by Chris Dixon
“The next day my wife goes, ‘What you do today, honey?’ I say, ‘I put down five grand on one Jet Ski.’ She goes, ‘You did what?’ I go, ‘But honey, I’m gonna change lifesaving with this thing.’”
However, when Keaulana tested it out, practicing pickups and rescues with fellow guard and best friend Terry Ahue, he found that lifting someone onto the wobbly machine was very tough. Then Keaulana’s mind lit on an old boogie board at home. He poked holes along the board’s perimeter and then wove an old garden hose along its length for grab handles before tying it to the back of his ski. “That was the first rescue sled,” he says, chuckling. “But it had no stabilizers or anything. I’d rescue people, and they’d be flipping over and over and half drowning. But at least I could get ‘em in.”
Todos Santos
A truly rideable big wave is a rare and wondrous thing. You need just the right combination of deepwater bathymetry, wind direction, and swell angle to produce a huge wave that you can both get into and escape from. By the mid-1980s, the good big wave spots on Hawaii were, in large measure, already spoken for. You might score big waves if you were from the mainland, but you probably wouldn’t score many. This is but one of the reasons that Flame and his compatriots began to search the deepwater nooks and crannies between San Francisco and Ensenada. If they found a spot, they might manage to surf in secrecy—at least for a while—and escape the madding crowds.
After he became a paid forecaster for Surfing magazine in 1985, Sean Collins began fine-tuning his predictions. The fiercely entrepreneurial and scientific nonscientist came to recognize a fact that had somehow escaped both surfers and even marine meteorologists. At the true deepwater breaks, it wasn’t only the height of a swell that was important, but its period from crest to crest. The longest-period waves were the deepest, fastest, and carried the most water. If you wanted to find massive surf—and that’s all that the growing ranks of dedicated big wave surfers wanted—you found the spot with the deepest offshore water at the very beginning of a swell.
At the same time that they first fingered Cortes Bank as a possible new target, Collins and Flame were lured by the fathomless bathymetry off the Islas Todos Santos, a pair of tiny, uninhabited moonscape islands seven miles offshore from Ensenada. Todos had a few known surfable spots, but everything about it was sketchy. To get there, you drove to Ensenada and then hired an impoverished local fisherman for a chilly, forty-five-minute cruise aboard a rickety panga. The captain puttered around just off the edge of the breaking waves, praying his sewing machine and rubber band two-stroke engine didn’t die or seize up amid a blanket of kelp. Due to the lack of accessibility and the fact that no one typically ever reached Todos at the very beginning of a swell, surfers didn’t realize how big it could actually get out there. “It all came down to the bottom contours interacting with a long swell period,” says Collins. “That’s what’s key at all the big wave spots—every single one of them.”
Collins thought the right off the northernmost island seemed an ideal spot for a long-period wave to rival Hawaii. But very few surfed there, with good reason. It’s nasty, scary, brutally cold, foggy, windy, and choked with forearm-thick bull kelp. Just inside the takeoff zone lies a submerged boulder that produces a heart-stopping surge of boiling water just as you’re dropping in. If you eat it, you might be pinned against an urchin-and-limpet-lined seafloor or swept across a boulder-strewn shoreline.
In late 1985, Collins saw the right conditions brewing at Todos, and he told Flame to send a Surfing contingent that included Bill Sharp, Sam George, Dave Parmenter, and Mike Parsons just as the first long-period waves hit. In the heart of the gladiator pit, Flame filmed Parsons slaying a 25-footer—by far the biggest wave any magazine had ever shown ridden on the West Coast. The caption read, “Sean Collins forecast this swell for Mike and this is what they found.”
The wave earned an appropriate moniker: “Killers.”
“Boy, that just really set off the sirens,” Collins says. “Everyone in California was just like, Oh my God. It was the first time anyone realized there was a Hawaiian-size wave just a couple of hours outside of LA.”
Subsequent Todos journeys upped the ante. On February 5, 1987, Bill Sharp and Sam George were out when Flame and photographer Rob Brown captured Parmenter, world champion Tom Curren, and pro surfer Chris Burke on even bigger waves. Parmenter later described a moment of sheer, naked panic during the session in Surfing magazine: “Missing a wave, I wheeled around to find my companions clawing for the horizon. I went over another, smaller wave, and then suddenly in front of me was a malevolent hillock of water surely sent from the bowels of hell. It was a no-win situation. I didn’t know which way to paddle. Easily five times my height, the wave felt bottom, skidded, and vaulted into the lethal slow motion of all deadly things. I felt like I was in the throes of a nightmare.”
For latter-day Hawaiian hellmen like Ken Bradshaw, Brock Little, Todd Chesser, and Mark Foo, the photos from this session were a wake-up call. When a swell hit Waimea, the same waves would sweep into Todos Santos two days later. Hawaii surfers began traveling to California for big waves. This was unheard of.
Unlike Hawaii, though, no one lived at Todos. There was no established hierarchy, and no angry locals. All you had to do to prove yourself was to muster up the shriveled cojones to paddle out and make the drop.
Mike Parsons began to hurl himself over the ledge on particularly suicidal waves. Sometimes he would take off on a beastly closeout he knew he couldn’t make, just to see how long it would be before he popped to the surface. Thanks to a strange quirk in his genetics, he somehow managed to shake off the steamrolling. He would, in fact, often emerge laughing like a maniac. He scared the hell out of Flame and Rob Brown.
“Guys like Brock or Todd would come over,” Parsons recalls. “And I just felt, ‘Todos is my spot.’ I wanted the biggest wave of the day. I knew every rock and learned everything that happens when you’d get caught inside.”
Yet just because you understand the dynamics of being caught inside at one spot does not necessarily make you safer at another. In fact, such overconfidence can make things much, much worse. Parsons would learn this lesson at Maverick’s.
Maverick’s
During the 1980s, Bill Sharp, Sam George, Mike Parsons, and a handful of buddies also explored, in addition to Todos Santos, a few other bona fide big wave spots off San Clemente and San Nicolas Islands. However, when Sean Collins said it was going to get really big, the smart money still lay on Todos.
But there was another spot well to the north. It had exploded in plain sight of Ohlone Indians for eons, just off the vast green headland that marks the northernmost edge of a Northern California hamlet today called Half Moon Bay. Just below that headland lay the perfect tank trap bathymetry to lure in the exact same long period swells that lit up Todos Santos. The wave was first explored back in 1961 by a Northern California surfer named Alex Matienzo, who paddled out with a couple of friends on a 6-to-8-foot winter’s day. His gutsy white German shepherd kept following him out to sea, so eventually Matienzo locked him in his car. The dog’s name was Maverick.
In 1975, a young third-generation Half Moon Bay local named Jeff Clark paddled out to Maverick’s for the first time. He was awed by the water’s godlike power and menacing emptiness. He tried to convince his friends to make the mile-long paddle out to surf with him. But no one else would dare take the drop. It was too damn scary.
On a cold boat ride back from the Cortes Bank in November 2010, I sat alongside a pair of rapt young hellmen named Greg Long and Mark Healey as Clark described his first ever paddle out in 1975.
“So I get out there and there were long lulls, and I see this set coming and I’m way too far inside. I just start scratching, just getting over these lefts that are bowling and breaking. And then I get way outside and I say, ‘Okay, here’s where the wave breaks. Here’s my landmarks.’ I got in position for the next set and paddled with it, trying to feel the energy and just tryin
g to find that vein to get into a wave. Once I did that, it was like, okay, no looking back, you’re going. I felt like him today [points at Greg]. Only on a smaller scale. So I paddle into this thing and I just remember it humping up like our beachbreaks. I got to my feet and I just remember the shadow behind me. I’m just running straight, like, frickin’ don’t get me. ‘Cause you know the lip’s coming. And I made it. I rode five waves that day. Never had a wipeout. After that, it’s like, you can actually ride this wave, you know? I’d seen it on much bigger days, and I was just like, It’s on.”
For fifteen years, rumors of the wave and its mystical surfer ebbed and flowed. Through all those long winters, Jeff Clark surfed alone, accompanied only by whales, sea lions, curious otters, and big, toothy fishes. It wasn’t until January 22, 1990—a day after Brock Little and Brian Keaulana’s epiphanies at Waimea Bay and a day before Flame and Mike Castillo’s jaw-dropping first flight over the Cortes Bank—that Clark lured a pair of Santa Cruz buddies, Dave “Big Bird” Schmidt and Tom Powers down to Half Moon Bay. “I said, ‘You guys wanna see a perfect peak?’” Clark told Surfer’s Ben Marcus, “‘Come with me.’ We snuck off to Mav’s and walked to the top of the lookout. Schmidt was looking off going, ‘Where is it?’ and just then a set came through. Big Bird started pacing back and forth going, ‘Oh my God!’ Powers was going ‘What? What?’ And Schmidt said, ‘That’s Waimea.’”
But it wasn’t Waimea. It was something even scarier.
An aspiring journalist named Evan Slater, a pair of brash loudmouths named Peter Mel and Ken “Skindog” Collins, a tall, noisy oncologist from the Bay Area named Mark Renneker, and a quiet young man named Jay Moriarity became part of an expanding crew who took Clark up on his invitation and began sharing the waves. One cold and gusty morning in December 1994, Slater sat alongside Moriarity as he paddled for a solid 30-foot bomb. “As he started paddling for that wave, I just said, ‘Good night, Jay,’” Slater recalled.
Surfer lensman Bob Barbour’s motor drive clicked through a rapid-fire sequence. The instant Moriarty stood, his 10-foot 8-inch Pearson Arrow was lifted from beneath him, the offshore wind flicking him skyward like a speck of dust. The only part of Jay visible in the ensuing Surfer cover shot are his arms, flayed out and flapping hard, while his board is aimed directly skyward. He hovered, impossibly, almost majestically, in midair for an eternal second before being launched into a bone-crushing two-wave hold down. The horrible moment was dubbed “The Iron Cross.” It would come to be recognized as perhaps the most horrific wipeout ever caught on film—much less survived.
A couple of days later, with the swell winding down, a trio of Hawaiians, Ken Bradshaw, Brock Little, and a recently engaged Mark Foo, decided to catch the red-eye from Honolulu. Only Bradshaw had surfed the wave before—at a smaller size—and all wanted to see if this wave was really worthy of comparisons to Waimea Bay. Fellow Maverick’s virgin Mike Parsons joined photographer Rob Brown on a coffee-charged drive up from the San Jose airport.
Jeff Clark stood in reverent awe early the next morning. Four of the best big wave surfers on Earth would be consecrating his home break with him. Yet none of these men were immortal, and the waters around Maverick’s were anything but holy.
Parsons found Evan Slater and a small crew of surfers loading onto a boat called The Deeper Blue and was invited aboard. He was wonderstruck by the bluebird conditions—and the wave. He had studied photos and video of Maverick’s—but not as hard as he should have. Nor did Little or Foo spend a great deal of time talking to Jeff Clark about hidden perils and currents. But that was okay. Somehow, they always popped up.
Rob Brown climbed up the steep, muddy cliff above Pillar Point, scared out of his wits that he was going to slide down and die. The sun shone through broken clouds, and a light breath of offshore wind left a twinkling mist behind massive green righthanders. “Other than Waimea, I’d never seen anything like it,” Brown said. “Taking off on a wave there was like free-falling off a cliff.”
Parsons immediately and successfully scored a couple of epic waves. “I was screaming and yelling, and we were having a ball. Mark Foo was having a blast. We were laughing about leaving our girls behind on the day before Christmas, and just saying, ‘Wow, isn’t this just so great? There’s all these great waves in the world, and we get to ride them.’ Mark was just on fire. It was such a small crowd—six to eight of us. It was just so bitchin’.”
At just after 11 A.M. , the horizon turned a deep emerald. The small pack of surfers clawed the water. The lead wave was relatively small, and it was allowed to pass. Foo and Bradshaw were in position for the second. Bradshaw actually had the inside line—the unspoken rule among surfers is that whoever is closest to the breaking curl has the right-of-way. But Bradshaw saw that Foo was a few more strokes into a commitment. He grabbed the reins, wrenching his board into a vertical position to halt its momentum. Foo dropped down a medium-size wave—perhaps 25 feet from top to bottom. It jacked to vertical in an instant.
Approximately fifteen seconds behind came another wave—a near carbon copy of Foo’s, but 15 percent bigger. Parsons paddled like hell. In his peripheral vision, he caught a glimpse of Brock Little. Both popped to their feet almost simultaneously, bent low, and negotiated a zero-g drop. But at the bottom of the wave, weightlessness gave way to a high-g compression of legs and body. Parsons lost his balance and leapt feet first off his 10-foot 6-inch Timmy Patterson. A half second later, Little realized he had no choice but to straighten out and leap, too.
Resistance was futile.
“The lip just crushed my chest,” Parsons said. “And I was immediately way down on the bottom.”
The shockwave was an invisible fist that held Parsons prostrate forty feet down. His eardrums nearly burst and the ice cream headache brought on by the freezing water was horrendous. Suddenly, he was stunned to feel Little bang into him from below. They became briefly entangled by either kelp or a surfboard leash. Beneath the foam, Parsons was completely blind. Little didn’t seem to be struggling, just sort of bouncing against him like a wayward balloon. Mike imagined a dire scenario: Little might be unconscious. If you survive, how will you rescue him—down here?
Another wave dragged Parsons away by his ankle leash like a cowboy with a boot locked in the stirrup of a runaway horse. After nearly a minute in swirling, frigid blackness, he clawed to the surface in a near panic. Little had been swept much farther toward shore.
“It was so obvious to me when I was down there that I had been wrapped up with Little,” he said. “When I saw him, it was just so relieving. All my fear just instantly went away.”
Parsons and Little believed that they could paddle north and make it back outside. They dug hard for thirty seconds, but a river of current swept them toward a limpet-and-mussel-encrusted series of boulders. Their leashes were snagged on the bottom as successive walls of white water waylaid them. The torrent was so strong that neither could even bend down far enough to release the velcro on his leash, and both commenced drowning anew. Parsons was stuffed under a rock. He struggled mightily, then tried to remember the instructions Brian Keaulana gave him for just such a dire situation: Relax. Think. But the current didn’t let up and neither did he. He escaped from beneath the rock, but his leash held fast. A curtain of blackness closed across his peripheral vision. Blood cells were dying, and his brain was starving of oxygen. Suddenly his leash inexplicably released. Jolted with fresh adrenaline, Parsons groped for the surface. Little had been miraculously freed, too.
Parsons was groggy, but he seemed to recall that the first thing he asked Little was something to the effect of “how radical was that?” Little agreed. Parsons assumed that Little understood the question to also imply that he was amazed when Little bounced off him. Amazingly, Little paddled back out. Parsons pointed his beat-to-shit Patterson out to The Deeper Blue. Filmmaker Steve Spaulding pressed his record button.
Parsons: I thought for sure I was dead. I don’t know how I lived.
&nbs
p; Spaulding: What happened to Brock?
Parsons: He was drowning, too…I felt him come up underneath me. I felt him, like, banging underneath me. Then we both got thrown, right in the middle there, got thrown over all those rocks.
Spaulding: That was quite the intro to Maverick’s.
Parsons: Wasn’t it, though? That was by far and away the raddest thing that ever happened to me.
Spaulding: So where’s Foo? Foo broke his board.
Parsons: I don’t know. I thought me and Brock—we’re both in the rocks going, we’re gonna die in these fucking rocks. We couldn’t come up.
An hour later, clouds darkened sky and mood, and onshore breezes signaled the end of the session. Evan Slater paddled over, and The Deeper Blue began to motor back toward the baleful mechanized drone of the foghorn at Pillar Point Harbor. A few minutes later the crew spotted the bottom third of Foo’s yellow-and-purple surfboard. Then a black shape lazily lifted into view on the crest of a swell. Dread washed over Slater and Parsons with a force greater than any wave. It was Mark Foo, who’d drowned unnoticed on a wave no one thought was a killer. Everyone had thought that, after his wipeout, Foo must have paddled in. Instead, his body was pulled aboard The Deeper Blue, which sped back to the harbor.
When Rob Brown skidded down the cliff to find paramedics performing CPR on a person sprawled across the hood of a car, he thought it was Parsons. He then watched, ghost white in shock, as they zipped the yellow bag on Foo’s body. Sobbing uncontrollably, Parsons forever abandoned his surfboard and drove back to the San Jose airport with Brown. “Mike’s on the pay phone with Flame bawling his eyes out while all these people were going to celebrate Christmas,” said Brown. “It was overwhelming. Surreal.”