by Chris Dixon
For most Americans, surfers were first revealed in the film and best-selling book Gidget. Both were based on the real-life Kathy Kohner and her 1956 summer spent on the beach at Malibu. In one scene from the film, a crush of Gidget’s named Kahuna reveals that he’s planning to leave the Malibu shack and head for Peru.
“Gotta follow the sun,” he says.
“You can’t mean…?” she pleads.
“Yeah, I’m a surf bum. You know, ride the waves, eat, sleep, not a care in the world.”
She stammers, “Um…uh…It may be awfully nosy of me, Kahuna, but when do you work?”
“Oh that,” says the former air force pilot. “Tried it once, but there were too many hours and rules and regulations.”
Before Surfline, Kahuna’s outlook was not only perfectly reasonable—that is, to unrepentant surfers—but almost necessary. If you couldn’t escape the pull of the waves, you had to make a life of chasing them. But Collins changed the equation. Not only did he take away the surfer’s go-to excuse for being jobless, his forecasts made it possible to keep surfing through one’s “responsible years.” Hell, after Surfline, you didn’t even have to live at the beach. For big wave surfers, reliable forecasting in the ensuing years would give the unheard-of ability to make a living by launching costly expeditions to meet the biggest storms on the planet.
Surfline was an anathema to Flame and to a great many dedicated local and “feral” surfers who would camp out on a remote spot waiting for the waves to show. Whenever Collins issued a “Surf Alert,” cherished empty lineups filled like Interstate 5 on a Friday afternoon. Surfers weren’t supposed to give, much less sell, forecasts to the masses. It was okay for Flame to plan his life around pending swells, but not everyone else on the planet. Flame possessed his own considerable forecasting knowledge, but nothing like Collins’s. To make matters worse, photographers at Surfer could now act on Collins’s intelligence. Shouting matches between Flame and Surfer lensmen soon ensued at outback spots all along the Baja peninsula.
Collins and Flame’s relationship became typically symbiotic yet competitive. If Flame had a good bead on a swell, he might or might not reveal his thinking to Collins. If Collins had the goods (which he always did), he might line up a crew and head to Baja but not tell Flame until he returned with a batch of photos.
Flame kept his building obsession with the Cortes Bank a secret from Collins. Yet Collins had conducted his own recon. His first inkling came around 1988, when a fisherman called to ask Collins about spots along the Channel Islands. In a surfer’s quid pro quo, Collins revealed a few secrets, and the fisherman opened up on what he had seen out at Cortes. “He fished and traveled out there a lot,” says Collins. “He told me about seeing some good waves at Cortes that seemed to have good shape for surfing.”
Collins then ran into Flippy Hoffman down in Baja. The aging charger described essentially the same scene to Collins that he had to Flame.
Yet when opportunity knocked in January 1990, it was Flame who first opened the door. A pinwheeling Aleutian low sent a now-legendary swell charging toward Oahu, creating all-time conditions for the fifty-thousand-dollar Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational at Waimea Bay. The swell then steamed toward the mainland with 27 feet of pure, long-period energy. The weather along the California coast was picture perfect. Flame got in a plane and flew over the Cortes Bank, and he told Collins nothing until several weeks later.
Sometime in 2003, Bill Sharp asked Flame about the flight. “A lot of people have asked me that,” Flame told Sharp. “I can’t really put any one kicker item up on the board leading to the first flight. It was primarily just Mike Castillo being the hellman and the Go-For-It Guy that he is, and me going, ‘Hey, well, there’s this big swell and do you just wanna go out and look?’ He just said, ‘Let’s go!’ You know? It was like having no hurdle to jump over except writing my check for the time we were in the air. It was just someone there going, ‘Why not? Let’s just go take a look for the heck of it.’ So we did.”
Early on the morning of January 23, Mike Castillo motored his tiny Cessna along the tarmac at the Oceanside airport and pointed his single propeller toward the naval weapons outpost on San Clemente Island.
“It was funny,” Castillo told me in a later interview. “We had to get the okay with the controlling agency at San Clemente—Beaver control—my call sign was November262 Zero XRay. We just played it like we were Coast Guard on patrol out to Cortes Bank, and they were totally cool. I think maybe they knew we weren’t, but us sounding official was their way of not barring us from flying through their airspace. We flew right on by off the south end of the island, and when we got out to the open ocean we saw this big navy ship on the water. The lines of swell were fucking unbelievable. The interval on the swell was just huge. It wasn’t even breaking on the beach because the swell was so deep it was just getting blocked. The real swell never really even got to our beaches. That navy ship, it just looked like a toy boat on those waves.”
Castillo brought the plane down to within a couple of hundred feet off the water, marveling at lines of open-ocean swell he reckoned as 18 to 20 feet high. The Cessna buzzed over a school of many thousands of leaping dolphins. Then off on the horizon, their eyes fixed on a telltale hint of white water.
Ten minutes later huge, slow-motion breaking waves appeared through the propeller. “We were screaming at the top of our lungs,” said Flame. “It just, it just literally caught us so off guard.”
With noses fogging the windshield, and the motor drive on Flame’s Canon working overtime, the pair made several slack-jawed passes above Bishop Rock. The sole point of reference was the Coast Guard buoy, which was regularly buried beneath thundering white water Castillo figured was at least 40 feet high. Before the waves broke, they rose high into mammoth slabs perhaps twice that tall. The pair felt like astronauts on Neptune.
“If you surfed down there, there was a serious chance of death or dismemberment,” says Castillo. “It was like nothing anywhere else. Even Jaws over on Maui. I mean shit, this is the longest fetch in the world. You could surf a wave out there that had come off Siberia. The potential was unlimited.”
“It was huuuge,” said Flame. “Finding that—finding it so perfect when no one really had ever gone there. It was truly something that you could have qualified as, ‘Wow, we discovered something.’ You know, something that no one had ever done before, no one had seen and no one else had photographed. It’s a really incredible feeling to know that you’re the first one to tread out there.”
Mike Parsons isn’t sure how many days it was after the flight, but he remembers the phone call well. Flame said he wanted Parsons to come down to the Surfing offices immediately—and he wanted him to come alone.
“Flame had this weird ceremony,” says Bill Sharp. “He would usher in the unaware, lock the doors to the photo room, and scare the fuck out of them.”
Flame thumbed the lamp to his slide projector. Parson recalls: “He said, ‘I have some photos I want you to see.’ But before he showed the first picture, he threatened me—made me swear to the utmost secrecy ever. He said, ‘Absolutely, if this ever leaves your mouth…’”
Flame keyed the forward button, and Cortes Bank flashed into view. Parsons’s chest tightened.
“I just got this wave,” Flame said. “It’s out in the middle of the ocean. It’s way off the California coast, and it’s bigger than anything. I’ve got the boat. I’ve got the way out to it. All we need is a swell.”
Parsons had no idea—no inkling such a wave existed. Flame wouldn’t tell him exactly where it was—only that it was out there. He showed Parsons all angles—including the shots that showed the buoy in the foreground. Was it 20 or 60 feet? Parsons thought it was probably rideable, but he wasn’t sure. What were the currents like? What lay on the bottom? How cold was it? What about big sharks? No one used Jet Skis yet—whether to tow into a wave or for rescue. If you were hurt, well, what could you even do?
Parsons emerged fr
om the photo room a little pallid. Sharp gave him a wry grin. “I had mixed feelings,” Parsons says. “If I saw that wave today, I’d have been freaking out and ready to go because we have Jet Skis and all the safety gear. But back then all we had was our paddle surfboards. The thought of going out there—it was intimidating as hell.”
Of course, such a journey lay well over the horizon. After all, several years still lay ahead before Mike Parsons would be properly—and horribly—introduced to the waves of Maverick’s. Yet Parsons, Flame, and Sharp—and soon also Sean Collins—had found their siren song. Out in the middle of the ocean their leviathan awaited—a wave beyond their greatest ambitions and deepest fears.
Chapter 7:
AT
ARM”S
LENGTH
The modern big wave surfer must realize that he wasn”t born with an 18-foot umbilical tethering him to a lithe, composite gun, and with a detailed lineup chart and printout of swell predictions in hand… Today”s hyper equipped surfer is the end result of thousands of years of evolution.
—Dave Parmenter, Surfer magazine, August 1999
Eventually, the waves at the Cortes Bank would become an earth-shattering revelation, at least for one particular and rarified surfing subset. Yet the vast majority of surfers blanch at the very idea of seeking out such monstrosities, and truly big waves don’t impact their day-to-day surfing lives one iota. That doesn’t mean they aren’t fascinated, but only from the beach. Most never angle for a spot in those lineups.
One imagines that Ahab must have been similarly lonely, for only a very few of the most fiendishly obsessed captains would have sympathized with and shared his lust for the biggest, most dangerous whale of all. To fully appreciate the impact and lure of Cortes Bank, it helps to understand something of the world of big wave surfing and the treacherous reef breaks that form the sport’s crucibles—those places where surfers develop the tools and techniques, and the nerve, they need to approach a place like the Cortes Bank when it is at its height, breaching in almighty, storm-driven rage. Even big wave surfers sometimes forget where they came from, that they “stand on the shoulders of giants,” to quote Surfer magazine’s brilliant and iconoclastic scribe Dave Parmenter. Towsurfing became the big wave surfer’s rocket-launched, explosive-tipped harpoon. This bastard mechanized spawn of surfing, waterskiing, and motocross was an evolutionary response to the desire for bigger and bigger waves. When towsurfing arrived, it shook surfing to its core, yet it followed and was made possible only by generations of paddle surfers who paved the way. Before anyone could stand on the shoulder of a giant atop the mile-high pinnacle of the Cortes Bank, scores would suffer, and in some cases die, running the gauntlet on waves whose histories are woven between Hawaii and the North American mainland like a braided necklace of kelp and hibiscus.
Makaha
On a quiet summer morning, Makaha Beach Park seems about as idyllic a place as you might find in all of Hawaii. It’s a perfect crescent moon of blond sand and warm, sapphire ocean, hemmed in by a dragon spine of ridgeline that defines the northern boundary of Oahu’s arid Waianae Valley. A small scrum of local kids bob atop surf and boogie boards, circling like vultures over the dying remains of a Southern Hemisphere swell. Beneath a small grove of broad-leafed kamani trees, a group of old men nurse coffee and talk story at a picnic table while a crew of teens sit atop a low wall, dissecting the rides of their friends and rivals, and talking shit when a wipeout lets a nice, open-faced wave go to waste. The smiles are broad, the laughs hearty, and the dialect a staccato Hawaiian pidgin, laced with copious profanity.
On a day like this, it seems hard to believe that Makaha could drown anyone, but that assumption would be a mistake. The volcanic seafloor is subject to churning rip currents and waves that can go from playful to deadly serious at the literal flip of a switch. This typically first happens sometime in the mid- to late fall, when titanic righthanders awaken and thunder down Makaha’s outside reef.
The history of what we today recognize as the sport of surfing begins in ancient Hawaii, and it reaches back at least seventeen hundred years—well before the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century arrivals of explorers like Captain James Cook, whalers like Herman Melville, journalists like Mark Twain and Jack London, or naval officers like Archibald MacRae. To Hawaiians, surfing formed the basis for an entire culture. In around 1859, a brilliant Hawaiian writer and cultural anthropologist named Kepelino Keauokalani used the recollections of his elders to capture the cultural zeitgeist of precontact surfing in terms that any dedicated wave rider could recognize today:
“Expert surfers going upland to farm, if part way up perhaps they look back and see the rollers combing the beach, will leave their work…then hurrying away home, they will pick up the board and go. All thought of work is at an end, only that of sport is left. The wife may go hungry, the children, the whole family, but the head of the house does not care. He is all for sport, that is his food.”
In the modern era, the offshoot that’s come to be known as big wave surfing is inextricably linked with Makaha, whose formidable righthand waves were plied by countless generations of Hawaiians. The break’s first documented charger was the six-foot-six Hawaiian chief Abner Paki, a man who actually made Archibald MacRae’s acquaintance during a Honolulu church service in 1845. Paki was reputed to hold off on launching his hundred-pound, fourteen-foot-long koa wood surfboard until the waves were absolutely massive (Paki’s board is today part of the permanent collection of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu). Yet the torch of Paki’s obsession almost blinked out, along with the rest of Hawaiian culture, when Western disease and oppressive missionaries worked to practically annihilate the islands’ indigenous population and society throughout the nineteenth century. The Hawaiian penchant for combining nudity and he’a nalu, or wave sliding, was considered the worst sort of godless hedonism and particularly singled out for censure.
Surfing survived only in isolated pockets until the early 1900s, perhaps dwindling to no more than a dozen practitioners at its lowest ebb. After the turn of the century, though, Olympian swimmer Duke Kahanamoku helped lead a revival of the “Sport of Kings,” demonstrating and teaching surfing to Westerners and exporting it to the U.S. mainland, where it flourished on California beaches through the first decades of the twentieth century.
In the years surrounding World War II, a handful of U.S. surfers—like Tom Blake, Pete Peterson, Whitey Harrison, Wally Froiseth, John Kelly, and brothers Walter and Philip “Flippy” Hoffman—made the crossing to Hawaii on the promise of surf and adventure. Once here, these Americans went native, leading a feral, carbuncle-covered life so at odds with the suburban postwar idyll that it’s almost inconceivable. They were a step ahead of Kerouac and established the rootless, surf-chasing lifestyle that guys like Harrison Ealey and Ilima Kalama would come to treasure. They lived in tents, had no money, and subsisted on fresh fruit and fresher fish. They were also the first Californians to risk themselves on Makaha’s frightfully perfect wintertime walls.
The first big Makaha waves of modern times were ridden atop long, dartlike “hot curl” fiberglass-covered balsa wood surfboards that had no fins. They were fiendishly tough to maneuver, but maneuverability wasn’t the point. The simple goal was to angle into a wave and head straight for the exit. Walter, Flippy, and an islander named George Downing eventually conducted some of surfing’s first serious heavy-water experiments with “skegs,” stabilizing fins that would allow them to hold terrifically high and tight lines along the faces of Makaha’s mammoths. As the Californians returned to the states and spun their dizzying tales of Makaha back home, they established the break’s early reputation as the premier arena where the best surfers could prove themselves in big waves.
Since the 1960s, many of the most gripping exploits at Makaha have taken place under the eagle eyes of Richard “Buffalo” Keaulana. “Buff” is a broad-shouldered full-blooded Hawaiian who can trace his lineage directly back to King Kamehameha. Buffalo grew up in Waiki
ki. He was brutally abused by an alcoholic stepfather, and thus spent much of his waking and sleeping life on the beach. But he grew into a gentle giant with a compassionate heart and became a popular diver and champion bodysurfer. Eventually he was named the first lifeguard ever on Makaha—a job equal parts cop, judge, jury, and hellman (a surfer-centric term that at its essence describes a fearless waterman). Buffalo also became one of the best surfers to ever charge Makaha, and he and his fiery, hilarious wife, Momi, raised six children in a tiny bungalow mere feet from his lifeguard stand. In 1976, Buffalo joined the famous cross-Pacific journey aboard Hōkūle’a, a reproduction of a traditional Polynesian sailing vessel. Guided only by the stars, Hōkūle’a’s 2,400-mile voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti proved definitively how Hawaii’s Polynesian ancestors sailed to the islands.
Buffalo’s oldest son, Brian, is not quite so big as his dad. While he’s clearly Buff’s son, a sharper facial structure suggests at least a few genes of the haole, Charleston, South Carolina, whalers in his mother’s distant ancestry. Brian has left a deep impression on the surfing world. He has won multiple world surfing tandem championships and is widely considered among the most talented big wave surfers Oahu ever spawned. He’s also coordinated stunts for films like Waterworld and Pearl Harbor and is widely regarded as the best heavy-water rescue expert in the world.
On this early August morning, I find Brian and Buffalo posted up beneath a kamani tree that Brian’s mother planted in honor of his birth. Brian’s charging his batteries with a quadruple espresso, a drink the local Starbucks employees call a “Keaulana Special”; he has already fielded about ten phone calls. Best friend and fellow surfer stuntman Brock Little wants to discuss a job. Filmmaker Brian Grazer might be down for a visit. Brian’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Chanel, is going surfing. “Where?” he asks. “Who with? How long going be gone?”