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Ghost Wave

Page 24

by Chris Dixon


  “I was hell-bent on trying to catch it,” says Slater. “I put everything I had into it.”

  Slater was close, but not close enough. The wave, eventually, barely rolled beneath him. An old Sunset Beach adage suddenly echoed between his ears. “Never paddle for the first wave of the set.” Slater was now thirty, forty yards inside of Walla. With a dawning horror, he looked over his shoulder.

  “I paddled over Evan’s wave and there was another one,” says Walla. “It was the full thing—a seven-, eight-wave set. I was like, ‘Oh, this isn’t looking good.’”

  Each wave was successively bigger—a nightmare stairway to heaven with no end in sight. Walla and Slater broke into a full sprint, trying to clear them before they broke. Slater watched Walla grab the edges of his board and sink it deep into the first wave, a move called a duckdive. He soon followed suit. Both managed to duck the next one, too. But it wasn’t enough. The ghosts of Kinkipar understood what was about to happen.

  Out at the top of the point, Skindog hurled Peter Mel onto a massive roping wave that might connect all the way through to Larry’s Bowl and far beyond. Mel etched a series of fifty-yard-wide half-moon-shaped turns into the wave’s face, with Dana Brown’s cameraman following him closely. Slater and Walla saw Mel flying toward them. The wave reared up majestically on Larry’s Bowl, far outside of the paddling surfers. Mel was astonished to catch a glimpse of Walla far below and inside. Mel had time to think, “What the hell?” There was no way Walla was going to punch through. He ditched his board as a hillside crashed down on top of him. His fifteen-foot leash, a cord capable of supporting well over a hundred pounds, stretched like an Acme slingshot in a Road Runner cartoon and snapped. Walla was a ragdoll, but his experience was not even close to that of Slater. It’s not shown, or even mentioned, in the film Step into Liquid, but this remains the most terrifying moment of Evan Slater’s terrifying life.

  “I remember watching John punch through the lip and ditch his board,” Evan says. “He was out beyond me, and there was nothing I could do but watch the wave explode. Top to bottom, it was probably a legitimate 40-foot face. [Actually, 50-foot, James Thompson says.] It was a big wave. And you know, I’ve never really panicked before in big waves—never felt like the end was going to happen. I’ve never felt so on my own, alone, nervous, scared in big waves as I did when that wave broke in front of me. You’re a hundred miles out, and there’s a hundred different reasons I can understand why I panicked, I guess. I just remember putting up my hand halfway and yelling as the wave’s coming. It was just like, ‘Heeellpp!’”

  “I was praying for him,” says Thompson.

  The wave enveloped Slater in a shockwave of almost unbelievable force. He doesn’t know how far down he was driven, but it was surely very deep. He had no idea that a concrete ship had once met its doom out here. He curled up in a ball and tried to relax as he was blasted southward. Had he been caught in a particularly bad downward shear, skin or his leash could have been easily snagged by reef, rebar, or worse, he might have been forever sandwiched between the seafloor and a broken slab of concrete. Instead, his leash snapped and he was carried far, far inside—perhaps an eighth of a mile underwater. What probably saved him—indeed, what saves many surfers in big wave wipeouts—is the fact that guys like Slater can hold their breath for at least two minutes, and the very water that threatens to dismember you also becomes an aerated cushion. Our bodies are around two-thirds water, so you sort of become one with the molecules. After being driven deep, Slater may have actually risen back up, traveling much of the distance above sea level, spinning and bouncing like a bingo ball in the white water. Or he may have been below. Only God knows for sure. Slater wondered about his life-insurance policy. Was it up to date? Did he have enough coverage? Would he ever see Jennifer and his six-month-old daughter, Peyton, again?

  After maybe a half a minute alone with his thoughts, Slater emerged, gasping for air in a deep cappuccino foam that made breathing terribly difficult. Had the froth been any deeper, he would have been unable to inhale anything but bubbles, and he would have suffocated. Two more walls of white water swept over him, but he had now traveled so far that much of their force had dissipated. Slater was dizzy and lightheaded, but he had survived the worst.

  A badly shaken John Walla swam over to Rob Brown’s catamaran. His board was gone, but he was just happy to be alive.

  On their WaveRunners, Laine, Skindog and Mel rescued Slater and went to hunt for the lost boards. Skinny and Mel were pissed. “It would have been nice if they’d come to us and gone, ‘What’s the lineup?’” says Mel. “But they were on their own mission. ‘We’re gonna paddle. You guys be the motorheads.’”

  “At that point, I really felt like a liability,” says Slater. “We’re just, you know, creating more hazards. I thought, this is probably a good time to just watch the show.”

  Incredibly, the surfboards were found, unharmed, and returned to their owners. “I guess this is Towville,” Slater told Walla. They climbed back onto their boards and paddled over to the bleeding edge of the breaking waves to watch the greatest spectator event since Ben-Hur.

  Walla laughs today. “But Evan, he still really, really wanted to catch a wave.”

  Evan Slater (left) and Captain John Walla (right) are all smiles after nearly dying trying to paddle in at the Bank during the Project Neptune mission. On December 23, 1994, Slater and Mike Parsons pulled the lifeless body of Mark Foo from the water at Mavericks. Photo: Rob Brown.

  Meanwhile, at the top of the point, Parsons and Gerlach were having the time of their lives, oblivious to Slater and Walla’s near-death experiences. On one wave, Gerlach was pulled to his feet in time to see a huge shark swimming by, and he then became ensconced in another spinning barrel as big as a cathedral—disappearing so far back that he couldn’t see a damned thing. “There’s this feeling—that any second the wave is just going to go booooom,” he says. “And you’re gonna get drilled harder than you’ve ever been drilled before. You’re saying to yourself, ‘Make it, make it, don’t fall.’ If you make it, it’s blind luck. It’s surfing by Braille.”

  Gerlach rocketed out, so amped that he thought his head would explode. Mike Parsons had yet to get a chance at the rope. He was twitching like a junkie and about to crawl out of his skin. What if the wind comes up? he asked himself. What if I don’t get a chance to surf?

  “Brad, I gotta get a wave!” Parsons shouted.

  Not fifteen seconds after exchanging places—Brad on the ski, Mike in the water—both surfers noticed that in the distance, well off Larry’s Bowl, a big wave, a huge wave, was coming. What made it so much taller than the others is not something that could ever be definitively answered, but it’s probable that a couple of swells merged as they reached Bishop Rock at the same time. Mike Parsons was looking at a rogue. John Walla and Evan Slater saw it, too. They paddled like hell for very deep water.

  “When I saw it, before we even got on it, it was like one of those things,” says Gerlach. “I looked over it and I’m like…I didn’t even say any words. I just nodded my head like, ‘You want this thing, don’t you? Even though you haven’t had a wave yet for the day, you’re not gonna wave me off. I know you better than that. I just wanted to double-check, right?’ He gave me the same look back like, ‘Yeah, yeah. Put me on it.’ So I was like, okay. I just made sure I was real…you really have to finesse the whole getting off the ski, getting on, grabbing the rope. If you miss the rope, you miss the timing by two seconds, you have to swim to grab it back and it gets really tough. So I just made sure I finessed it.”

  Gerlach smoothly juiced the throttle to bring Parsons up out of the water and onto his surfboard and mentally calculated his angle of approach. He says, “I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m putting him on this thing.’ And it was sticking way, way up and I said, ‘Oh, yeah! The swell’s gonna kick in now.’”

  Gerlach was stoked for Parsons, but he was also covetous. A historic wave like this only comes along once, and then
only if you’re lucky, in any surfer’s life. This is how you do it, Snips, Gerlach said to himself. You fucking little bastard.

  Parsons let go of the rope, and Gerlach veered off like a fighter pilot. Parsons faded left, quickly losing sight of his old rival. The sound of the ski faded into the distance, and in a few seconds all Parsons could hear was the roaring wind and the sound of his board slightly pattering across butter smooth water. For a brief moment, the sensation was almost…peaceful. After dropping swiftly for a few seconds, though, Parsons had a disconcerting realization. On most of the waves he had seen ridden so far, you could fade a bit, crouch into a bottom turn hard enough to drain the blood from your brain, and then either line up for the best series of cutbacks of your life or thread a wormhole barrel. This wave simply didn’t have a bottom. Holy shit, he thought. This thing’s gonna drop forever.

  Parsons angled toward the right and his board began to chatter with the speed. The wave kissed the sky.

  Rob Brown was transfixed in horror and fascination. With only thirty-six shots on his camera, he had to consciously remind himself not to blow through his whole roll of film. “I didn’t have a comparison for the wave because it was so much bigger—I mean, I couldn’t even compare it to anything else,” Brown says. “The size and the sound—it was just such a leap over anything I’d ever seen. I was sitting there going click, click, click, watching the counter go down frame by frame, telling myself, ‘Relax. Mike is gonna die right here, and right now, but you’re gonna do your job.’”

  Aaron Chang and Randy Laine were directly inside of Parsons and gaped in wonder. In all their years on the water they’d never been granted a view quite like this.

  The wave threw forward an enormous lip. The concussion rattled Parsons’s brain. He was inches from death. He tried to focus on the boils in his path and concentrate on where the nose of his humming, skittering surfboard was taking him. If the wave, somewhat slowed by the Bishop Rock, was marching over the reef at forty to fifty miles per hour, Parsons was probably doing sixty-plus down its endless face, a moving slope of ocean nearly a football field in length. Maybe Parsons was going to drop forever.

  Parsons says, “I was thinking to myself, get in the right spot. Then I was just locked in. I mean I knew I was riding the biggest wave of my life, but I was just focused on make it, make it, make it. No mistake.”

  He blasted past a cheering Mel and Skindog, and then Slater and Walla—who sat in reverent awe a stone’s throw away on the shoulder. Had they still been trying to paddle in, they would have been in the bull’s-eye of a wave perhaps 70 feet high, and they would have probably died. “I think he got weeded,” Walla yelled through the torrent of spray.

  But Parsons stayed planted. To Flame and Sharp in Vince Natali’s plane, he appeared positively Lilliputian. Cheers drowned out the propeller.

  Parsons kicked off a hundred yards inside of Slater and Walla and the small gallery erupted.

  “I’ve watched and photographed Parsons since he was fourteen,” Brown says. “That was the pinnacle of his long surfing career.”

  Gerlach picked up Parsons, and they throttled back out to Rob Brown on his catamaran. “Guys, that’s the pinnacle,” Rob said. “We’ve done it. Stop while you’re ahead. Let’s go before someone dies.”

  But no way, no way, was Parsons leaving. The next set held another wave—nearly as tall. The skinny kid from San Clemente careened down the spine of another dragon. “I remember going, Wow, this is a huge one, too,” Parsons says. “Coming off the bottom, I just felt it breathing down my neck.”

  This time the dragon’s breath burned. Once the wave broke, “it just swatted me,” Parsons says. “Blew me forward out of my foot straps, straight down. I remember going, Oh my God, you’re so deep.”

  Another view of Parsons’s epic ride. “The size and the sound—it was just such a leap over anything I’d ever seen,” said Rob Brown. “I was sitting there going click, click, click, watching the counter go down frame by frame, telling myself, ‘Relax. Mike is gonna die right here and right now, but you’re gonna do your job.’” Photo: Rob Brown.

  Parsons followed Evan Slater over the Jalisco’s final runway, his eardrums ballooning inward. He had been much farther out than Slater, though, and his hold-down was much longer. Yet unlike Slater, Parsons had the great advantage of a flotation vest. Still, the wave was violent enough to rip a skintight glove right off his hand. Thankfully, his life jacket straps held. Parsons was bouncing along through the column of white water like an avalanche victim—trying to relax and concentrate on which way was up. Stars began to form in his peripheral vision. And then, just like that, he was blown to the surface. Eyes big as saucers, and with another wave bearing down, he turned to see Gerlach racing toward him.

  Brad saved Mike, but there was still one casualty. Parsons’s favorite towboard was simply gone. They searched up and down the reef on the ski. Natali, Flame, and Sharp tried to find it from the air. Perhaps it had been stuffed into the hull of the Jalisco. Perhaps it was swirling in the vast patch of foam. They would never know, though it was seen again.

  “A friend of mine who lives here in Santa Cruz named Sam Samson was on a sailboat race to Cabo,” says Pete Mel. “He saw Parsons’s board out in the middle of the ocean. The first time he’d ever seen a towboard. He goes ‘What the hell is that?’ Got a good visual of it—yellow logos and yellow rails. He was in a race, though. He couldn’t turn around. So he left it.”

  When it came time for lunch, the surfers and lensmen motored back to Pacific Quest. Randy Laine told Chang he wanted to have a look at the top peak. The swell actually seemed to be growing a bit larger, and he wanted to see just what his ski could do. He left everyone and motored a lonely mile up the reef. “I was tripping,” Laine says. “And I’m not slamming any of the guys surfing, but the biggest sets of the day actually went unridden. I’d ridden big Avalanches and Todos well over 50 feet, but this was just significantly bigger. There were some rogue frigging sets—I mean, I looked at some, and there were ones I wanted to call 90 feet on the face but you couldn’t get a perspective because no one was on them.”

  When a true monster set came through, Laine lined himself up for the second wave, gunned it, and was soon roaring along on his WaveRunner at better than fifty-five miles an hour, trying to stay ahead of it. “I didn’t realize how fast the waves really were,” he says. “I had thought previous to this trip that the third reefs in Hawaii had all the speed—because I’d ridden all of those—all of ‘em. This moved even faster.”

  The wave swallowed Laine whole. He braced himself and held the handlebars in a death grip and was bounced around like a piece of popcorn. He had time to think clearly that if he came off the ski, no one would see him and he would simply drown. Eventually, he was somehow blasted out. “It’s just a miracle I survived it,” he said. “It was a terrifying thing to realize—that even with the fastest ski, you could just not survive.”

  Parsons and Laine’s waves seemed to have broken at the absolute apex of the swell, which afterward gently subsided. The day was gorgeous and the wave faces became increasingly inviting. Skindog kept offering to tow Evan Slater into a few, and eventually the dedicated paddle Surfer relented. “It took me a while to get up,” says Slater. “But I got a couple of in-betweeners. The speed of the waves was 25, 30 percent faster than anything I’d ever seen. After fifteen minutes Skinny was over it and kicked me off.”

  “The surfing Pete and Skinny were doing, it was so ridiculous,” says James Thompson. “It was also really interesting to see their skill levels. Gerlach and Parsons were a little more conservative, sitting out the back and towing into the bombs. Skinny and Pete, though, they were going straight at 50-footers, flipping the ski around, and whipping the guy into the pocket so he had extra speed. Pete would do a carve up the face and come back into it with another carve.”

  “These swells were moving, you know?” says Pete. “Even the slopey ones, when you’re on the face, the g-forces are just
kicking when you’re doing your turns. It was pristine and blue and kind of inviting. It felt so cool. Like no other. It was incredible.”

  Mel towed Skindog into a 25-footer, a smooth-as-glass halfpipe from the top of the point. The wave wound down toward Larry’s Bowl, but rather than offering a makeable barrel, it swallowed Skindog alive and smote him with a three-wave battering that should have led to a lifetime of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sensing a seventeen-second opening, Mel rocketed in to pick him up. “Grab the sled!” he yelled. Skinny obliged and Mel goosed the throttle. But the ski’s impeller sucked in foam—the aquatic equivalent of a bad case of wheelspin. “I’m in the mud! I’m in the mud!” Mel yelled. They leapt clear at the moment of impact and cartwheeled. By the grace of God, they popped up right by the ski. The machine fired. The impellor grabbed solid water. They were gone.

  Parsons’s 2001 wave as seen from the air by Bill Sharp, Vince Natali, and Larry “Flame” Moore. Photo: Larry “Flame” Moore.

  “For me, it easily goes down as: Is this a dream?” says Skindog. “Why me? How come I’m so lucky? Some of those waves, in my head I wonder, did that really happen? I used to think that 30 foot [or what is actually 50 feet] was as big as it gets. You know, ‘cause I believe Maverick’s can get as big as the ocean will throw. But just seeing what Cortes did with the swell we got. It’s on a higher voltage. It’s on steroids. But, you know, there’s also the weather factor: Is it gonna be clean? We went out and scored an oasis. We might never get it like that again.”

  Gerlach’s eyes glaze over, lost in the recollection. “Whew,” he says. “I wish I was there right now. I think about it so much. I wish I was there.”

  “I felt weightless,” says Parsons. “I told Brad, that was it. I mean, I got the ride of my life. It just felt like that moment, that day, on that wave…I kicked out and went, That’s what I’ve been waiting for all my life.”

 

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