by Chris Dixon
It’s rare that a person sees the leading edge of a deep swell like this. If you’re aboard a ship in calm weather and deep water, you might become aware first of an increase in very long, seemingly slow rollers, followed in an hour or so by the appearance of higher, somewhat steeper waves that seem to stretch across the horizon. This is what James Houtz noticed but failed to identify quickly enough aboard the Jalisco in 1966.
The vast majority of coastal landmasses don’t see these forerunner waves. They run so deep that they scrape across the continental shelf and are refracted or deflected away from land, losing much of their energy in the process. But there are places, like Cortes Bank, where the seafloor transitions rapidly upward from abyssal depths. Forerunners are drawn to such spots like rays of sun through a magnifying glass. They initially stir the water in low half-minute or longer undulations, but as their periods shorten, tremendous breakers can appear almost completely without warning.
It’s interesting to note that, due to simple meteorology, the prime, raw energy of the strongest North Pacific storms—open-ocean swell energy between 50 and even 100 feet—typically doesn’t travel much below the latitudes of Washington and Oregon. Thus, the Ramapo’s giant wave likely dropped to a solid 25 to maybe 35 feet well before it careened headlong onto the Cortes Bank on February 11, 1933. The Bank’s two unique characteristics—that a wave of almost limitless size can break here, and that the Bank, as has been proven, magnifies long period swells into breaking waves between four and five times a swell’s height—means that were the Cortes Bank situated a hundred miles off the coast of Seattle, it might regularly spawn waves at least 200 feet high.
Instead, the Ramapo’s wave probably reached a breaking height somewhere between merely 100 and 150 feet over the Cortes Bank. But like a giant tree falling in a forest, its thunderous fury was released in essentially undocumented privacy. This was understandable. Even if someone had known it was coming, in 1933, no veteran fisherman, no pioneer surfer—no human in his or her right mind—would have set out to confront such a deadly freak of nature.
But nearly six decades later all that would change.
Chapter 6:
MAKING
THE
CALL
As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming.
‘There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!’
—from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, 1851
By 1985, when Cortes Bank first blinked onto his big wave radar, Larry “Flame” Moore was just as obsessed with chasing down the best swells nearer to shore. Nor were Bill Sharp, Sam George, and George Hulse his only comrades in arms. Flame had enlisted a group of reliable, hungry California chargers into a loose confederacy that friends and rival photographers only half-jokingly called “Larry’s Army.” The recruits came to include a cadre of hot Orange County surfers—guys like Chris Mauro, Dave Parmenter, and Terrence, Joe, Brian, and Pat McNulty, as well as a fastidious and fanatical redheaded shredder named Mike Parsons.
Flame would assemble his troops and photograph them dissecting the glistening, front-lit waves at Salt Creek in Dana Point, the point break peelers at San Clemente’s famed Trestles, or perhaps they’d make the two-and-a-half-hour drive below the U.S.-Mexican border to charge the heaving barrels of Baja Malibu. Flame was dictatorial, demanding that his subjects hold themselves to professional standards—an idea then completely at odds with the popularized image of the Jeff Spicoli slacker/stoner immortalized in the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High. If you weren’t on time, you were left behind. If your board or wetsuit didn’t have vibrant color, forget it. And it didn’t matter if you were Laird Hamilton, if you disappeared into a smoke-filled VW bus when you were supposed to be out surfing, you were going to catch pure hell.
Still, Flame demanded nothing of his subjects that he didn’t demand of himself. He considered it requisite to pull on his wetsuit and swim fins and swim or paddle into the heaviest conditions on a boogie board clutching a heavy water housing for his camera. The only way to get stellar barrel shots of surfers was to put yourself right in the teeth of a blue-green cyclone and prepare for the detonation.
Oftentimes, an eager understudy of Flame’s named Robert Brown would also show up and snap differently angled shots of the same waves—particularly at Salt Creek. Flame would bark at Brown for poaching his shots, yet Brown says it was mostly bluster, aimed at determining whether Brown could take the heat. Flame was an egalitarian dictator who saw talent and drive in Brown and was just as likely to use Brown’s shots as his own in the magazine. At the Surfing offices, Flame would offer encouraging critiques of Brown’s work and that of a great many upstart lensmen, offering advice on what lighting worked—most desirable was a front-lit condition everyone came to call “Larry Light”—and where surfer, ocean, sponsor logos, and points of land needed to be for an advertisement, a double-page spread, or the hallowed cover. The tech-savvy Flame also recognized great value in the fact that Brown possessed a boat for offshore expeditions. “We had a funny relationship,” Brown says. “I was working under Larry, but I was also his competitor. He was doing all he could to sabotage me.”
Brown had grown up surfing the sandbar barrels at Salt Creek. Early on, he particularly hated Larry’s top model, Mike Parsons. It wasn’t that Parsons was a jerk. He was a damn anachronism—polite to a fault and infuriatingly skillful. “We’d surf Gravels and he’d come down from Laguna with Chris Mauro and maybe George Hulse. He didn’t fit the profile of a pro. He was this skinny redheaded stepchild with freckles. But he had his perfect wetsuit with his sponsor’s logo airbrushed on it, and he pulled these perfect off the lips. We’d try to vibe him, but he out-surfed us so bad that it just didn’t matter.”
Parsons and Flame clicked particularly well. Not only was Parsons attentive and scrupulous, he was equally driven and obsessively crazed for the next surf fix. He was ascending the competitive ranks and was fearless when it got big. In Flame, he found the perfect documentarian—and the perfect friend.
Irascible, pioneering, devoted, faithful. This book would not have been possible without the work of the late, great Larry “Flame” Moore. Photo: A Frame Photo.
Flame’s early tenure at Surfing also coincided with the first forays into surf forecasting of a stocky, ruddy-faced photographer named Sean Collins. Long before he would become surfing’s one true media mogul, Collins was a brilliant high school dropout with an addiction to waves. He thought nothing of dropping everything—bartending or table-waiting jobs, girlfriends, responsibilities—to travel to the dustiest, remotest beaches of Baja California. He’d surf his brains out and take photos to make a few dollars on his return home. Collins lived feral for long stretches through the late seventies and early eighties, sharing barren campsites with Sam George and a few other friends. This was the sort of lifestyle that Harrison Ealey, Rex Bank, and Ilima Kalama treasured in the fifties and sixties, but in no small measure due to Collins, it was about to become permanently endangered.
Sean Collins’s slavish devotion to waves is shown in his calendar from 1986, just one of many pages of a years-long documentation of every swell to hit Southern California. Below that, one of Collins’s early hand-drawn charts of Bishop Rock, showing his best estimation of prime swell directions and periods for Cortes Bank. Collins keeps the very best angles and periods a secret.
Unlike most surfers, Collins wasn’t content to simply wait for waves. He developed a mania to understand where they came from and, just as important, when they would arrive.
Still today, Collins speaks in a soothing, Southern California surfer’s tone that betrays none of his intensity. He readily admits that his early motivations had nothing to do with making a living but, he says, were based on straight up fascination with swells and pure selfishness. He wanted to score waves—particularly
summer swells that originated off Antarctica. Basically, he wanted to beat everyone to the punch.
Collins had become intrigued years earlier by the groundbreaking work of Dr. Rick Grigg, a Hawaiian big wave surfer and navy forecaster, and a navy scientist named Walter Munk.
In addition to figuring out why the moon only showed one side to the earth, Walter Munk used his mathematical genius to develop a measurement scale for wave energy based on height and period. He coupled swell measurements taken by the pilots of Pan American World Airways “Clipper Ship” seaplanes, which crossed the South Pacific in the 1930s and 1940s, with his own hard-fought understanding of the physics of wave propagation and decay (which refers to a swell’s loss of energy as it radiates out over long distances). He compared these PanAm records with weather maps of storms in the distant latitudes above Antarctica, a perennially tempestuous zone known as the “Roaring Forties.” By jibing the two, he figured out how a swell radiated across the ocean. This resulted in critical, lifesaving forecasts for Allied World War II landings in North Africa and Normandy.
In the mid-1950s, Munk helped marine landing parties understand waves along the beaches off Camp Pendleton, south of San Clemente. He then traveled sixty miles offshore to San Clemente Island, where he deployed deep-water pressure sensors that measured a swell’s power and direction. Among his less-celebrated findings was the fact that from certain angles of approach, San Clemente’s swells were far smaller than you would expect. Munk correctly postulated that their energy was being “shadowed” or blocked by a pair of big damn obstacles—namely, the Cortes and Tanner Banks. More celebrated and revolutionary was the discovery that some waves that reached California weren’t actually generated in the Pacific at all, but west of Australia in the Indian Ocean. The swells made a great circle around Australia and New Zealand and literally came ashore from halfway around the world.
Sean Collins saw a documentary film about Munk’s work and it set him on a path.
“Munk scientifically confirmed to us surfers what we already knew—that some of our best swells were from the Southern Hemisphere. But back then for us it was all coconut telegraph—someone talking about a big storm in New Zealand and trying to follow it. Then getting reports from Tahiti, with the swell seven days from us, then Hawaii with it two days away, and then anticipating the swell’s arrival in California. But it was really hit or miss. Not all those swells would even make it to California.
“Back in the seventies nobody really had a clue about real forecasting. I couldn’t use Munk’s work since I wasn’t a calculus whiz—I just wasn’t smart enough. And most of the oceanographic papers that I found in the Federal Depository libraries and weather service offices were far too complicated for me to fully understand. So Southern Hemisphere swells were still just mystical rumors. We’re relying on storms sending waves from between five and ten thousand miles away. All of a sudden a swell would just show up. It would be flat and 1 foot one day, and the very next morning it would be 8 to 10 feet. It was like Christmas. That’s where the whole ‘surf’s up’ thing came from. You drop what you’re doing, run to the beach, and jump on it—because it was a ‘good today, gone tomorrow’ kind of thing.”
One bright day in late 1979, Collins posted up on the roof of his house and flipped open a notebook to watch the waves running up against the Seal Beach jetty. His work quickly evolved into a fanatical obsession—a daily log of height, angle of approach, seconds between individual waves, minutes between sets of waves, and the number of waves in each set. Collins then bought a clunky old marine fax machine capable of decoding the crackling beeps and chirps broadcast via shortwave from Christchurch, New Zealand. The clearest signal arrived at three in the morning, and the printouts of swirls and isobars gave only the crudest information about wind speeds and pressure gradients. But the images could be held up one after the other, allowing for a rough animation of how storms and their winds were evolving. He learned, like Munk, to hindcast.
“I was kind of like my own virtual buoy,” he says. “And that just really taught me about swells. Southern Hemi swells were the hardest to forecast. They were like a black hole. You could hardly get satellite photos back then. I’d get those weather-fax charts and keep a library every single day. You could backtrack to determine size, timing, swell period. When we’d get really good waves, I could measure the swell period and tell how fast the swell actually traveled in deep water, so I could reverse it and go back to the point of origin. That would tell the location and date where those waves came from by the speed of their travel. I taught myself what to look for—this storm didn’t look all that good, but the swell it produced was incredible—why did that happen? Over a few years, I got to a point where I was about 75 to 80 percent accurate.”
This image shows the effect of a constant forty-knot wind on the surface of the ocean. After one hundred miles, a swell is fifteen feet tall and two hundred feet deep with a ten-second period from trough to crest. After two thousand miles, it’s thirty-seven feet tall and one thousand feet deep and carries a twenty-second period—and orders of magnitude more power. A swell like this could create a perfect breaking wave more than a hundred feet tall atop the Cortes Bank. Image courtesy: Sean Collins/Surfline.
Collins amazed his friends when he showed up unexpectedly one day at their Baja campsite with his weather-fax. He strung the antenna wire around his tent and juiced the machine with his car battery. He told Sam George and his fellow campers, “Watch this, tomorrow it’s going to be six to eight feet.”
George says, laughing: “We were living in a tent, and he was getting faxes from the weather service. It was just unbelievable technology. All I knew before Sean was that on the great south swell of ‘75, we were like Indians. When the moon came full and the day grew long, the great waves would come rolling in from the south. I didn’t even know what the hell a swell was.”
“Those were fantastic days,” says Collins. “Nobody else knew anything, and I’d just get tons of waves. It was like voodoo.”
“You know, in eighteenth-century Hawaii, there was this whole cult of surf priests, or kahunas,” says George. “They had a temple on Waikiki Beach. By monitoring natural things like water color and temperatures or bird flights indicating a faraway storm, they could predict the surf. The fantastic thing was, when the waves were going to hit, the kahunas would send kites above Diamond Head to tell the villagers, ‘Hey, the surf’s up!’ The villages would empty as the people rushed to Waikiki. Sean became our kahuna.”
The track of the USS Enterprise before her collision with the Cortes Bank on November 2, 1985. The times shown are military times, while the hand-drawn figures indicate rudder/steering angle commands. The outline shows Bishop Rock’s six fathom (maximum thirty-six-foot deep) outline. The Enterprise passed through very shallow water, barely two nautical miles from where the waves break. Image courtesy of Karlene H. Roberts taken from the study: “Bishop Rock Dead Ahead: The Grounding of USS Enterprise.” By Karlene H. Roberts, University of California, Berkeley. 1986. Image courtesy: Karlene H. Roberts.
Flame soon recognized that Collins’s predictions were becoming accurate enough to bank on and offered him a five-hundred-dollar-a-month forecasting retainer. Collins would give the heads up, and Flame would position photographers and surfers along the coast.
The mid- to late eighties were heady days for Surfing. Flame was getting baffling and frustrating drops on his archrivals at Surfer, whose offices were just up the road in San Juan Capistrano, and Flame’s two young editors were talented provocateurs. On the one side was Sam George—an earthy, long-haired, and loudly opinionated soul surfer from the Bay Area. On the other was Bill Sharp—a brash and equally opinionated neon-clad ripper from Newport Beach with his halo of spiky bleach-blond hair. Their night-and-day lifestyles provided a yin-and-yang balance for a magazine targeting young readers. “Bill dyed his hair and wore tiger-striped spats,” laughs George. “He was raging at the clubs and ska dancing to the Specials. I was listeni
ng to Loggins and Messina.”
If George tended to be self-serious and even self-important in his pronouncements about the surfing life, he was also generous, gregarious, and always open to other opinions. And in Bill Sharp, he found the perfect philosophical and rhetorical foil.
“When Bill started full-time at the mag, I had a little trepidation because we were so different,” George says. “But we saw right away that he had a really wry sense of humor, and over that, we established a bond. We didn’t butt heads, but Bill had a much more cynical outlook than I did. He wasn’t shy about keeping the reins on my hyperbole and romance—which was good. He taught me that my reverence for surfing could be a liability. And he was also very good at looking at the big picture.”
Surfing’s editorial director, Dave Gilovich, brought Sharp and George’s ideas into clear focus. Art Director Mike Salisbury framed the work of trailblazing photographers Aaron Chang and Jeff Hornbaker in neon and checkerboard, while budding writers Nick Carroll and future X-Files creator Chris Carter further enhanced the brain trust. This was arguably the most forward-thinking, entrepreneurial, and controversial team of media minds surfing ever produced. For better or worse, their focus on young surfers, competition, hot brands, and fashion planted the seeds for what has grown into today’s multibillion-dollar surf industry.
However, this transformation required more than style. There were practical necessities, and Collins couldn’t help but wonder: If Flame was willing to pay five hundred dollars a month for his forecasts, what about the several million other surfers along the East, West, and Hawaiian Coasts? In 1985, Collins and a buddy named Larry Arnold bought the rights to the toll phone number 976-SURF, and they called their nascent company Surfline. For fifty-five, and later ninety-five cents, any hodad could learn what the waves were doing right then and what they would be doing up to a week out. The fallout from this nuclear bomb is still radioActive twenty-five years on because, in effect, Sean fundamentally changed what it even means to be a surfer.