by Chris Dixon
Parsons had his Greg Noll moment, but rather than being sated, he hungered for more.
A couple of months later, at the first annual Swell/Surfline Big Wave Awards, photos of the winter season’s biggest ridden waves were evaluated by a slate of judges—Bill Sharp, Sean Collins, Sam George, Evan Slater, Brock Little, Flippy Hoffman, Mickey Muñoz, and photo editors Les Walker and Flame. In this raucous, baptismal incarnation of the XXL contest, Parsons’s 66-foot, $60,000 wave would defeat entries by Peter Mel, Darryl “Flea” Virostko, Noah Johnson, Jay Moriarity, and Laird Hamilton (the first and only time Laird would enter the contest). Declaring one wave “officially” the biggest on Earth is always a perilous business, especially when you have to take into account all the proud slayers of Jaws mammoths, Maverick’s mackers, and blurry Outer Log Cabins behemoths. Nonetheless, the overlords at Guinness felt sufficiently awed to declare Mike’s wave a world record.
When the dust had settled, Sharp, Flame, Collins, and Parsons took a hard look at the swell specifics from the day at Cortes. The numbers were fairly staggering. A 15- to 18-foot groundswell had produced a wave 66-feet high on the face. But bigger swells hit the Cortes Bank. Much bigger. On the right swell, the unthinkable was truly possible.
The quest for the 100-foot wave had begun.
Chapter 10:
MUTINY
ON THE
BOUNTY
“Men, this gold is mine, for I earned it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead; and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold is that man’s; and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all of ye! Away now!”
—Ahab, from Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick, 1851
It was a shot heard round the world.
On January 22, 2001, the venerable Los Angeles Times plunked down before 1.5 million readers with news of a remarkable maritime occurrence just one hundred miles offshore. On the front page, adjacent to a story about George W. Bush’s first day as president, read the headline: “Surfers Catch Monster Waves Off California.” The news was scarcely to be believed. A small team of daredevils had challenged the biggest waves ever encountered in the history of their sport in a location all but unimaginable. Yet if the words seemed sensational, a turn of the page brought proof. Mount Everest had not only been discovered looming just beyond the Hollywood hills, it had been summited the first day.
From his terrifying ringside seat, Dana Brown captured a session no less groundbreaking than the waves his father, Bruce Brown, had filmed a generation earlier at Cape Saint Francis in South Africa for the film Endless Summer. Brown and Sharp edited together some footage, and feeds were soon caroming off every TV news network satellite in the sky. It was unprecedented, death-defying, and radiantly newsworthy.
Sharp wondered, if there were occasional 100-footers atop the Cortes Bank, what other freaks of bathymetry and swell lurked just over the Malibu horizon? A “K2” reef set in the bull’s-eye of the Roaring Forties? A submarine volcano far up north? An uncharted reef off Midway Island?
His fertile mind imagined a documentary film project with a simple concept: explore the world with the best big wave surfers looking for 100-foot waves. Sean Collins could provide the forecasting, and the lineup would consist of high-profile members of the big wave fraternity: Mike Parsons, Brad Gerlach, Ken Bradshaw, Brian Keaulana, Peter Mel, Skindog, Brock Little, Shane Dorian, Kelly Slater, and maybe, hopefully, Laird Hamilton, Dave Kalama, and the Maui crew. Since Billabong already sponsored the XXL contest and its thousand-dollar-a-foot annual prize, why not suggest that they offer a half-million-dollar reward to the Surfer to ride the first documented 100-footer? Billabong wasn’t going to let a K2-size opportunity pass them by again, and they agreed. Sharp’s first working title was “Project Sea Monster,” but he soon settled on something a little more dignified—The Odyssey—creating an event and a film that sounded like surfing’s first high-dollar Homerian epic.
Bill Sharp, mapping out The Odyssey sometime in the early 2000s. Photo: Les Walker.
Sharp laid down his logic in an article in Transworld Business, the Wall Street Journal for the extreme sports set. “A lot of pro surfing is about trying to make surfing into a jock-strap sport,” he said. “The Odyssey is Jacques Cousteau meets Evel Knievel meets Crocodile Hunter meets Jackass. It’s not nearly as contrived as having a guy put on a hot pink jersey and try to do forty-seven turns on a 2-foot wave.”
Sharp raised an interesting point. Unlike mainstream sports, which are largely spectator- and competition-driven, surfing is fanatically participant-driven. Many don’t, in fact, consider it a sport at all. That’s why a substantial percentage of surfers view competition and the ASP World Tour as contrived and even antithetical to surfing’s heart, which should ideally beat in soulful communion between Surfer and wave. So even if The Billabong Odyssey was based on a somewhat outlandish premise, it was really more of a globetrotting adventure in the mode of Endless Summer than a further attempt to turn surfing into a middle-class-friendly professional sport like football or Nascar. The same was true of the XXL Awards. In fact, to prevent some renegade glory hunter from doing something profoundly stupid, Billabong’s prize money would only be offered to sixty-four surfers on a predetermined roster. Sharp intended to lionize a cadre of hellmen and perhaps resurrect a few careers in the process. It was not his intention to inspire hordes of glory-seeking yahoos—though that is what he would eventually be accused of.
“We don’t know what the limit is,” he told Transworld. “And that’s an amazing thing.”
Indeed, the waves that towsurfing made available were blowing minds right and left. The year before the Jet Ski allowed Mike Parsons to descend the tallest wave ever ridden, it allowed Laird Hamilton to conquer the thickest at a warm-water freak of nature in Tahiti called Teahupoo (pronounced cho-poo; rough translation “Broken Skulls”). At this break, swells sweep out of four-thousand-foot-deep ocean and lumber onto a five-foot-deep reef. The resulting wave doesn’t go so much up as out. On August 17, 2000, Derrick Doerner slung Laird into a flawlessly glassy warping Teahupoo barrel. Atop a dart dubbed Excaliber, and in a flouting of the laws of physics, Hamilton disappeared into a cylindrical abyss of foam and spray before being shotgunned out. The wave was so inhumanly massive and powerful that the experience of riding it reduced Hamilton to tears. Surfer magazine carried a single cover line: Oh My God.
These were the sorts of ultimate, soul-shaking encounters that surfing, particularly big wave surfing, was all about, and no one exemplified this more than Laird, who was towsurfing’s answer to Michael Jordan. His presence would be requisite for Sharp’s Odyssey project. Sharp met Hamilton and his agent, Jane Kachmer, in Los Angeles, but things didn’t go well. First, Hamilton’s sponsor, Oxbow clothing, was less than comfortable allowing their star to compete in an event so closely tied with Billabong, a competitor. This corporate anxiety could have perhaps been ironed out, but Sharp says the arrangement fell apart for a far simpler reason: With two of the bigger egos in surfing, each wanted more control over the project than the other was willing to cede.
In the years to come, Sharp and Hamilton would come to disagree over the role of towsurfing, the impact of contests and money—with the XXLs being the most obvious target—and indeed the very morality and purity of purpose that modern, hydrocarbon and horsepower-driven big wave hunting was somehow supposed to represent. Eventually their split over the XXLs in particular would grow into a mutual and at times extremely personal antagonism. Towsurfing was about to transmogrify into a Frankenstein’s monster that would threaten to ruin their favorite breaks—Jaws, Todos Santos, and Cortes Bank. Hamilton blamed Sharp for this, and when that happened, Sharp shot right back. Yet in the end, each was probably no more guilty than the other. For after seeing Parsons at Cortes, Hamilton at Teahupoo, and both surfers at Jaws, the mongrel hordes were coming whether anyone liked it or not.
Bill Sharp la
unched the first of just over a year’s worth of Odyssey missions in late 2001. While Sharp glibly proclaimed the Odyssey team the “Delta Force of Surfing,” he found that mobilizing those forces—Jet Skis, a quiver of tow and paddle boards, airline tickets, and all the related hardware needed for towsurfing—on a moment’s notice to be damned difficult. Further complicating things, despite all its satellite-assisted number-crunching, surf forecasting remained as much art as science.
Still, Sharp’s argonauts successfully chased down waves from Oregon to Chile to the South Pacific and had their share of near-death experiences. At a fearsome French beach break, Flea nearly snapped his neck after ducking under an iron curtain, while Sharp was almost decapitated by his drowned Jet Ski. Gerlach simply lost Parsons as daylight waned. “Mike was just gone,” Sharp says. “I’m going, ‘Oh my God, I just destroyed a six-thousand-dollar ski and killed Mike Parsons.’” Mike endured a relentless pummeling before Gerlach finally spotted his weak waving. Had Parsons not been wearing a life jacket, he surely would have died.
On an aerial recon off western Australia, Sharp spotted an azure mauler with an awful, spitting barrel—Teahupoo’s righthand twin. Parsons and Gerlach tentatively sketched into a few rampaging drainpipes that scared them to death. In honor of Homer, they named the one-eyed monster “Cyclops.”
When they tracked a forecasted swell at Todos Santos, they ran into John Walla. With all the excitement over Jaws, Maverick’s, and Cortes Bank, the focus of big wave surfing had largely shifted away from Todos. “We had been getting perfect glass, ceiling-high barrels to ourselves for years,” Walla says. “Then Bill and the Odyssey came out there. It wasn’t very big, but they wanted to ski. Bill wanted us out of the lineup. They’ve gotta make money—produce for Billabong. I’m like, ‘I ain’t getting out.’ Bill and I got in a huge argument.”
Walla was paddle surfing, and for reasons of basic safety and established big wave courtesy, the unwritten rule is that towsurfers generally don’t share waves with paddle surfers. If paddlers are out, towsurfers motor off or wait their turn. Yet the Odyssey mercenaries were only equipped for towsurfing, and Walla was put out to be asked to cede what he regarded as his priority to the break. He says, “I actually paddled up to Pete Mel and explained the situation. He was supercool. I’m like, ‘Hey, you’re more than welcome. I’ve got a board over there, and you guys are welcome to it. You can paddle surf all you want. But I gotta draw a line in the sand somewhere, you know?’”
In early January 2002, several Odysseans descended on Maui. Rumor was that the Tow-In World Cup Competition might run at Jaws, and they wanted to be there. While this was officially a “first annual” event, the very first tow-in contest at Jaws happened on December 26, 2000. It was a quickly organized ad-hoc event called the “Peahi Superbowl,” and first prize for winners, and Maui locals, Luke Hargreaves and Sierra Emory was pizza and beer. Laird Hamilton told Evan Slater that he and his buddies sat the event out because there was no prize money, and the event wasn’t terribly well thought out. “You can’t throw any hint of an ASP format toward a tow-in event,” Hamilton said. “Everything needs to be considered: wave selection, how you tow your partner in, how you follow him, and the line you take to pick him up. To simply judge the wave would do the sport an injustice and allow the teams to be totally unaccountable for their methods. On top of that, it’s just dangerous.”
Then the following year, a Brazilian documentary film company, Estudios Mega, put up a whopping $168,000 to sponsor what became the Tow-In World Cup.The sponsors gave little consideration to Hamilton’s ideas, so Hamilton and most of “Team Strapped”—as his fellow cabal of towsurfers called themselves—decided to sit out the 2002 event as well. The snub did not go unnoticed. Not only were Laird and Kalama towsurfing originators, this was their home turf.
“We basically didn’t support the fact that they were putting all the money on something that wasn’t quite ready for it yet,” Team Strapped crewman Rush Randle told me in an interview shortly after the contest. “We started the sport to have fun…There were people looking to say, ‘I’m the best big wave Surfer in the world. I don’t even know how to surf, but I can get towed onto a big wave.’”
Dave Kalama explained to me: “Say you and I go on a surf trip to Indonesia to find the new, greatest place, and we say, ‘Come one and come all, it’s attainable to everybody.’ I don’t think we’re putting everyone at unnecessary risk to come and surf a perfect 3- to 6-foot wave. But if we find a 60-, 70-foot wave, and we put it in the magazines, then besides, we go, ‘Let’s have a contest, and we’ll put up a hundred grand and just bring everyone down here—people who’ve never surfed the place.’…I mean, if Jeff Clark had been surfing Maverick’s for twenty years, and we say, ‘We’re gonna have a contest, invite fifty guys you don’t even know.’ I think he’d say, ‘That’s not too cool to me.’ It wouldn’t be responsible. It would be dangerous.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, even though neither Sharp nor The Odyssey were connected to the contest, Team Strapped refused to even be interviewed for Sharp’s documentary (with the notable exception of Randle). Sharp would describe the history of towsurfing in his film without a peep from Laird and Dave Kalama.
Based on Sean Collins’s World Cup forecast of big but not apocalyptic waves, Gerlach and Parsons opted not to bring the bigger boards they would have used out at Cortes Bank. But as occasionally happens, Sean’s forecast changed. It would be nuking. Despite their woefully inadequate equipment, the siren song of a long-period swell crashing over the reef at Peahi was utterly irresistible.
The pair reached Maliko Gulch, a little nook off the Hana Highway where surfers launch their Jet Skis, to find a full battle zone. Waves were washing clear up into the river, setting ski-towing trucks afloat. Some people were swept into the rocky cliffs. You’d think Mike would have learned a lesson from Maverick’s, but he and Brad were unprepared for what they saw. “There was a heaviness out there,” says Gerlach. “I was thinking, shit man, what did they sign me up for? It was very much like I imagine it would be going into war. So many unknowns. We had never even seen Jaws in person.”
They sheepishly asked around in the predawn darkness if they might borrow someone’s watercraft. A local fireman named Jay Sniffen offered a tiny, tippy two-seater, half the size and power of the ski they used back home. Chasing down a big wave with it would be damned difficult. “We called it the Hamster,” says Gerlach. “We’re feeding it carrots and its exercise wheel is our motor.”
After Parsons threaded the Hamster through a terrifyingly small hole in the surge and out into the open ocean, they puttered north for twenty minutes, arguing over where, exactly, they were heading. They finally found a small fleet of boats and skis bobbing alongside enormous rooster tails of spray. The contest had yet to officially begin, and so noncontestants, like Kalama and Hamilton, were still catching waves.
“We pulled right up,” says Gerlach. “I’ll never forget this image of Laird powering down the face—boom!—getting air. Then skipping down the face and—boom!—getting air. He looked like he was just saying, ‘Fuuuck you guys. This is myyyy spot.’ You think about your own home break and how you have it wired. That was Laird. He didn’t have a bad attitude, but his confidence and presence was heavy. It was just like, ‘There he is. There’s the King of Jaws.’”
Then they watched another Surfer skipping and tumbling down the face of a 50-plus-footer as if atop the horns of a bull. Pure carnage.
The winds were howling straight offshore, streaking and folding small creases into the silvery gray wave faces. The roar was deafening. Gerlach thought they possessed a true monster quality. He nervously contemplated riding one, thinking to himself, “No wonder they call it Jaws.”
Later, I asked Hamilton about opting out of the contest. “We rode the waves we wanted and then went in and watched the experts,” he said, laughing with sarcasm. “We just wanted to watch—to see what all the professionals were going to do out at Jaws. I
just think anytime you come down someplace, and you have no experience there, you’re not just going to step in and show people who have been doing it at that place anything tricky. Now if you have been there, learned, practiced, had the experience, put in the time, then yeah, okay, that’s a different story. Then you’d be one of the people who understand the spot—and you probably wouldn’t have participated in the circus, anyway.”
When the horn sounded, Hamilton and his buddies left the water and posted up on the cliff overlooking Jaws, unwittingly removing themselves from a monent that would become among the most iconic in the history of big wave surfing.
Parsons and Gerlach were in the third heat against Team Strapped members Buzzy Kerbox and Michel Larronde. Parsons didn’t want a warm-up wave. One wipeout might kill him, so it would be best to get it over with. “You have the pressure of everyone watching,” says Gerlach. “Then there’s the pressure of—you don’t want to kill your best friend. Plus, we had just scored at Cortes, so people are like, ‘Let’s see if these guys are the real deal.’ Eventually, I just said to myself, ‘Okay, I’ve been surfing for almost thirty years. I know how waves work. We’re gonna go out here—we’re gonna pick one and go.’”
Prior to the contest, they had studied videos of Laird and Kalama intensely. In the water, they dissected Kerbox and Larronde. Where did they line up? How did they track a swell? When did they drop the rope? Heads were lowered while Gerlach said a little prayer. “God, help us out today.”
The first wave of a new set loomed. Kerbox and Larronde throttled up and were gone. The wave was big. But Parsons had a feeling, just a weird twitch borne of a lifetime of instinct, that lurking behind was something bigger. The Hamster was too slow to simply chase a wave down from behind, so when they saw the first beastly wave, Gerlach fed it a carrot and angled Parsons to intersect it.