Ghost Wave

by Chris Dixon

  I ask Brian if he worries about raising his two teenage kids along Makaha’s shoreline—a stretch still generally referred to as Hawaii’s Wild West, and not only for its waves. To Brian, this is the safest place on Earth. “My family is so deep-rooted and connected,” he says. “When I was a kid, I couldn’t get away with jack. Anything I did, Dad finds out. For my daughter it’s even worse. She never realized it till I said, ‘Okay, you don’t believe me? Go out for the day.’ When she got back, I gave her a blow by blow of her day: where she was at class, what path she took to school, where she was holding her boyfriend’s hand.”

  Brian’s early years in the water, during the 1960s and early 1970s, were spent under the watchful eyes of the best big wave surfers on Earth—guys like Rick Grigg, Buzzy Trent, Butch Van Artsdalen, Pat Curren, Fred Hemmings, Paul Strauch, James “Chubby” Mitchell, and a wild, burly hellman named Greg Noll. So close were these men to the clan Keaulana that for years Brian thought most were his biological uncles. Noll in particular spent many nights in the tiny family bungalow. Occasionally he awoke from a brutal hangover to find Brian and his brother Rusty grinning down at him impishly from the top of their bunk bed, pissing right onto his face.

  Brian remembers watching in awe as “Uncle Greg” challenged the lumbering lines of his home break. “Makaha starts out kind of like humongous Laniakea,” Brian says, comparing the wave to another somewhat more forgiving break on the North Shore. “But then you end up at Waimea Bay. But Waimea goes shallow and back to deep—that makes it safer. At Makaha, it goes deep to shallow. You take off on a 40-footer and then it will grow to an 80-footer. It’s like running down a hallway full speed and then having the door slammed in your face. I’ve had the worst wipeout of my life here.”

  Indeed, Makaha’s inside section contains a notorious backwash that can launch you straight up into the air. When Brian was in fifth grade, such a backwash nailed Buffalo and the trip to the bottom broke his neck, leaving him paralyzed for a year. His family considers his complete recovery a true miracle.

  For Brian and Buffalo, and the history of big wave surfing, one Makaha day stands out above all others: December 4, 1969. A once-in-a-generation El Niño condition had turned the entire North Pacific into a gigantic tempest. The resulting waves had been hammering Oahu for weeks.

  Brian was seven years old, but he still remembers the booming, mist-shrouded waves as they crashed down a half mile offshore and eventually flooded up the beach, threatening to carry his family home into the ocean. Early in the morning, his father paddled out. “It just got bigga’ and bigga’,” says Buffalo. “Come two, three o’clock, most guys came in. Not Greg.”

  By late afternoon, the waves leapt up another notch; they were the biggest Noll had ever seen. He bobbed alone, far up around the top of the point with his heart in his throat, well out of sight of his fretful wife, Laura, and of Buffalo. The waves shook the earth and caused the droplets of water on Noll’s surfboard to sizzle, as if atop a kettle drum. With daylight fading, and stuck outside of the breakers, Noll accepted the fact that he had one chance at survival—catching a wave to the beach. He reckoned his odds of survival at around fifty-fifty, and yet he had waited his whole life for this moment.

  A tremendous set began to feather far on the outside reef. Noll turned to face them and stroked over the first wave, gasping in awe at its power, his adrenalized pulse pounding in his ears, and set his sights on the second. He levered his board, aiming now for shore, and laid every watt of substantial horsepower into his shoulders.

  The wave rose up beneath Noll and he leapt to his feet, assuming his trademark wide stance, with his foot near the tail of the board for control. Back on the mainland, Noll described the experience to me. “I’d spent my whole life looking for that one wave,” he said. “It was ten feet bigger than anything I’d ever surfed. Ten feet bigger is a leap of faith. You don’t fuckin’ know what’s gonna happen.”

  Traveling at perhaps forty-five miles an hour, the rushing water amplified even the tiniest imperfections in his board. His skeg began to resonate—humming like a pipe organ.

  Buffalo noticed a tiny, airplane-like contrail powdering the misty wall. It was Noll. “It was hard to see because it was near the evening,” Buffalo says. “It was a big, big wave.”

  The wave is long reported to have been between 30 and 50 feet, and undocumented, though Australian filmmaker Alby Falzon claims a hotly debated three-photo sequence of a 25-footer he shot represents Noll’s epic ride. It’s a debate Noll refuses to enter. Noll simply calls it the biggest he ever rode while Buffalo calls it the biggest he’s ever seen ridden—so who’s to argue? “Then when he reach the bottom it close out.” Buffalo says, “Boom! It just bounce all over him.”

  “I got the shit kicked out of me,” Noll said.

  I ask Buffalo if he thought Noll would die. “I wasn’t thinking he was gonna drown,” he says. “He had good lungs—could hold his breath a long time. Everybody train for these things. Lots of diving in the summer when there was no waves. So when the waves come up, we were ready.”

  Noll wasn’t so sure though. When Makaha gets big, a river of current pours southward, pulling the hapless surfer toward a deadly cheese grater of volcanic reef. Noll struggled while eyeballing the angle he’d need to, hopefully, safely intercept the sand. Buffalo keyed his Jeep and followed along the beach, quietly wondering if his friend would be butchered.

  “Buff’s just driving down the beach with a six-pack,” said Noll. “He’s drinking a beer and I’m sailing down the beach. I ended up goddamn near eating it. Twenty feet more and I’d have been fucked. Just before I hit the rocks, I drag my sorry ass out of the water and he hands me a beer.”

  “Good t’ing you make ‘em bruddah,” Buffalo told Noll at the time. “‘Cause no way I was coming in after you.”

  It was arguably the biggest damned wave a human being had ever surfed, and that was how it was regarded by the surfing world for the next twenty-five years.

  “I came in, I got to the beach, and I was like, okay, for twenty years here, I’ve been waiting to catch a wave—this sounds very egotistical—but to basically catch a wave bigger than anything ever ridden,” Noll said. “That happened. I had waited twenty years, and then what? By the time another twenty years rolls around, I might be in a wheelchair. Usually I’m stoked at the end of a good day of surfing, but it took me two, three days to get out of that zone. I just went home with Laura. Here’s this guy whose gone through twenty years in the islands, this eager, overly adrenalized monster, and all of a sudden it’s over. The pressure was off. The monkey was off my back. It was, well it was like taking a giant shit. I could go surf and just do what I had to do. It was totally unintentional and totally lucky. I could just exit gracefully. A little bit like a prize fighter.”

  Popular myth is that Noll quit surfing after that wave. He didn’t. He just stopped competing and started enjoying surfing more—appreciating smaller days at Sunset and other breaks. After trekking across Alaska, Noll moved to Crescent City, California, and became a fanatical commercial fisherman. He and Laura still live there today.

  Waimea Bay

  Makaha wasn’t the only giant wave Oahu offered. Everyone knew that on those rare occasions when winter swells got big enough, the waves on the North Shore in Waimea Bay were sometimes even taller. Yet like a monster in the closet, Waimea Bay was long considered kapu, a place to avoid—too big and deadly to risk.

  That reputation was due in no small part to what happened on December 22, 1943. Oahu surfers Dickie Cross and Woody Brown had paddled out to surf the lonely point break waves of Sunset Beach just as the first pulse of a powerful long period swell began to sweep across Hawaii. The swell rose with such ferocity that the terrified young men were unable to paddle against a river of ripcurrent that rises between the breaking waves and the beach on giant swells. Now they faced a nightmare. They couldn’t catch a wave and surf into Sunset Beach, and the only possible way they could see to survive was to
make the two-and-a-half-mile paddle from Sunset down to Waimea Bay. During much of the year, when the waves are small, Waimea Bay is a calm, paradisiacal cove. When the surf gets big, the bay’s deep inside waters make it one of the last places you might safely negotiate your way to shore on a surfboard. The men hoped that perhaps they could sneak in between a huge set in the dwindling daylight and negotiate the crushing shorebreak to kiss the sand.

  Yet conditions at Waimea were little better. Waves they reckoned at 60 feet were exploding in eighty feet of water across the bay’s entire outside reef. They waited and watched, unsure what to do, when eventually a huge set relieved Cross of his board. That left apparently one choice: to try to belly ride a wave tandem on Brown’s board. However, another huge wave came, and Cross apparently swam for it, leaving Brown to face another horrific set that stair-stepped out to the horizon. The late, great Brown described the set’s first wave to surf historian Malcolm-Gault Williams:

  “I’m watching it come, bigger and higher and higher and it broke way outside, maybe four-five hundred yards outside of me. I said, ‘Well, maybe I got a chance.’ So, I dove as deep as I could go, again, and I just took the beating; a terrible beating…And when I couldn’t stand anymore—black spots are coming in front of my eyes—I just started heading for wherever it looked lightish color. You know, you didn’t know what was up or down. Wherever it looked kind of a light color, it might look like down, but ‘That’s where I’m headed for.’ And I got my head up!

  “So, I figured, ‘Man, if I lived through this one, I got a chance!’

  “So, they washed me up on the beach. I was so weak, I couldn’t stand up. I crawled out on my hands and knees and these army guys came running down. The first thing I said to them was, ‘Where’s the other guy?’ They said, ‘Oh, we never saw him after he got wrapped up in that first big wave.’ That was their words. ‘Wrapped up in that first big wave.’ I figured from that, this guy [Dickie] had so much guts, he tried to bodysurf the wave. Because, otherwise he would have dove down. Why didn’t he dive down under it? If he got ‘wrapped up’ meant that he was up in the curl, right? How else would you express it? So, I figured he tried to bodysurf in.”

  Cross’s death put a voodoo hex on Waimea that would last better than a decade. As far as anyone knows, the first effort to ride what might be called the second great big wave on Oahu was led in 1957 by Greg Noll and his buddy Mike Stange. The burly, magnetic Noll and the picture-perfect righthander were ideally suited for one another. On the five to twenty days that Waimea broke each year, Noll and Stange laid down the gauntlet alongside well-known guys like Mickey Dora, Buzzy Trent, Butch Van Artsdalen, Mickey Muñoz, and underground surfers like Harrison Ealey.

  Waimea soon became a media sensation, its waves providing fodder for Hollywood films like Ride the Wild Surf and Gidget. Waimea Bay regulars found occasional, and high-paying work trying to kill themselves standing in for Frankie Avalon and his buddies. Greg Noll rode the movies, photo shoots, and his hand-shaped “Da Bull” surfboards into a rare and wondrous place—an actual livelihood based almost solely around surfing big waves. It’s a feat that today, even in a world of million-dollar contracts for postpubescent small-wave aerial artists, is still a rarity.

  In the ensuing decades after 1969, a cadre of other surfers would take their cracks at Greg Noll’s summit—mostly at Waimea. But despite countless epic rides, the consensus was that no one could, or perhaps would ever, top that wave.

  I asked Noll why it was so hard to catch something bigger. “Waves that big are breaking on an outside reef,” he said. “They’re coming across from the Aleutians, and they’re moving much, much faster than smaller waves that are breaking on the inside. The water running up the face makes them even that much faster still. That’s why I rode a board that was 11 foot 4 inches long, 22 and 7/8 inches wide, and 4 and ¼ inches deep. That thing was a wave-catching machine. If you can’t paddle to catch the wave, nothing else matters. But the problem with a big board is that once you catch a wave, you’ve got this long, banging, slapping piece of equipment under your feet. It’s like a bucking bronco. A smaller board is easier to control, but you can’t catch waves with it.”

  In short, there comes a point when a wave is carrying so much energy that you can’t match its speed by paddling. The wave passes beneath you or launches you into a deadly oblivion. Waves bigger than Noll’s came to exist in a hazy zone that a brash young North Shore local named Mark Foo would coin the “Unridden Realm.” After a near-death experience at Waimea Bay in 1985, Foo postulated that to charge into a wave better than 50 feet from top to bottom you would have to be towed onto it from the back of a boat—or maybe a Jet Ski.

  The actual origins of Jet Ski–assisted surfing are somewhat murky. But if you were going to place a bet on the very first person to be towed behind a diminutive personal watercraft on a surfboard, the safe money would fall on a man named Wes Laine. Back in the late 1970s, Laine was an aspiring young East Coast pro who spent a lot of time in Carlsbad, California, with his older brother, Randy. Kawasaki tested early incarnations of stand-up Jet Skis in the Carlsbad Lagoon, and Randy, who competed atop both surfboards and waterskis, was particularly fascinated. “I saw the prototypes and used to borrow them and take them out into the surf at Tamarack,” Randy said. “One day I tied a rope to the back of one and towed Wes to Oceanside Harbor. Pulled him into, like, 6-footers with a little thirty-horsepower 400 cc ski.”

  Randy was soon traveling on the worldwide surf circuit on Kawasaki’s dime, testing stand-up watercraft in big waves at Todos Santos and running ski demos at surf contests from Huntington Beach, California, to Bells Beach, Australia. He became one of the best stunt riders in the business. “I knew that surfing and Jet Skis were going to come together from the first time I saw a ski,” Randy told me. “I just didn’t know how it would happen, and I didn’t capitalize on it. I just loved doing it so much.”

  Around the time Foo first pontificated on the Unridden Realm, Randy Laine and a nephew-in-law of Flippy Hoffman’s named Herbie Fletcher started riding waves along the North Shore atop a stand-up Jet Ski. They were eventually joined by a good buddy of Brian Keaulana’s named Squiddy Sanchez and started charging Waimea Bay and outside reef breaks like Himalayas and Outer Log Cabins on their little one-man aquasleds. At Pipeline, Laine and Fletcher actually towed pros Wes Laine and Brian McNulty, Martin Potter, Tom Carroll, and Gary Elkerton into a few waves. The rides drew cheers but didn’t set off the lightbulbs. Perhaps the Jet Ski’s loud and smoky two-stroke motor was an anathema to the surfing aesthetic. Perhaps the stand-up craft was too unstable and underpowered. Or perhaps the surf world just wasn’t ready to admit that you’d actually need a machine to crack Foo’s “Unridden Realm.” Randy Laine didn’t know it, but one day he and his ski would become intimately, and terrifyingly, familiar with this realm atop the Cortes Bank.

  Then, near the end of the second week of 1990, storm warnings sounded from Hawaii to California: a meteorological “bomb” was arriving. A 940-millibar low had generated a fifty- to sixty-knot windfield along better than a thousand miles of Pacific Ocean, aiming 27 feet of deepwater groundswell directly toward Hawaii and the West Coast. Comparisons flew between this swell and the monster of 1969. This would be the swell that Flame witnessed from the air over Cortes Bank.

  The waves bore down on Oahu on January 21, and for the first time in four years, the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational at Waimea Bay was a go. Invitees included Mark Foo, Ken Bradshaw, Brian Keaulana, and his good friend Brock Little. The twenty-one-year-old Little was in the prime of his surfing career and felt well nigh invincible.

  When the biggest wave of the day came through, Little aimed his gun. The crowd gasped—then shrieked. If there had been a wave comparable to Noll’s, this was it. Little could not have positioned himself any better. But that didn’t matter. “There was too much water moving,” he said. “That wave was not meant to be ridden.”

  Brock made the drop, but then f
ell, his life flashing before his eyes as he bounced across the water like a crashing speedboat. The wave swallowed him, but an instant later, he was churned to the top. His head poked out through the roof of the wave, and in the instant before he was buried again, Brock was granted a beautiful view of Waimea Bay, with the crowd and the mountains spread out before him. He wouldn’t unseat Noll, but the epic instant before the wipeout nabbed the cover of Surfer magazine.

  Another incident went down that day, one far less celebrated but no less important. Brian Keaulana caught what he thought was a makeable monster, but he too fell. Brian has a phenomenal lung capacity and the ability to slow his heart rate at will—enabling relaxation under cataclysmic conditions. Still, this was as heavy as it gets. Until he cleared the maelstrom of choking white water in the impact zone, he would be fighting for his life all alone. Of course, that’s just how it was. Aside from the occasional helicopter basket rescue, no one had yet devised a means of rescuing a surfer in the absolute bull’s-eye of a breaking wave. Then, with a four-story slab of water about ten seconds out, an angel appeared above Keaulana.

  “I was getting ready to get pounded,” says Keaulana. “Then my friend Squiddy comes right up to me on one stand-up Jet Ski—right in the impact zone. He just zooms in and looks me straight in the eye and says, ‘You all right, Brian?’ I was just amazed. I was like, ‘Yeah.’”

  Sanchez zoomed away the instant before the wave detonated, pile-driving Keaulana. But that no longer mattered. “I was just goin’, ‘That was fuckin’ amazing. Someone actually came into the impact zone at Waimea. If I survive this beating, I’m going straight to the dealer, and I’m going to buy one Jet Ski.’