by Chris Dixon
The moment Skinny and Mel’s ski splashed into the water, an amped-up Skindog sped off toward the waves without so much as a good-bye. “Fuckin’ selfish Skinny,” Mel laughs. “I wanted to be the first one out there.”
Skindog edged in. Away from the boat and bell buoy, the air became still and quiet—seeming to suck up even the sound of the idling ski. The ocean’s surface was lumpy and a bit confused, a condition surfers call “morning sickness,” and there was a good deal of kelp. Suck a few fronds into the ski’s jet impeller, and you might become a sitting duck.
A set began to shoal.
“It’s 8 feet,” Skinny said to himself. “No, it’s 10. No. Ohhhhh Jeeesus.”
He tore back to Pacific Quest. The waves were easily 20 feet from top to bottom and building.
Rob Brown was quietly freaking out. This swell was still coming on. The strongest, deepest long-period bands were still an unknown number of miles out. There was no way to know when they would arrive or how they would react with the bottom. At Maverick’s and Todos, the seafloor produces a very pronounced takeoff zone that makes photographing from a boat a reasonably easy endeavor. If you know what you’re doing, you can safely hang a hair’s breadth from the edge of disaster. This wave, though, was dangerously shifty—like Sunset on Oahu. Different sets seemed to focus on different sections of the reef, and Brown had seen waves capping on other distant shoals—Maverick’s-size peaks. As energy filled in and tide dropped, waves might shoal across other spots on Bishop Rock where nothing was showing. No one really knew what lay on the bottom, either. Brown knew that the chart guide map showed a wreck to the inside covered by a mere three feet of water, but he had no idea where it really was or what that really meant. Nobody did.
One of the few who might have told them wasn’t there. Santa Barbara diver Ben Wolfe has dived the Jalisco’s wreck probably six times. Once, he was even left stranded for a day on the Bishop Rock buoy when the current swept him away from a dive boat whose crew didn’t realize that he’d gone missing.
Wolfe and his friends still dive inside Jalisco in search of lobster, reaching as far into her decaying innards as an engine room that leaks oil to this day. She’s now in at least three pieces, and Wolfe is reasonably sure that a big portion of the concrete behemoth has been pushed just inside the surf zone. “There’s fifteen, twenty feet of water over her collapsing deck, and she’s not going anywhere,” he says. “She’s covered in marine growth, and barely recognizable as a ship.”
Worse, her concrete is breaking down, battered by waves and eaten from the inside as rust consumes her rebar like a plague of metal termites. As more concrete crumbles, more jagged rebar is exposed.
“It’s pretty crumpled down now,” he says. “And there are just a couple of portions where you can get in. When you do get in, it’s still pretty enclosed. But there are more and more holes in it—some blow through all the way inside now. You’re diving in rebar all over, and you gotta pay attention to where you’re going so you don’t get lost. When you’re inside it’s calm, but coming in and going out can be rough. It’s scary. I can’t believe guys surf out there.”
As far as anyone—even John Walla and Evan Slater—knew, only the towsurfing teams would actually be riding waves: Skindog and Peter Mel on one ski, and Brad Gerlach and Mike Parsons on another. As the watercraft pulled away from the Pacific Quest, deckhand Mike Towle’s words resonated. “Remember, everything’s big about the Bank,” he said. “And if someone needs help, keep in mind that it’s a forty-five-minute chopper ride out—and the Coast Guard won’t even bother if you’re already dead.” As if on cue, Flame, Sharp, and Natali appeared on the horizon in their plane. The weather was perfect, the view stupendous. At sea level, waves can appear somewhat flat and two-dimensional. From a thousand feet up, you could see the swells slowing and bending around the Bishop Rock, their three-dimensional spines literally tracing the contours of the ancient shoreline. Endlessly complex physics caused each to shift and warp in its own unique, almost hypnotic pattern. A mile to the north, Evan Slater’s “Himalayan” wave indeed looked like a giant volcano. It was, said Sharp, “utterly fascinating.”
Randy Laine had motored to a position inside of and directly in front of the breaking waves with his massive four-passenger Yamaha. Directly behind him sat Aaron Chang cradling a Canon with a big 300mm auto-focus lens. Laine was the first person to ever tow a human on a surfboard behind a Jet Ski. He had skied nearly every big wave on Earth, from Todos to Maverick’s to Jaws and Outside Log Cabins—and he was spooked.
Gerlach and Mel were to grab their respective ropes and surf first. There seemed two spots along the reef where you could slingshot a Surfer onto a wave. The teams approached gingerly, opting to get a feel for the seemingly safer inside sections before heading farther out. From a distance, everyone had marveled at how the waves seemed to topple in slow motion. Up close, the impression was completely reversed. Mel thought the wave moved two notches faster than anything he had ever seen.
Today, no one seems to remember who rode the first wave, but the consensus is that it was Peter Mel. Skindog picked a fairly small wave—what he later called 15 to 18 feet, in Surfer terms, but which anyone else would call 20 to 25 feet, trough to crest. He chased it down from behind and expertly piloted Pete Mel a good position.
The glider pilot let go of his tow plane. Mel made a few short S-turns to get a feel for his 7-foot 2-inch JC Hawaii. It was a little stiff, but felt gooood. The wave let Mel just kiss its lip, then Mel arced a hard angle to his left and plunged downward. At the bottom, he laid every ounce of his two hundred pounds into a solid bottom turn and rocketed back up the face. He carved the wave like a Super G skier.
Next, Mike Parsons slung Gerlach onto an A-frame-shaped peak. Gerlach faded left, turning his board back toward the descending white water to tap into the precise spot where he might harness the wave’s maximum energy, and then at the last instant, he laid a gauging right-hand slash across the wave’s face. Gerlach was a technician; he liked nothing better than to lay his board down on a rail and draw out a turn as long and hard as he possibly could. Yet he had never in his life felt anything like the power of these waves—had never drawn out a turn so long and hard. It was like snowboarding down the steepest, deepest powder run on the planet while the mountain tried to eat you.
For the moment, the surfers maintained their roles. Parsons and Skindog towed Gerlach and Mel for maybe a half an hour. Bravery increased, and before long, the boys were edging their way farther up the point toward the northernmost peak. Directly in front of the waves, Laine and Chang were scared out of their wits. Laine kept having to jump into the water to pull clogging kelp out of the impellor. Rob Brown inched his throttle forward and followed warily in his catamaran, with Dana Brown’s sportfisher tucked a little farther to the inside. Rob’s buddy John Connors was hyperventilating. “I was spending 90 percent of my morning defending the fact that we were safe,” Rob says. “He was so freaked out that I made him go sit down in the front of the boat. He was stressing me out so bad that I had a big knot in my chest.”
Of course, Rob should have listened to his friend.
Parsons hurled Gerlach onto the first wave on the northernmost peak. Gerlach charged down the line, and as it reached the inside, the wave began to clamshell above him. He was enveloped in a massive, yawning barrel. The biggest of his life. When the wave cleared its throat, a cannon blast of compressed air erupted him from its windpipe and he shot out, still standing, into daylight.
“I remember Brock [Little] telling me that he fell inside a tube at Jaws because Brian Keaulana told him to jump if he felt anything hit him,” Gerlach later told Slater. “But he was pissed ‘cause he said he probably would have made it if he hadn’t jumped. I kept thinking about that as I pumped through these blind sections.”
“Oh my God! Gerr!” Mel shouted to Skindog, who was driving their ski. “Dude, get me into one of those.”
Brad Gerlach, perfect form, Cortes Ban
k, January 19, 2001. “I wish I was there right now. I think about it so much. I wish I was there.” Photo: Rob Brown.
Rob watched Gerlach’s wave in awe. Between shots, he had been trying to figure out—as best he could—from which point he might most safely shoot. Going around to the far side of the wave and filming from the east, off the top of the reef, was out of the question. Every so often, Evan Slater’s wedge wave thundered clear into the edge of the surf zone. It was easy to see why the nineteenth-century captain of the Cortes once thought he was above a caldera.
A wave unspooled off the top of the point, wrapping onto the reef like a whistle string spun onto a lifeguard’s finger. Rob watched mesmerized as it steamed across the shallows. He sensed his boat turning a bit and looked over his left shoulder. A deep blue wall loomed above the catamaran. The wave had swung wide. It was draining water down off the reef and sucking Rob toward its maw like a black hole. He screamed, simultaneously yanking the wheel to the left and slamming the throttle forward. The boat nosed into the wave’s face and slid backward a bit, the propellers straining to gain a footing, a terrified Connors hanging on for dear life. The wave was feathering, and Rob had a moment to think, I’m looking straight up at the ocean.
The boat climbed to vertical and sailed into the air, its entire twenty-nine feet fully clear of the water. It could have come back down either way, but miraculously, it flopped forward on the wave’s backside, obliterated from view in an explosion of spray. Later, when Rob watched the last moments of the Andrea Gail in the film The Perfect Storm, he was struck with a powerful sense of déjà vu. A half second slower on the draw, and the catamaran would have been pitched backward.
A second, bigger wave loomed through the clearing mist. Brown gunned the engines and pulled up alongside Pacific Quest in deep water. Flame’s voice crackled across the walkie-talkie. He and Bill Sharp had seen the whole thing from Natali’s plane. “That’s the spot!” Flame yelled.
“I almost died,” Rob said, clutching his chest.
“That’s the spot!” Flame was nearly frantic. “That’s the wave I saw before. Tell the boys to get over there! That’s where they need to be.”
Riding together, Randy Laine and Aaron Chang pulled up alongside Rob. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Laine said. “That wave was double, triple the length of your boat. You went straight up it.”
“His big boat just looked like a tiny little Jet Ski going over a wave at Jaws—a postage stamp,” Laine told me.
Rob Brown’s gaze returned to the waves. Dana Brown’s far larger sportfisher had been allowed to drift into almost the same spot. Rob watched incredulous as another wave lumbered onto the reef. He grabbed his VHF microphone and yelled to the captain to move his ass. The boat just sat there. Then he heard the captain say, “Oh my…Oh my God!” A cloud of diesel smoke rose as he finally throttled his engines, the boat nearly broadside to the wave. It disappeared completely in the trough and then wallowed, sideways, up its five-story face.
“We’re going, ‘He’s dead, he’s dead,” Rob says. “We’re gonna have to go save these people. Then he just rolled over the top, going, ‘Uuuggggggh!!’”
Rob shouted into the VHF. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“Oh my God,” said the captain. “I couldn’t get it in gear quick enough.”
This was indeed Sunset Beach—juiced on a tankerload of steroids. At Sunset, most waves break off the northernmost top of the point and peel down from there. But some waves instead load up their energy onto Sunset’s West Bowl. There, they grow, warble, and barrel in a most spectacular and unpredictable fashion. Surfers spend lifetimes trying to get Sunset wired. This crew had a few hours at best. As the tide slackened, the best waves were now jacking up onto the Cortes Bank’s version of the West Bowl, a spot that would come to be called “Larry’s Bowl.” And they were still growing.
Aboard the Pacific Quest, Evan Slater and Captain John Walla marveled at waves that were just achingly beautiful. Eventually, Slater could bear no more. “If this was five years ago, before everyone had safety blankets,” he told Walla. “We wouldn’t think twice, we’d be paddling in, no problem.”
“Okay, let’s go have a closer look,” Walla said. He knew full well that if they paddled out, they were going to get close enough to try and catch one. It looked intense out there, but it looked surfable.
James Thompson sat on the roof of the Pacific Quest casting a fishing line. Mike Towle was behind the wheel. Walla called up to Thompson. “Hey, we’re gonna put on our suits and paddle out. You in?”
“Umm, no,” Thompson said.
Of the waves, Slater says, “It looked 15 to 20 feet, which was manageable—with the occasional 30-footer. From the channel it really did look doable.”
Slater, like Skindog, was measuring by the macho Hawaiian big wave surfer’s scale; judging the simple top-to-bottom face height, he meant the waves looked 25 to 30 feet, with the occasional 40-footer. Despite what would happen a little while on, it’s always been surprising to me that Slater and Walla’s paddle into the unknown isn’t a more celebrated event. Partly this has to do with the fact that all the focus at the time was on towsurfing, and also, in later written accounts, the modest Slater would downplay what actually happened. Yet it’s fair to say that, up to that day and at least until January 2008, Evan Slater and John Walla committed either the bravest or the stupidest act in the long, storied history of big wave surfing. Probably both.
“There’s one thing I wanna say,” says Slater in his defense today. “What we did was probably pretty dumb. It wasn’t meant to be any publicity stunt or getting attention kind of thing. Looking at the waves from the channel from the boat, it honestly—it was pretty hard to tell how big it was.”
Evan leapt into the deep water, clutching his nine-foot-eight Rusty, a big, stable paddle machine you might use for the biggest Hawaiian outer reefs. Walla followed atop a 10-foot Rich Hynson. About a quarter mile of rapidly shoaling water separated them from the surf zone. To Slater the water felt thick, foreign. “It was like the stuff they add to cling peaches,” he says. “I think it has to do with this idea that the ocean is different, denser, when it’s so cold and you’re a hundred miles offshore.”
They immediately noticed that, from eye level, the swells were steaming in incredibly fast.
The duo took up a wary position off the kelp-tangled western edge of Larry’s Bowl, alongside a baffled sea lion. There they could watch the waves from fairly close to see how they were actually hitting the reef. A medium set came through. The roar was terrific. Evil boils churned.
“We’re really whistling in the dark on this one,” Walla said to Slater.
Evan agreed. He says, “Once you got out there, you realized, not only how difficult it was to actually get in a spot to catch one of those waves, but how vulnerable you were.”
The towsurfers were a quarter to a half mile up the point. If something serious went down, and someone on a ski didn’t happen to see the paddlers—which was the likely scenario, since none of the towsurfers even knew Slater and Walla were paddling out—there was no hope of rescue by boat. Essentially and for all practical purposes, Slater and Walla had just trekked alone into an utter wilderness. They couldn’t tell where to line up, there were no points of reference, there was too much current, and the waves were far shiftier than Todos Santos or Maverick’s, seemingly bending in and almost approaching at a sideways angle compared to the North Peak—just like Sunset. Then there was another factor, not noticeable from the boat—four-foot-tall refraction waves were marching across the big waves at a perpendicular angle, putting a bizarre bounce on the water. Stroking in was going to be incredibly, incredibly difficult. But when a solid wave, 25 feet on the face, swung toward them, Walla nonetheless started paddling.
“Go, go, go!” Slater shouted.
“I was kind of in it, kind of not,” says Walla. “I was like, dude, no. I backed out.”
The leading edge of the swell’s st
eeper, twenty-second energy was sweeping the Cortes Bank and another set quickly followed. Walla and Slater paddled over the waves, exhaling through the storms of spray with a whoosh. “Next set, for sure,” Slater told Walla.
A few years after the death of Foo, and not long before his horrific knee injury at Maverick’s, Evan Slater was nominated for a “Worst Wipeout Award” at the 1997 Surfer Magazine Video Awards. He endured a three-story upside-down elevator drop to hell at Maverick’s that drew horrified gasps from the crowd and was augured to the bottom. Yet he climbed his leash, found the surface, and paddled right back out to the lineup. From that moment, everyone at Surfer regarded Evan Slater as both preternaturally calm and almost certifiably insane. I asked him what he was thinking when he took the drop, and I will never forget his answer.
“I was thinking I was gonna make it,” he said. “A big wave’s different from a small wave in that you have to start paddling so far before the wave comes. So you can’t start paddling with any hesitation. You have to know you’re going to make it. I know that sounds kind of weird, though, because sometimes you don’t.”
“Evan always eats shit,” Walla says with a laugh. “Every session. He’ll get some sick ones, but he’s always the guy who’s like, air-dropping 40-footers and getting slammed. He’s just crazy when it comes to big waves. He’s a lunatic.”
A lunatic was about to eat shit.
Slater and Walla noticed the next set. Gerlach, Parsons, Mel, and Skindog noticed it, too. It was absolutely huge. These waves seemed to be focusing on both the North Peak and Larry’s Bowl. Arms dug and throttles roared.
Slater set his sights on the first wave. He paddled like his life depended on it—since it did. Walla echoed his words—”Go! Go! Go!”—as he stroked over the top of the wave in the opposite direction. Slater passed Walla running downhill at better than twenty knots.