Ghost Wave

by Chris Dixon

  Jaws

  The North Shore of Oahu is a tough place to be a little boy. Grommets grow up playing chicken with a shorebreak that can snap their spines in the blink of an eye, and they dig sandcastles in front of wicked rip currents that can drag them to their doom before Mom even realizes anything is wrong. When a local kid starts to surf, he enters a Jungle Book meets Lord of the Flies world where the bigger kids egg the little ones into maulers that they have no business surfing. Yet if a kid doesn’t at least attempt the drops, the words, taunts, or fists can hurt even worse than an impact with fiberglass sticks or coral stones.

  A big little kid named Laird Hamilton came of age in this palm-shaded gladiator arena. He was sucked out in vicious rips and rescued by his adoptive dad, Bill Hamilton, more times than he can count. Alongside his dad, he was probably one of the youngest kids of his era to surf Pipeline and big Sunset. I once asked him if there was a particular instance—a critical moment early in life—when he realized he was out in far bigger surf than he should have been, and if the moment taught him anything.

  With nary a pause, he told a story I’d never heard: “I was thirteen years old, and it was at Hanalei [Hanalei Bay on Kauai]. It was when I went from riding what would be considered normal surfing conditions to what we would classify as big. I wiped out three times in a row. That was before we had good leashes. The first wave I caught, I got nailed. Probably swam a mile. Back out, same thing again. Back out, same thing third time. I remember saying to Bill, ‘Man, I don’t know what’s wrong. I just got worked three times. I was hammered.’ He said to me, ‘Well, now you know, at the worst, what’s going to happen. Now go out and catch one.’

  “The next one I made—then the next. That was the decisive moment in my psyche. I could survive a pretty good beating and I didn’t get discouraged. If I had gone in, maybe I wouldn’t have pursued surfing as I have. That was the psychologically defining moment for me. You go out and you have grown men scared—big wave riders scared. You’re thirteen years old and you decide you really like this. That it’s what you’ve really wanted—what you’ve dreamed of.”

  Laird became known as a preternaturally talented paddle surfer. Had he ended up a little more lithe and half a foot shorter—the size of a Mike Parsons —he might have become a serious contender for the ASP World Title and its world of smaller wave venues. But Laird developed the kind of height, physique, and ego that put him in the company of men like Greg Noll, while his Nordic good looks made him impossible for the fashion industry to ignore. Big waves and bright lights were his destiny.

  In the middle of the tempestuous, El Niño–fueled winter of 1991–92, Hamilton and his friend Buzzy Kerbox, a sailboarding champion, began experimenting with a forty-horsepower inflatable Zodiac boat, a waterski tow rope, and a big wave surfboard at a series of mysto reefs off Oahu’s North Shore that included Outer Log Cabins. Within sight of some of the most insanely packed and dramatic surf spots on Earth, the duo used the tiny boat to tow each other into gigantic, dreamlike waves all by themselves. If they had been paddle surfing at Waimea, they might have caught five or six waves all day. Instead they round-robined continually, riding more big waves that day than they typically would in a year.

  Their session went mostly unseen by surfers, who were hustling for waves close to shore. But a lifeguard named Darrick Doerner watched spellbound through a pair of binoculars. These guys were on to something, and he wanted in.

  The following winter, Doerner joined Laird and Kerbox on Maui, at a spine of reef off the winding road to Hana that had the uncanny ability to turn northwest swells into perfect monsters. The spot’s Hawaiian name was Peahi, but the surfers decided to call it “Jaws.”

  Laird had paddle surfed Jaws at small size a few times and was sufficiently intimidated. He said, “Anyone that’s ever come to Jaws, the one thing they always comment on is, ‘Omigosh, the thing is moving so fast. It’s just moving at a different gear. Other waves are third gear, others are fourth. This one is OD—overdrive.”

  Mechanized surfing seemed to hold the most promise. Laird and a small, tight circle soon ventured out in the following configuration: One or two surfers would pilot single stand-up Jet Skis for rescue. Another pair drove the inflatable boat and slingshotted a surfer into the waves from behind. It was frightfully dangerous. The Zodiacs possessed not only sharp propellers but a disquieting tendency to launch backward into the air from the stiff wind blown off the top of a wave. Still, the team managed to ride and study the wave and narrowly survive trips through its wormhole barrel. Jaws became an absolute—and largely secret—obsession.

  Sometime around 1987 the first two-person, sit-down personal watercraft—the Yamaha WaveRunner—hit the market. Hamilton and his friends got their hands on one in the early 1990s and called it a turtle. It could carry more than one rider. It was fast, stable, reliable, and most importantly, one of Brian Keaulana’s grab-on rescue sled inventions might easily be mounted to its rear. Freed of the buoyancy needed for paddling, surfboards were shorn down dramatically in dimension and fitted with chop-defeating lead weights and windsurfer foot straps. Now, with feet locked in, the largest waves anyone had ever seen were not just ridden by Laird and his friends, they were ripped. Massive top-to-bottom carves, impossible aerials, and gaping pits became commonplace across a mind-blowing blue water playing field. It was a quantum leap in performance—a completely new way to inject the earth’s purest form of energy directly into your veins.

  The images of these revolutionary exploits hit the stunned staff of the surf magazines like a gut punch. In 1994, Surfer associate editor Ben Marcus sat in his San Clemente home watching advance copy footage from these epic Jaws sessions for the first time. He keyed his remote back and forth, replaying the titanic rides and rodeo backflips in sheer disbelief, continually repeating, “This changes everything.”

  Heated debates ensued among Marcus and Surfer magazine’s other editors Sam George and Steve Hawk. Was this even surfing? If it wasn’t surfing, then what the hell was it? And what did this mutant—or what some called satanic—hybrid of snowboarding, waterskiing, and monster truck racing mean to the future of the sport?

  The contrasts were stark. Into surfing’s longstanding, environmentally pure world of rugged individualism was born a terribly polluting, technology-driven team dynamic. Early skis in particular burned and belched a nasty, pungent mixture of gas and oil.

  In big wave lineups, the rule had always been “survival of the fittest.” You had no choice but to earn your place among the world’s heaviest swells—or drown trying. Few begrudged the added safety that Jet Skis brought to the lineup, particularly in light of Mark Foo’s death, and increased safety might allow paddle surfers to push even harder. Yet something was also lost with the addition of the ski—particularly with the rise of towsurfing. Whatever this new sport was, it heaved time-honored traditions of self-sufficient, primal forays into the wilderness out the window. Big wave surfers were no longer Lewis and Clark. They were astronauts.

  “You gotta match power with power,” Laird told me. “Or as Darrick Doerner says, ‘Horsepower with horsepower.’”

  K2

  In the years just before horsepower-driven surfing hit the mainstream, Bill Sharp and Sam George grew weary of editing Surfing magazine. Under their tenure, the magazine had grown from just over 100 to 250 Day-Glo pages. “But it got to be like Mexican food,” Sharp said. “Same ingredients, different mix.”

  George made the move over to Surfer, but in an unusual move for a journalist, Sharp saw opportunity in a storied brand of surf trunks, “Canvas by Katin.” He and his best friend Rick Lohr convinced owner Nancy Katin to put them in charge of wholesaling, and they took the company from a literal cottage business to one with fifty-three employees and millions in sales. In 1997, Katin sold to the mountain sports juggernaut, K2. Sharp stayed on for a while to help direct their marketing while using some of the money from the sale to launch a hilarious gossipy tabloid titled Surf News.


  Late in his Katin reign, Sharp came up with an explosively controversial idea. Sometime in the late 1950s, Waimea pioneer Buzzy Trent famously said, “Big waves aren’t measured in feet, but in increments of fear.” Big wave surfers were notorious for applying a weirdly inverse, macho nobility to the actual measurement of waves. Mark Foo would look you straight in the eye and call a giant Waimea Bay wave that clearly measured 40 feet from trough to crest only 20 feet tall. Ken Bradshaw might then scoff and say, “Shoots, it was 18 feet tops.” Even more confusing was a Hawaiian tendency to measure a big wave from its back. Who the hell rode the back of a wave?

  Sharp thought this whole sensibility completely ridiculous. It not only made it impossible to measure how big, exactly, a wave was, but this strange logic had the effect of reducing the importance and significance of a big wave surfer’s accomplishments. No climber ever underestimated the height of K2 or Mount Everest. Sharp’s attitude was: Don’t tell me how big you think the wave was. Let’s cut the bullshit and measure the damned thing from top to bottom—and may the best man, or woman, win. In fact, why not reward the Surfer who rides the very biggest wave a thousand dollars a foot? A 40-foot wave would pay a surfer $40,000, a 60-footer, $60,000, and so on…

  Sharp took his idea to Quiksilver, Billabong, and several other companies, but strangely, no CEO in the surf world wanted to endorse such a radical competition. He turned, instead, to the most aptly named new surf company on Earth, and the K2 Big Wave Challenge was born.

  “In a sport of ‘men who ride mountains,’ Bill created Mount Everest,” Sam George said. “He put a number to the size. He single-handedly changed the scale of how surfers measure big waves. It was also a concept that the mainstream media—not to mention mainstream America—could easily grasp.”

  K2 happened to endorse Sharp’s idea during the epic El Niño winter of 1997–98. A panel of surf industry icons agreed that one of Mike Parsons’s best friends—a respected pro from Carlsbad named Taylor Knox—had narrowly defeated Maverick’s icon Peter Mel after paddling into a 52-foot beast at Todos Santos. Knox deposited his $52,000 check at an ATM. “I got more publicity for that one wave than Kelly Slater did for any of his world titles,” he later said.

  After a two-year hiatus, the K2 Big Wave Challenge would change its name and morph into an annual contest, eventually called the XXL, which would come to include yearly awards not just for the biggest ridden wave, but for the worst wipeout, the biggest barrel ride, and simply “Ride of the Year.” For decades, the professional World Tour had been the only ongoing annual crucible through which surfers made their reputation. The XXL would become, and today remains, the standard by which big wave surfers are measured.

  Interestingly enough, however, Taylor Knox hadn’t ridden the biggest wave in the winter of 1998: that honor actually belonged to Ken Bradshaw, who rode a wave at Outside Log Cabins on Oahu that was variously estimated at between 60 and 80 feet on its face and would for some time be known as “The Largest Wave Ever Surfed.” The difference? Knox paddled for his 52-foot wave, while Bradshaw was towed into his. The K2 contest was only open to paddle surfers, so Knox got the money. Yet the fuzzy footage of Bradshaw’s giant had given everyone—particularly Bill Sharp—a glimpse of the future.

  Out at Cortes Bank, the giants slept while paradigms shifted. At least two missions had been scrubbed in the early 1990s due to mechanical issues. Then in 1995, Flame recruited Mike Parsons and Brock Little for a paddle surfing mission on a promising swell. But as their boat rounded San Clemente Island’s Castle Rock, a wave-shredding gale sprang to life. This would be the last attempt at the summit for six years.

  Flame thought it just as well. “Evan Slater, he’s thoroughly convinced that if there had been a pure paddle surfing trip, someone would have caught some waves,” he said. “I’ll betcha, too, but someone would have paid…dearly. I don’t know what we were thinking really. We didn’t have any rescue craft available. I was gonna shoot from the water—from a surf mat, or maybe a Morey Doyle [a soft foam longboard]. It would have been really difficult. There just was always something in the way, and it’s all the better we didn’t go. I think it was the Lord making sure we didn’t go out there.”

  One day in early 2000, as Bill Sharp thumbed through a batch of impossible paddle and towsurfing shots, another lightbulb went off. Perhaps this towsurfing could provide the tools and horsepower for a successful return to a place most surfers in the world had never even heard of. He imagined a serious, high-dollar expedition to the Bank. Four teams of the best towsurfers in the world, a five-thousand-dollar contribution per sponsor, a small fleet of skis, a hundred-foot yacht for a base camp, and major coverage in the mainstream media from CNN to the New York Times.

  Sharp brought the idea to Flame and Surfing publisher Bob Mignona. Both men liked what they heard.

  Sharp typed up a press release in his prototypically glib, hyperbolic style—something to drum up a sponsor’s interest:

  PROJECT NEPTUNE!

  COMING TO A SURF SPOT…FAR FROM YOU!

  Remember the K2 Big Wave Challenge? It was the year of the El Niño, when the waves were good and the water was warm. The K2BWC issued a challenge…One wave, one ride, biggest wave of the winter that was successfully ridden in the North Pacific wins a huge cash prize. That was possibly the sport of surfing’s most publicized media event, which resulted in plenty of ink & air-time for the sponsoring K2 Corp…

  OK, now for the sequel to the K2 Big Wave Challenge. It’s called: Project Neptune. From the brain trust of William ‘Bill’ Sharp, a.k.a. Dr. Evil, comes yet another surfing challenge the world has never seen, or imagined.

  A journey into the unknown, the abyss…

  Chapter 8:

  THE

  PRISONERS

  “Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that.”

  —Ishmael, from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, 1851

  In some way or another, every serious big wave Surfer alive today is a walking ghost. Each one I’ve met has been absolutely sure at some point that he—or she—was going to drown. Most remember the experience vividly, from the panicked groping for the surface right down to the eerily peaceful point when a hypoxic cloud darkened their vision. Not even a water-safety guru like Brian Keaulana is immune. This is how he described a near drowning after voluntarily paddling into huge surf at Sunset Beach, wiping out, being folded across the rail of his surfboard by the downward force of the wave, and having nearly every molecule of air driven from his lungs: “There’s this feeling of black velvet being drawn. Like black drapes in front of your eyes—but your eyes are wide open. Then you start going through twitches and convulsions. Your body’s just going through this eruption—and you have no control over it. I was thinking of past, present, future—how I would be buried—and my ashes being spread in the ocean.”

  Had Keaulana actually blacked out, his larynx would have, in all likelihood, relaxed, and he would have inhaled better than a liter of ocean. The bronchial immersion would have rinsed the thin layer of gas-transporting surfactant from his lungs. So even if he had bobbed to the surface and been rescued, recharging his blood with oxygen would have proven most difficult. As it was, though, the reality of actually dying shocked him with adrenaline, and vision and control briefly returned. He squeaked to the surface and gasped the sweetest breath in his life.

  Despite regular moments like these, big wave surfing is, statistically speaking, a relatively safe endeavor compared to other extreme sports. Not counting those who have died of freak accidents like breaking a neck in smaller, near-shore surf, you could count on one hand the number of surfers who have died in truly giant waves during the last two decades. In contrast, and relatively speaking, high-altitude mountain climbers and motocross riders are killed or paralyzed with sobering frequency.

  Back in 2002, I interviewed a young hellion named Travis Pastrana for the New York Times. By the age of eighteen, Pastrana was well on his way to becoming a sort of Kelly Slater of motocross. Yet while Kel
ly has endured cuts, contusions, sprains, and the occasional concussion during the course of his world title–filled career, he has not endured anything like what Pastrana had been through by his eighteenth birthday, including thirty broken bones, twelve surgeries, and ten concussions (one concussion alone can cause brain damage). When Pastrana was fourteen, he actually dislocated his spinal column from his pelvis. “Every time I’ve gotten hurt,” he said, “it has been worth it, and it has been my fault. After I separated my spinal column and woke up a week later in intensive care, the first thing I remember my mom saying was, ‘Are you sure this is worth it?’ There was never a doubt in my mind.”

  Pastrana’s seemingly insane devotion to such an apparently self-destructive activity is something most of the big wave surfers I’ve ever met have shared. It’s the same devotion that drives mountain climbers to want to summit Mount Everest despite grave personal risk and a complete lack of control over the elements: It is all too easy, despite sherpas and oxygen tanks, to get caught in a blizzard and freeze to death or lose fingers and toes to frostbite. Indeed, in 2010 alone, four people died on Everest while 513 reached the summit—thus making one year on Everest more deadly than all of big wave surfing in the last decade.

  A number of theories have been raised over the years about why big wave surfing has such a comparatively low fatality rate. One is that unlike sports such as motocross and high-altitude mountain climbing, surfing traditionally has never depended heavily on machines to carry them into waves or on gear as a safety net. Technology, in fact, comes with two flaws: It can fail, and it can fail when it’s carried an athlete much further than they’d have gone on their own, leaving them exposed and vulnerable. Consider the Himalayan climber who runs out of oxygen at 28,000 feet just as a storm rolls in. Some have argued that because a Surfer isn’t insulated by such technology, they’re better at staying within their limits and thus big-wave surfing is much safer than it might appear.