by Chris Dixon
He wondered if he would ever see a day like this again.
Rusty gazed into the deep, black abyss. Whales sang. A weird light suddenly bathed the sea off the distant Bishop Rock. A submarine? A diver? A ghost?
Rob returned to the grave of the Jalisco the next morning. They were again all alone. The waves were even bigger.
Two swells pulsed in the water—the dominant, long-period westerly and a secondary northwesterly with a shorter period. Occasionally, when the two swells reached the Bishop stair step at roughly the same time, they turned into rogues.
Rusty was in position for the first of these barn burners. It didn’t look all that big to start out, but when it slammed into the top of the shelf off Larry’s Bowl, it threw out a wondrous barrel that had the shape of an inverted horseshoe. Rusty’s 6-foot 6-inch Timmy Patterson turned squirrelly—like the speed wobbles you might get atop a skateboard. The wave clamped down ahead of him. He rocketed out into daylight.
Aboard the boat, Rob Brown reloaded his Canon with film while his buddy Jon Beachamp steadied his video camera. The Rolling Stones blared over the Worldcat’s stereo. Brad drove Mike back out to the lineup, passing the brothers as a mammoth reared up. He shouted to Greg, “Go, go, go!”
As they disappeared, Gerlach turned to Parsons and said, “Well, that was the wave of the winter.”
The brothers had switched roles. Greg plunged six stories straight down on a wave that was arguably as big as Parsons 66-foot bomb of 2001, but even steeper, more hollow. Greg had a moment to briefly contemplate boils and kelp below him. The reef, or maybe the deck of the Jalisco, was plainly visible. He felt the g-forces as he turned—the equivalent of bench pressing four hundred, maybe six hundred pounds with his thighs—and fought to hold fast to the wave’s epicenter. The wave slammed Larry’s Bowl and Greg entered a tornadic barrel, becoming utterly obscured by the spray. He was launched back into the sun.
“The wave of my life,” said Greg. “No questions asked.”
Greg Long had also just earned his first Surfer cover shot. Not bad for your first session at Cortes Bank.
Greg Long, December 17, 2003, on a wave that would land him his first Surfer magazine cover. “The wave of my life. No questions asked.” Photo: Rob Brown.
A couple of weeks later, another powerful swell lit up breaks in Hawaii, and hordes of fire breathers descended on Jaws. Greg Long’s Surfer cover wouldn’t hit the newsstands for another month, but a number of Rob Brown’s stellar photos had already been leaked by the XXL Web site. With a huge swell steaming toward California, big wave surfers were chomping at the bit. Everyone wanted a piece of the Bishop Rock.
In contrast to the silence that preceded the previous Cortes Bank mission, Sean Collins issued an alert via Surfline, and anybody who had seen the footage at Jaws knew something wicked was bearing down. The fuse was lit.
Invasion forces marshaled, and on January 12, 2004, they attacked. Maverick’s founding father Jeff Clark and Grant Washburn joined a crew of kiteboarders and Southern California big wave chargers aboard a seventy-five-foot, jet-powered catamaran called the Condor Express. The Longs journeyed with their dad, Jeff Kramer, and Bob Harrington. Rob Brown headed out with Kelly Slater and Ventura Surfer Chris Malloy. Bill Sharp lined up an Odyssey helicopter to ferry out Parsons, Gerlach, and Hawaiians Shane Dorian and Noah Johnson. Taking a commercial bird that far out wasn’t even legal.
Another seventy-five-foot boat out of Oceanside called Electra held an MTV film crew, along with Garrett McNamara and his tow partner Carlos Burle—a mad Brazilian who had eclipsed Mike Parsons’s 66-foot 2001 Cortes wave with a wild 68-footer at Maverick’s in 2002. Skindog climbed aboard the Electra with his old friend and new towsurfing partner Josh Loya. Flea and Barney joined the party. A small crew of professional freestyle Jet Skiers decided to head out, too.
Yet this swell lost much of its vigor on the passage between Hawaii and the mainland, and the best the Tanner Bank buoy could muster was 9 feet at twenty-second intervals—still good for perhaps triple overhead waves, or about 35 to 40 feet high, but half of what was expected. It was as if Bishop Rock could only muster a relatively meager line of defense against a massive array of firepower.
Overhead, the churning of rotors—a twin-engined airplane, followed by Sharp’s helicopter. Sharp was sure he imagined the music of “Flight of the Valkyries” from Apocalypse Now playing in the background. The Odysseans leapt from the whirlybird and were chauffeured over to their tiny attack craft. The battle for Waterworld began.
“It was an absolute circus,” says Steve Long.
Initial salvos were launched not by surfers but stand-up Jet Skiers, who attempted an attack equal parts Supercross and swamp buggy. They circled the lineup like Apaches attacking a wagon train, laying confused creases and chops in the faces of the waves. Parsons and Gerlach were approached by an overweight man in sweatpants and an Indiana Hoosiers jacket who rode atop what Brad called “an inner tube with a steering wheel.” “This is my first time here,” he told Brad pointing at his rescue sled. “What is that, you have some kind of pad on the back of your ski there?”
The Hoosiers fan was soon towed straight through the lineup on his knees atop a standard-issue paddle surfboard. “If I see that guy on that inner tube coming down the face,” Gerlach told Parsons. “I’m cutting him off.”
Towsurfers retook the lineup from the solo Jet Skiers, but the scene remained distressingly chaotic. Greg and Rusty Long watched in disbelief as Jet Skis ran over the heads of wiped-out surfers.
The captain of the Condor Express took up a position barely off Larry’s Bowl, a spot that had yet to show its fearsome wave, but was surely capable of doing so at any minute. When Sean Collins radioed him and said, “You’re putting your passengers at great risk,” he was ignored. A couple of wide sets thus nearly rolled the giant whale watcher. Then, during a longer lull, the Electra, a boat whose expeditionary force had been funded by Red Bull energy drinks, drifted into the impact zone. Before anyone realized it, she lay broadside in the residual white water of a broken wave.
Steve Long hailed the captain. “What the shit’s going on?”
The boat had lost power.
Long wrapped a line around a cleat and threw it to one of Electra’s deckhands. The cleat tore right off. The panicking deckhand then threw Long a line. With a set looming, Harrington feathered his throttle while Long pulled a seventy-five-foot-long boat to safety with his bare hands.
The towsurfing teams laughed and berated one another in equal measure. They were all friends, more or less, and the peaks were perfectly shaped and utterly rippable. Garrett McNamara was one part poet and one part hellman in describing the Bank to journalist Michael Kew, who was on his boat. “The kelp looked like a woman’s hair, and the submerged reef was her body,” he said. “It looked very inviting. Cortes is the place to catch a 120-foot wave—not a 100-foot wave, but a 120-foot wave. I want the 120-foot wave. That way, there’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. After surfing there, I’ve confirmed my thoughts: Cortes Bank is the smoothest and most incredible wave I have ever surfed. The biggest wave in the world will be ridden there.”
Most didn’t know it, but Garrett McNamara had actually organized a loose contest for the day. It was a sort of skins game he called “If It Can’t Kill You It Ain’t Extreme.” Each participant—McNamara, his tow partner Ikaika Kalama, Burle, Skindog, Flea, Barron, and Loya—threw a thousand dollars into a pot, and then the boys would dissect the footage later over beers to decide who won. Thus was launched a crazed aerial assault, with surfers sometimes towing at the smaller waves just to see how high they could go.
Gerlach eventually towed Parsons into a barreling beauty—the wave of the day, but really, they were embarrassed. Greg and Rusty didn’t even surf.
“You know what it is?” Brad Gerlach says. “You bought this house out in the country and you’re like, yeah. I finally found some peace and quiet. Then two years down the track they’re like, ‘We’re
going to put an eight-lane freeway through your front yard.”
Bill Sharp was more succinct. “I came to call it the Cortes Wank.”
At the end of the day, on the ride back with Rob Brown, Sean Collins sat under a black sky, in a dark mood, watching as Shane Dorian powered a Jet Ski back to land in their wake. Collins thought about how easily someone could have died out there, and he made a decision. He would issue no more public alerts of Cortes Bank swells. He would do the same with Jaws. If you understood the basics of forecasting, and knew where to look, you could probably make an informed forecast by yourself, but Collins wasn’t going to spray paint the data across Surfline’s home page anymore. Some places were just a little too sacred and too damned dangerous to bring a circus.
After Cortes in 2004, big wave surfing seemed to hit a crossroads. Towsurfing was blowing up, and every month it seemed there was a new big wave discovery. A nascent group called the Professional Towsurfing Association planned to launch a World Tour. Garrett McNamara foresaw a day when the sport would be as big as Nascar and surfers would boast sponsorships from Tide and Budweiser. In 2002, Dana Brown’s Step into Liquid landed Jaws and Cortes Bank on the big screen. In 2003, Bill Sharp’s Billabong Odyssey brought Mike Parsons’s Jaws and Cortes monsters to life in sickening detail, while in 2004, Stacey Peralta and Sam George’s Sundance darling Riding Giants chronicled the history of big waves through the lives of Greg Noll, Jeff Clark, and Laird Hamilton.
On the same swell that had spawned the Cortes Wank, forty-two-year-old Team Strapped founding father Pete Cabrinha would set a new world record at Jaws, riding a wave deemed 70 feet high. When Cabrinha won, he hugged his wife for an eternity, held the oversize check over his head, and shouted, “I don’t care what anybody says: This is a big deal. And it’s a big deal to me.”
And it was a big deal. Big wave surfers were garnering unprecedented coverage in the mainstream media, including the New York Times, NPR, Vanity Fair, Outside, ESPN, 60 Minutes, and Dateline NBC—to name a very few.
The only trouble was, all the attention and notoriety wasn’t unalloyed good news. As the January swell made clear, one thing it resulted in was more crowded lineups, and in towsurfing, this was an exponentially more noisy and dangerous situation. How long before a novice towsurfer died, or before a novice ski driver decapitated a pro? Or, for that matter, before a pro decapitated a pro? Through the mid-2000s, the question increasingly turned to asking: Who was to blame? Was it Sean Collins and his forecasts? Bill Sharp and his big money contests? Laird Hamilton and his Team Strapped towsurfers? Was it simply the magnetic attraction of the superhuman feats of Mike Parsons, Brad Gerlach, and Greg Long?
A week after the film Riding Giants was released, Time magazine published an article that gave the first hints of a theme that Laird Hamilton would faithfully carry for the next six years. In “When the Surf’s Way Up,” Terry McCarthy wrote: “Others question whether the pressure of sponsorship and competitions is pushing some big-wave surfers dangerously beyond their abilities. Hamilton, who surfed Jaws reef the same day Cabrinha set the record, thinks he might have ridden some even higher waves. But he declines to enter the big-wave competitions because he thinks they are bad for the sport. ‘I resent the whole concept of a bounty to try to ride an 80-ft. or a 100-ft. wave. You are provoking people that maybe shouldn’t be out there.’”
This point became even more personal in the provocative 2006 story penned by Susan Casey in Sports Illustrated called “The Jaws Paradigm.” In it, Laird Hamilton, and Casey herself, pointed the finger squarely at Bill Sharp and the XXL contests for what she described as “the goat rodeo” at Jaws during a massive swell on December 15, 2004. Casey wrote:
No, it’s not the desire to ride the biggest wave ever that Hamilton dismisses—it’s the fact that the bounty will inevitably attract some surfers whose main motivation is the cash. And the cruelest irony is that Jaws, his home break, is the place where the bounty seekers are most likely to catch the winning ride…
People had worried that the 100-foot wave prize (now called the Billabong XXL) would lead surfers into situations that were over their heads, and the chaos at Jaws seemed to prove them right.
Bill Sharp was also quoted in the article, and he defended the way the Billabong XXL was organized—restricting participants to an approved list to avoid this exact problem—but beyond emphasizing safety, the contest, he said, can’t police foolhardiness and stupidity. Sharp was quoted as saying, “It’s really disappointing to…see how some people have decided to be a little reckless…It’s a sport that’s just not regulated—it’s about freedom, and if someone wants to be a little unwise, it’s difficult to stop them.”
Hamilton has continued to make his argument up to the present day, as loudly and publicly as possible, reiterating it in Susan Casey’s 2010 book The Wave (on which Hamilton partnered to help her write): Laird and his fellow Team Strapped members blame Sharp for crowding the lineup at Jaws by making big wave surfing about the bounty. Emotions over these accusations run high, even to the point of alleged physical confrontation. According to The Wave, during the 2009 Waterman’s Ball, surfing’s annual black tie affair at the Dana Point Ritz Carlton hotel, Dave Kalama supposedly put Bill Sharp in a headlock, growling, “You represent everything I hate about big wave surfing.” Both Sharp and Kalama, though, have different recollections of that night. Sharp told me, “Anyone who was there knows that’s not what happened. There were no physical assaults at the Ritz Carlton. But Dave did walk up to me, shake my hand, and tell me he thought I was the biggest asshole in the world.”
For his part, Kalama said, “I think I spotted Bill walking into the room from across the way. I was a little fired up, but not in an aggressive way. I mean, I went to shake his hand and with that I sort of pulled him into a headlock—like you would with a brother or sister. I mean, I didn’t know the guy. Already I was pressing the envelope for not knowing him. And I go, ‘Look man, you represent everything I hate about big wave surfing.’ I didn’t call him an asshole. He’s got his spiked hair, and he’s just pushing it so hard for Billabong and just milking the thing to death. It was me being frisky. It just wasn’t a big thing.”
“I just don’t remember ever being in his armpit,” laughs Sharp. “I must have blocked it out as a traumatic experience. But his recollection of the discussion is right on.”
Even though this one incident was overblown, the underlying issues invoke strong feelings because surfers believe so much is at stake. The argument reaches into the heart of the sport, and even into each individual’s motivations and basic philosophy of life: In essence, why do you surf? Are you a competitive gloryhound or a soul surfer? Are you trying to make a buck—either as a mercenary or a profiteer—or are you participating in a way of life while training to have transcendent experiences few humans will ever have? Further, who has the right to promote, and profit from, the waves? The right of locals to keep their surf spots secret forms part of surfing’s DNA. Once you advertise a spot, however, what rights do you retain, and for how long?
For instance, Jaws is not a spot that you would notice from the side of the winding Hana Highway. It’s well hidden. If Hamilton and Team Strapped had never identified the location of the wave where they refined towsurfing, Jaws might have remained in obscurity for who knows how long. Yet in 1996, Hamilton, Kalama, and their friends made and released the film Wake Up Call about towsurfing at Jaws. The same is true of the Cortes Bank: If Flame and Sean Collins had kept knowledge of it entirely within their inner circle, who would have found it? Of course, sooner or later, particularly in the age of satellites and Twitter, someone eventually would have discovered and documented these waves, but maybe not. There are numerous big waves at outside reefs in the Hawaiian Islands and off the California coast that 99 percent of surfers will never know about. Indeed, Ghost Tree, a mammoth that sits right off the Pebble Beach golf course, remained an unknown wave for several years after first being towsurfed by Peter Mel and Skindog
in 2002. As such, doesn’t Laird feel like he’s also at least partly at fault by promoting towsurfing and advertising Jaws?
It was a question I asked him in 2008. “But there was no [financial] incentive for someone to go charging out there [at Jaws],” Laird said at the time, adding that Wake Up Call “was more of a documentation. What we were experiencing and what was going on. We felt that it should be shared. It was never our intention to try to monopolize the spot. The way that we portrayed it was always in awe, and in an inspired, respectful manner, is what I felt.
“It’s just that when you start promoting it in another way, then it changes the whole thing. When you start putting up bounties and stuff. Then you’re going to have guys make different decisions than you would if you’re in it just to ride it. If they’re just saying, ‘Hey, I want to go ride some giant ones,’ it seems like that mindset’s a little different than if you’re like, ‘Hey, I’m going to win this big prize.’
“It’s about your intentions,” Hamilton continued. “What are your objectives? Your reasons why? Not, ‘Oh I’ll get chicks, or it’s cool or I’ll get sponsored’—all the wrong ones. The only reason should be I love it. I have to get on it. I have to try to ride it…”
On a more pragmatic level, Hamilton added that one thing that really irked him was that—prior to the arrival of XXL-hungry crowds at Jaws—he and the Strapped crew had always been essentially a self-reliant team. With the arrival of so many upstarts, a Tragedy of the Commons scene was not only unleashed, but the Strapped crew even had to rescue surfers they didn’t know—frequently people who had no business being out at Jaws. However, he did concede that one good consequence of the XXL contests was that they would come to open up heaps of new waves across the world, perhaps taking at least a little pressure off his home break.