilima, the boat’s sinking.’ The water’s up to my knees. I told him to call the Coast Guard and to tell them that we’re at the Bank, that we’re sinking, and that we were going to try to swim to the bell buoy.”
A few minutes later, the Sea Way disappeared beneath its fully clothed crew, leaving them to swim in breathtakingly cold water that Kalama reckons hovered in the high forties—a temperature capable of inducing hypothermia in a matter of minutes. Kalama was so disoriented that it took a while to realize that the reason he could barely swim was because he was still wearing his boots. He kicked them off. Then, after a few minutes in the water, as things seemed utterly bleak, came the epitome of a miracle. Both men’s thick, hooded wetsuits unexpectedly corked to the surface like Queequeg’s coffin in Moby Dick. They shed their clothes and climbed in.
The men next made a desperate swim for the blinking Bishop Rock buoy, but the black sea was a combat zone of steep, short-interval 12-foot swells, smothering whitecaps, and strong currents. They were rapidly swept out into the open ocean. “I’ve been out in the water in big waves,” Kalama said. “Makaha and Sunset. I’ve been near death and near drowning, but none of that was even close to this. Larry was swimming right next to me. I told him to relax, and after a few minutes I started trying to crack jokes. We were drifting toward San Clemente Island.”
Kalama didn’t know it, but the situation was still beyond grim. In his near panic, Doyle had forgotten to give the boat’s name or identifying number in his mayday broadcast. The Coast Guard ignored the call. The light of morning revealed a sight of terrifying desolation. The other boats were gone. The men were tiny, insignificant creatures, treading alone atop a vast ocean.
Kalama thought about his family—his wife, young son, and daughter—wondering if God would ever grant him the privilege of laying eyes on them again. He directed his prayers toward his mother, who had recently passed away. “My mom—I felt she was out there with me,” he continued, his voice breaking. “That mana. That spirit. I felt so at ease. It was sort of, what will be, will be.”
They bobbed alone for perhaps a couple of hours. Then in the far distance, they saw a lone fishing boat. It appeared to be motoring slowly but generally in their direction. It disappeared in the troughs of the steep swells, but when boat and diver were simultaneously borne to a wave’s crest, it would reappear, each time slightly closer. After an hour or so, she was perhaps a mile off. Then, unexpectedly, she veered away. “Our hearts just dropped,” Kalama said.
Kalama and Doyle reached a decision. They would attempt the forty-mile swim to San Clemente Island. The effort itself would offer them some sort of hope—something to focus on. Yet deep down, Kalama knew this was essentially impossible. He had canoe-paddled the brutal twenty miles from the mainland to Catalina Island, and the relentless twenty-six miles of wind and current that separated the Hawaiian islands of Molokai and Oahu. What were the odds of swimming forty miles to San Clemente? But if they continued simply treading water, slowly bleeding heat into the Pacific, their chances were zero.
Then the fishing vessel reappeared to the south. Her captain had chanced to have his radio tuned to Doyle’s channel during the mayday. He recognized the panic in the mariner’s voice and proceeded toward Bishop Rock, where he eventually sighted a small but telling oil slick and, shortly thereafter, a floating hatch cover. He commenced a zigzag transect of the waters. A couple of hours later, he was shocked when he literally stumbled upon two men bobbing in mile-deep water. Their death march had ended just in time for lunch.
A month or so later, Kalama did something that I’ve found an astonishing hallmark of many who’ve nearly died at the Cortes Bank. He simply couldn’t ignore the sirens—and went back.
“After we got saved and came back in, I was able to get on another boat,” Kalama said. “I wanted to dive again at the same spot—because if I’m going to dive again, I wanted to do it where we sank. I went with another fella, Kenny Cohen. When we got out there, we saw that the waves were up. Cortes was breaking—the first time I’d seen it break. It was a good 25 feet, perfect rights. Perfect. I wish I had friends out there with me to go surf. It was just an amazing sight.”
Because of the current and turbulence the swell was bringing in the shallower water, it was impossible to free dive at the usual depth of thirty to thirty-five feet. They dove without scuba tanks down to ninety or a hundred feet, where the currents were somewhat manageable. “All that time, when I came up, I could see the waves breaking just five hundred yards away,” Kalama said. “When we were done that afternoon, we anchored, and wouldn’t you know it, at one or two in the morning, the wind and ocean got rough. I pulled anchor and the ocean was almost washing over the back of the boat. It was the slow
est we ever went to San Clemente Island. Kenny and me were just getting pounded left and right. You can’t believe how many Lord’s prayers I said on that trip. After that, I hung it up. I said to myself, I think Akua wants me to stay on land.”
As we spoke, Kalama grew quiet for a moment. He had, it seemed, been granted freedom from the belly of the whale not once, but twice. “You know, I grew up respecting the ocean. I was taught by the very best watermen in the world. When my buddy woke me up that night at midnight, we should have left. It was greed that made me want to stay longer. I totally disrespected myself and disrespected the ocean, and I should have known better. I just thank God that in spite of that wrong choice that I’m here to talk about it. Thank God. Mahalo Ke Akua. To this day, no matter what I do, I cannot thank Him enough for the goodness and happiness I’ve received my whole life. I’m so thankful and so blessed. No matter what I try to do, I can never give back enough.”
When Ilima Kalama speaks of greed and respect, and the fatal dangers that can follow an unwise decision, he captures an essential element of life atop the Cortes Bank. Bishop Rock’s litter of wrecked boats, Larry Doyle’s among them, are testament to this. Yet two far larger ships have also met the Rock. Both misadventures, one a near disaster and one an outright fiasco, would only add to the Bank’s ominous legend.
Next to the USS Constitution, the ship that first discovered the Cortes Bank, the USS Enterprise is the second-oldest commissioned ship in the U.S. Navy. The aircraft carrier first sailed in 1961, and at 1,123 feet (about 300 feet shorter than the Empire State Building), she remains the longest U.S. Navy ship ever put to sea. She is also incredibly fast, her reactors still capable of pushing her along at forty miles per hour.