by Chris Dixon
Gerlach curves and closes his fingers one by one, mimicking the curl of a breaking wave, and sweeps his hand in a horizontal line. “The wave goes like this,” he says. “It moves with the bottom—follows the shallows. When you’re driving in, the focus is intense. Don’t put him all the way over on the shoulder, but don’t put him in too deep so he can’t escape. Eventually, I put him in what I thought was the right spot and let him off.”
Suddenly the wave lunged upward and Parsons was hauling ass—as fast as he had gone at Cortes, maybe faster. But because the wave was sucking water backward across the reef, it gave the strange sensation of running down an up escalator. Parsons bent his knees to absorb the bumps and simply rocketed straight on, a herd of angry water buffalo nipping at his heels. He narrowly kicked out on the shoulder. Gerlach, unable to keep up, had seen nothing but the back of the wave.
“Dude, I barely survived that one,” a hyperventilating Parsons told Gerlach. “Put me on the shoulder. I’m not kidding, on the shoulder.”
Catching the wave on its less-steep shoulder might make the ride a little less critical, but at least Parsons would be closer to the exit. He cared less about winning and more about surviving. Overhead, helicopter pilot Don Shearer saw Parsons and Gerlach gunning it for another huge wave, a tsunami. He swung into a near sea-level position while cameraman Peter Fuszard, filming for the contest, zoomed in close enough to see the whites of their eyes.
Gerlach would try the same technique. He had just enough of an angle to get the Hamster over the speeding wave’s hump so he could whip Mike in. “I was just like, okay, this is a big, big, big wave, don’t put him in too deep,” says Gerlach. “I look back to see if he’s back there and he’s already let go. There was no way, no way he should have already let go. I said, ‘dude, what are you fucking doing man? Fuck. Oh, you fucked up.’ Then I just look back at him one more time and go, ‘well, fucking good luck, man. Dig deep on that talent, buddy, and make it happen.’”
Parsons made a few tight S-turns and bent his knees deep to absorb the bumps, his board blipping a dotted line of wake as he aired over small pieces of chop. He began a brief fade back toward the left, mirroring his actions at Cortes, but realized this was not the place to fade and corrected with a quick jog back to the right.
As the wave began to stand toward vertical, swirling boils of sand were swept up into its face. The wave itself was moving at forty to fifty miles an hour and pushing directly into an offshore wind of ten to fifteen miles an hour. This whipped up an instantaneous gale that pushed against Parsons like a big hand and ratcheted up the chop. “I’m thinking, Everything’s wrong here. This is fucking it,” Parsons says. “Get to the bottom—just get down as far as you can. Then when I saw it bend at me up ahead, I just figured, Well, you’re really done. You’ve just got to go as far as you can go.”
A lifetime in heavy water and hours studying Laird and Kalama told Parsons that his only hope was to set his edge and force a high, fast line. He would attain maximum escape velocity from a critical position right at the bleeding edge where the wave transitioned to vertical. But the bumps and chatter were so fierce that he couldn’t change course. His feet were slipping and shifting. He drifted downward. Then at the wave’s base, he made a quick, conscious decision. Turn, hard. He leaned low, laying every bit of strength his 160 pounds could muster into fins and rail.
He began to turn, but at the same moment, his board unexpectedly slowed as if a hand brake had been yanked. Water had literally begun to boil in the low-pressure lee of his aluminum fins—a strange condition called cavitation. This instantaneous liquid-to-gas transition causes a sound-barrier-like shockwave along a fin’s trailing edge that in turn generates enormous drag. Had Parsons not been strapped in, he would have cartwheeled forward. He crouched deep and planed his hand on the water’s surface for balance. “I was just like, you gotta make this. Hold on.”
As Parsons slowed and was pulled toward the maw, the boiling suddenly abated and he began to drift up the wave’s face and accelerate again—very, very rapidly. He was now aimed down the line at a perfect right angle.
“I remember pulling up there and thinking, Oh my God, what are you doing? You’re pulling into the barrel at Jaws.”
The wave folded over Parsons, enshrining him in a tube about as big around as a Boeing 727. Very few humans have ever stood amid such force and survived. The eruption of mist and spray became so violent that he couldn’t see. The blast of air pressure popped his ears. A tremendous shockwave exploded toward the only opening and Parsons was lifted clear off the surface of the water. “I just said to myself, Hang on, hang on. I pointed it and just came flying out.’”
Parsons scored the only perfect ten of the competition. He and Gerlach were in first place. Despite a number of stellar rides, even by a terrified Gerlach, the pair would take second overall, ceding $70,000 to Garrett McNamara and his teammate Rodrigo Resende. Thus, it was the second wave Mike Parsons had ever ridden at Jaws, not the contest result, that came to define the day. Don Shearer has ferried cameramen above countless Jaws waves, but never before or since has a ride been captured in quite such an awe-inspring manner. Bill Sharp wasn’t at the contest, but when he saw the film, he was spellbound. “I knew instantly it was the best bit of film ever shot of surfing,” he said.
Parsons’s now iconic wave became the stupefying opener to the film Billabong Odyssey, as well as the most downloaded surfing video in the history of YouTube—with 30-plus million downloads (among the many YouTube iterations, that number is probably quite a bit higher). In fact, the clip, improperly titled “Struck in Tsunami,” is among the most highly downloaded video clips from any sport on the entire site, or it would be if it were properly labeled as a sports video. Of the clip’s more than ten thousand comments, the most common are assertions that the footage is fake and that the Surfer must be Laird Hamilton. Of course, it is neither.
Mike Parsons’s second ever wave at Jaws, January 7, 2002. A still photo of the most downloaded surf clip on YouTube and the poster shot for the film Billabong Odyssey. Helicopter pilot Don Shearer and motion picture cameraman Peter Fuszard look on from the bird’s eye position. Photo: David Pu’u.
Ten months later, on Halloween 2002, conditions looked good for an Odyssey return to the Cortes Bank. Parsons, Gerlach, and Skindog climbed aboard Pacific Quest with a small team of newcomers that included World Champ Kelly Slater and a budding Hawaiian hellman named Shane Dorian.
However, the Halloween mission to Cortes was a bit of a disappointment. The surfers found some solid 30- to 40-footers, but it had been nearly twice as big the year before. Still, it was a good warm-up for what would become another epic big wave event.
On November 26, 2002, Mike Parsons and Brad Gerlach were lured back to giant Jaws. It was the first time they’d ever seen a real crowd of towsurfers. Clearly, the increased profile of the sport was having an effect. The amped, hustling ski jockeys were yelling and cutting one another off. The surging water hummed with smoky machines and the type of competition for waves that you expected in 6-foot Lower Trestles.
Parsons thinks this is the reason they eventually chose a macker that Brad had no real chance of making. It was the first of what would seem an endless set, and Gerlach could do nothing but brace for impact. “I started deep breathing,” he says, doing a hilarious imitation of his rapid breaths. “All the people up there safe on the cliff are like, ‘Holy shit, I don’t wanna be that person.’ I don’t wanna be me right now either.”
Gerlach was jackhammered. Despite the long hold down, the life vest would, he hoped, help him return to the surface. In the meantime, should he struggle? Go with it? Just how long could he hold his breath? He tumbled and tumbled, giving himself second by second updates. He thought he had enough air, but his topsy-turvy world soon grew fuzzy around the edges. Suddenly, the boiling abated, and he sensed an opening. He stroked for the surface. The biggest wave he’d ever seen from sea level was bearing down on him. He hyperventila
ted, filling his bloodstream with fresh oxygen. “Then boom,” he says. “And these second by second updates again.”
He surfaced again, only to be smashed by a third wave, and Gerlach’s emotions shifted to a sense of sheer wonder that he was handling a beating of this magnitude with enough clarity to ponder his own mortality. Without a lifejacket he would already be dead. With it, Jesus, just how much could a human being endure? And where the fuck was Mike, anyway?
Again he surfaced, and a ski bore down. It was Kelly Slater. The world champ held out his arm. Brad missed, grabbing the rope instead. Kelly gunned the ski, pulling Brad away and nearly drowning him all over again, churning liters of seawater through his sinuses. But it wasn’t far enough. When another wave came, Kelly roared off. Brad was again alone. When he finally surfaced, Mike was waiting. Brad was so keyed up, his blood sparked and crackled so hard with endorphins, that everything seemed overexposed, white.
When they returned to the lineup, Laird Hamilton and Dave Kalama motored over. “Whooo, she gave you a little kick in the ass, eh?” Laird said. “She went easy on you then, eh? You’re back out here. Good.”
This afternoon at Jaws came to be called the “Day of Days.” Laird Hamilton was typically insane, bombing and side-slipping down monster waves at breathtaking speeds and catching huge air as easily as you might ollie a snowboard. Australian Ross Clark Jones drove through the biggest barrel Gerlach and Parsons had ever seen negotiated, that is, until Garrett McNamara then ducked into a collapsing mountain that would earn him $5,000 for the XXL’s Barrel of the Year. An eighteen-year-old Oahu kid named Makua Rothman was pulled onto the XXL’s Wave of the Year, a $66,000 66-footer that would, for the time being, tie Parsons’s Cortes world record. Gerlach was judged to have endured the year’s worst wipeout—his life being thus valued at a mere $5,000.
The super session demonstrated why there weren’t many places in the world like Jaws. For accessibility, only Maverick’s was equivalent, and even if it held more potential, Cortes Bank was, logistically speaking, several orders of magnitude more difficult. Yet the day also served notice that a shocking number of surfers were, not only willing to risk everything for a wave, but able to survive wipeouts that, on their face, appeared utterly fatal. If Hamilton and his Team Strapped friends had cracked open the towsurfing door in the mid-1990s, by winter 2002 it had been blown off its hinges. But the bottom line was, there were only so many giant waves to go around. Towsurfing contests, the regular dismantling of world records, and the resulting high-profile media attention were fueling an almost self-destructively successful interest in the sport. If any Surfer doubted this, they only had to attend raucous NOAA meetings where angry environmentalists were demanding bans on towsurfing from San Francisco to Santa Cruz—or they only had to wait until the winter of 2003–04, when the circus discovered and descended on the Cortes Bank, clowns and all.
Expeditions to Cortes Bank would soon start to become regular occurrences, yet one notable absentee was the break’s Christopher Columbus, Larry “Flame” Moore. In fact, after leading the charge in January 2001, Flame would never venture out to Cortes Bank again.
The years following the Bank’s revelation were tough for Flame. Most of his adult life had been defined by Surfing magazine and a Groundhog Day-like routine of surf, work, and family, but then he left Surfing in 2000 to help launch the ill-fated Web site Swell.com. Swell chewed through untold millions of venture capital dollars and went flat broke during the dot-com crash of 2001. Swell had initially paid Sean Collins millions for Surfline, but the savvy Collins eventually bought his brainchild back, along with all of Swell—for pennies on the dollar. Flame returned to Surfing with a job intact, but his longstanding professional relationships were strained. He lost considerable weight, his walking gait changed, and he was suddenly looking older. Stress and politics were wearing him out. He called his wife, Candace, one Saturday in late 2002 and said, “You gotta come home. I’m falling apart.”
Candace called fellow Cortes Bank pioneer George Hulse, who was still shepherding San Clemente’s growing Shoreline Church. Hulse’s one-time mentor now leaned on his young disciple. They talked for a long time. “I’d just taken a class on burnout,” says Hulse. “Larry was just going down the list and reciting the classic—headaches, fatigue, having a hard time staying focused. We prayed on it and I gave him a book. I think it was called Beating Burnout.”
For a while things seemed to improve.
“But he had told me that his headaches had been getting pretty severe,” says Hulse. “I told him, ‘This could be something physiological, and you need to get it checked out.’ Of course, we weren’t even aware of how bad things were going to get.”
Only a few weeks after he and George Hulse first talked, “it really all fell apart,” says Candace. “He’d get lost at Costco. He had this olfactory thing. When he went to work, he thought he smelled petroleum. One day he drove up on the grass and got escorted home by the police.”
On December 31, 2002, Candace and her mother checked Flame into a Mission Viejo emergency room. A brain scan revealed what Candace had feared. Larry’s skull now shared its space with an aggressive tumor—a grade-four blastoma. Even with emergency surgery, radiation, and chemo, Flame probably had no more than fifteen months to live. Still, surgery was performed, leaving a stunning scar along the right side of his skull, while chemotherapy dripped poison into his veins. The diagnosis and treatment were, of course, hell on Flame and Candace, but it perhaps most profoundly affected their son, Colin, who was not only in his tough middle teenage years but had been deaf since birth. Flame was stripped of his fine motor skills to the degree that it became very tough for him to use sign language. “The burden of parenting really fell on me long before Larry died,” Candace says.
However, for the moment and for the next couple of years, Flame battled with his typical intensity, vastly exceeding his doctor’s expectations and even returning to work at Surfing as much as he could. Flame had documented the rise of a generation of big wave surfers who would come to change the very definition of what was possible on a surfboard. His illness, though, coincided with the sudden rise of a young man who would come to eclipse anything even Flame had ever seen.
While more and more surfers were experimenting with horsepower, none would come to have a greater impact on the future of big wave surfing than Greg Long, who picked up his first tow rope in winter 2003. Long is that rare combination of seriousness, drive, and thrill-seeking guts—a younger version of and a torchbearer for Mike Parsons, his mentor. But Long has also enjoyed the serendipity of being in the right place at the right time: He was lucky enough to catch one of 2003’s most epic waves, and his Kodachrome moment became yet another reason for what happened next at Cortes Bank. Then as the decade unfolded, Long piled up the awards, records, and accolades, while leading the charge to return big wave surfing to its woolliest paddle surfing roots. He would also come the closest anyone ever has to catching and riding Flame’s legendary 100-foot Cortes monster.
Greg was born in 1983 in San Clemente, California, and his father, Steve, was the head lifeguard for all of San Onofre State Beach. Steve and his wife, Jan, raised their three children in a fifty-year-old wood-framed cottage on the grounds of San Clemente State Park. Greg’s older sister, Heather, was born in 1980, and Rusty, his older brother by two years, was named in honor of a classy Encinitas soul Surfer named Rusty Miller. Steve Long named his second son after a big wave Surfer he respected immensely, the legendary Greg Noll.
Steve planted his kids on the nose of a longboard at San Onofre before they could walk and was hauling them down to Baja to camp by toddlerhood. Rusty and Greg were soon bombing the hills above Calafia Beach aboard skateboards and BMX bikes and ducking into the strand’s thumping beach break atop boogie boards. The boys made good grades and became talented soccer players and a seemingly psychic little league pitcher/catcher duo. Heather became a stunning, fearless waterwoman.
By middle school, the k
ids were experienced free divers who knew more about the local hiding spots for lobster and corvina than the crustiest old longboarders at San Onofre Point. They also came to know, and see, the consequences of Dad’s work firsthand. The ocean can kill you. Plan accordingly.
The Longs learned to surf all of the waves that peel from San Onofre through Trestles: Church’s, Middles, Uppers, Barbwires, and Cottons Point, but the high-performance right and left peaks at Lower Trestles became the brothers’ specialty. Even on days when it seemed you could walk atop the heads of surfers to the lineup, the lean, swarthy young duo learned to slay their share at Lowers. Rusty was a quiet young Zen warrior. Greg was precocious beyond his years, regularly butting heads with guys—and girls—three times his age. “God, he had such a mouth,” Rusty laughs.
By the mid-1990s, San Clemente was shedding its image as a somewhat sleepy surf town. In 1992, Esquire magazine ran a cover story on the life aquatic of Herbie, Dibi, Christian, and Nathan Fletcher, and other locals ascended to national recognition: Shane Beschen, Chris Ward, and the big wave–charging brothers McNulty. What’s Really Goin’ On—released by a small homegrown surf company aptly named…lost—captured a hilariously and disturbingly dysfunctional surf town, portraying San Clemente as a barrio capital for hard partying new school surf punks. It was a world of drug-and-booze-fueled Jackass pranks, with kids pushing each other down a deadly hill in a barrel or lighting a buddy’s hair on fire with an aerosol can for laughs. But the Longs were not among the donkeys. “We couldn’t get away with anything,” says Rusty. “We had Dad and all the lifeguards around.”
Sounding like his boyhood idol Mike Parsons, Greg says, “Our parents were very open about partying, drugs, alcohol, and using recreationally, and how for some, it’s part of their everyday lifestyle. That was never a point for me. I wanted to be a professional surfer. I didn’t want anything to slow me down.’”