Ghost Wave

by Chris Dixon

  Still, even if the XXLs are responsible for much of the overcrowding, is there really any genuine difference between Hamilton and Kalama’s intentions and those of Bill Sharp? Aren’t both simply trying to make a living doing something they love?

  “The difference between myself and a Bill Sharp is that I go out there and I risk,” Hamilton said. “He’s not going out there and risking. For me, at the end of the day, I feel like you shouldn’t really have much to say in the thing unless you’re willing to go out and put your butt on the line.

  “For me, the whole thing has to do with sending the sheep into the wolves’ den. It’s like, line these guys up and send them out. A lot of these guys are not qualified to go out in these conditions and surf these waves. We’ve said it before and we’ll continue to say it. This is not a game. This is not like something you just buy a license for and go out and do. It’s lifelong work.”

  Indeed, what motivates a big wave Surfer to pursue this life? It’s a question the surfers themselves often have a hard time answering. Is it possible, I ask Bill Sharp, that the lure of money is enough? Has the XXL encouraged surfers to bounty hunt for big waves they otherwise wouldn’t go near?

  “Let me answer the question this way,” Bill says, and he queues up a video that he shot in November 2008 while at Maverick’s.

  On the first wave, Grant “Twiggy” Baker paddles into and sticks the drop on a four-and-a-half-story bomb. Moments later, another wave looms, and Greg Long also bare hands it. But Long doesn’t make it. He free-falls a third of a football field straight down and skids across the water like a polished stone before taking the entire ocean on his head. In less than a second, he is driven thirty feet deep. The wipeout is so violent that Long’s aquaman lungs are almost completely deflated while an instantaneous, crushing pressure change pops one of his eardrums like a balloon. Another wave steamrolls through the lineup. Long still fails to surface.

  Shouts ring out among the Maverick’s water patrol. Below the water, Long is suffocating, and the forty-eight-degree water has induced a blinding ice-cream headache, while his ruptured eardrum has given him vertigo. He swims in confused loops twenty-five feet down, circling and twitching like a dying fish. A trio of WaveRunners roar into the seething impact zone. They have seventeen seconds before the arrival of the next wave. Groggily, Long grabs his half-inch-thick ankle leash and climbs it to his surfboard. He surfaces, but his emptied lungs will only accept squeaks of air. He weakly waves to Jeff Clark and somehow manages to grab his rescue sled an instant before the next impact. Steve Long, who’s been watching from the boat with Sharp, drops his head and breathes a long sigh of relief. The Godfather of Maverick’s has just saved his son’s life.

  Sharp asks, “Would you be willing to endure that on the outside chance that you might pocket the annual pay of a McDonald’s manager after taxes? And would you then paddle back out the next time it got big?”

  No, money alone seems a poor incentive to become a big wave surfer. There are, in fact, too many other ways to earn a paycheck through surfing that don’t involve eardrum-bursting two-wave hold-downs. At best, it seems, the promise of money could only be a partial explanation and incentive for such risk-taking behavior. Indeed, it seems to me that most of these guys—including Laird Hamilton, Dave Kalama, Mike Parsons, and Greg Long—are addicted to the life, not the livelihood.

  Then again, even big wave surfers need to make a living, and so, Bill Sharp asks, is it really fair for Laird to imply that money is no motivation for himself? While Hamilton is a highly respected surfer, one who has earned the right to speak out on behalf of the sport, doesn’t his accusation over money amount to a double standard? Sharp wonders: Why are he and the XXL surfers accused of being sellouts when Hamilton boasts sponsors from Oxbow to American Express to Davidoff cologne and has his own line of stand-up paddle surfboards? “How much was he paid to ‘pimp’ Jaws in the film Die Another Day,” Sharp asks. “Why did he split a million-dollar advance with Susan Casey to be a subject in her book The Wave. I don’t think any other surfers she interviewed were offered a bounty.

  “Asserting that the guys who surf in the XXL are doing it for bounty—or that I’m somehow leading lambs to slaughter—those are quotes from someone who either has their own agenda to push or does not have any grasp of what goes on in the mind of the big wave surfer. I mean, whether you’re Mike Parsons, Greg Long, or even Laird, you do this because you love it. If we shut down the XXL today, on the next big swell, I can guarantee you that there are going to be no fewer surfers in the water.”

  I interviewed Dave Kalama about this, and he was clearly conflicted. “We made surf videos,” he says of Team Strapped and he and Hamilton’s own role in the chaos at Jaws. “We organized Sunny [Miller] and the helicopters to get ourselves coverage. That coverage is gonna make it crowded. That’s how being a professional Surfer works. No way we can say, ‘No, you’re not allowed,’ and then we still make money off it. That would be completely hypocritical. But there’s a big difference between that and standing on a podium and saying, ‘Come one, come all.’ Throw yourselves into the gladiator pit. We definitely showcased it, but there was no money on the line.

  “When a large multimillion-dollar company says, you know what, we’re going to milk this thing for every dollar we possibly can, it changes it from an individual to a corporate thing…You take a guy like Mike Parsons—he’s fulfilling his sponsor obligations and being able to ride these big waves—that I’m willing to accept, and I think most guys are. It’s the guys sitting in the corporate offices and golfing, and they’ve got nothing to do with it, and they’re making the most money off it. That’s what rubs me the wrong way.”

  In fact, when he considers the surfers themselves, Kalama’s tone softens. “Enough time has gone by now that I can look at guys like Snips and Gerr, and I mean, I can appreciate them rather than look at them as competition. I can look at it like, we definitely started a path and opened a door.”

  Then, when Kalama discusses the current crop of new-school paddlers— guys like Greg Long, Mark Healey, Twiggy, and a Maui Surfer named Ian Walsh—his tone switches to reverence. “Those guys are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. Taking the subject matter and rolling through it with a steamroller. I’m almost glad I’m not having to do what they do.”

  For his part, Bill Sharp concedes that Billabong puts up the check because they recognize that sponsoring a major event like the XXL is a profitable business decision. But in the last decade or so—and it is something that Hamilton and Kalama help spark—this corporate interest has allowed at least a few surfers to actually make a living chasing adventure, satisfying their addictions, and blowing the minds of mere mortals.

  “The core of all of this—the core of my life—has always been about having amazing adventures in places no one has explored before,” Sharp says. “There was no such thing as towsurfing or the XXL when we first went to Cortes Bank. It was done purely for the same reason George Mallory sought to climb Everest or Laird first towed Log Cabins. We did it because it was there. We weren’t thinking, ‘Wow, here’s a wave where people can win the XXL.’ That’s beyond absurd. The XXL is a document of what’s going on in big wave surfing today. It’s a mirror on the sport, not some engine propelling it in the wrong direction. And anyone who alleges that any of the top surfers are riding big waves purely for the bounty is ignorant of what goes on in the hearts of these men—and women.”

  Like Kalama, Hamilton’s complaints about the mercenary impulse seem to be in part frustrations over the role of commercialism in surfing in general. Many surfers complain about corporate involvement in surfing, even when sponsorship is the Faustian bargain that allows professional surfers to afford to do what they do. Yet not every Surfer opts in, and the living that even the most successful XXL surfers make would be considered marginal. In 2008, I was out at Maverick’s aboard Rob Brown’s boat with Greg and Rusty Long, and I noticed that Greg had blackened out the O’Neill logo on his ga
rish blue wetsuit. One of the best big wave surfers on Earth, maybe the best, had been surfing for some time with no sponsor at all. Meanwhile, Greg was literally living in his beat up Ford Econoline van down by the San Mateo River, and Rusty was stretching a thousand dollars a month to pay for food, travel, rent, catastrophic health insurance, and gas for his rust-eaten Land Cruiser. Brad Gerlach plays music and works as a surfing instructor. Skindog hustles clothes as a representative for Volcom; the most he has ever earned from a sponsorship was thirty-five thousand dollars a year. Pete Mel puts in grueling road time for main sponsor Quiksilver, as an announcer on the ASP World Tour, and helps run the family surf shop. Mike Parsons has just left Billabong for a full- time job as manager and coach for up-and-coming pro Surfer Kolohe Andino. To some, it may sound impressive that Evan Slater was once the editor of Surfer magazine, but as any Surfer editorial staffer will tell you, the glory of the position is accompanied by poverty wages.

  If this is the income and living that the best big wave surfers can command, how much of an incentive to others can it be? Those athletes for whom money is most important choose to compete in the small wave-friendly World Tour, or they choose another sport. Unless you’re Laird Hamilton, big wave surfing just isn’t a way to get rich.

  Nor are Laird’s and Bill’s the only valid opinions on the matter. Most of the XXL surfers, not surprisingly, chafe at a suggestion that they’re bounty hunters. But it’s the ever-outspoken Sam George who gets at a truth that might, and perhaps will, make both Laird and Bill spitting mad.

  “Not everyone can be Laird Hamilton,” says George. “But I’ve seen Bill ride giant waves. He doesn’t have to prove his physical courage to anyone. You know, it’s funny. Bill would come to single-handedly create a new genre of professional big wave riders. It’s something Laird Hamilton might have done, but he didn’t. I’m not saying Laird couldn’t have, but he didn’t. And I’m not denigrating Laird or his contribution to big wave surfing. He has completely changed the sport. But the way Bill would come to revamp big wave riding—and put the focus back on it. He’s almost solely responsible for the fact that Laird Hamilton has a career in big wave surfing. Without Bill Sharp turning the world’s attention back to big wave surfing, Laird Hamilton would still be out riding Jaws. You just wouldn’t have seen him doing it on the cover of National Geographic.”

  What Sharp really did to big wave surfing, George says, and what some self-described purists consider an almost unforgivable offense, was to do away with Buzzy Trent’s enduring romantic notion that “big waves are not measured in feet, but in increments of fear.”

  George says, “Bill cut away all the bullshit and upped the ante. He said that if you rode it, it should be measured, and you deserved to be recognized. So if you really think about it, those two in the end, they’re both responsible for all this. Laird and Bill. They’re a team. It’s true. If not for Bill, there’s no Laird. If not for Laird, there’s no Bill.”

  Chapter 11:

  TRIFLING

  WITH THE

  ALMIGHTY

  “What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?”

  —Ahab, from Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick, 1851

  Following his sobering wake-up call at the Cortes Bank in January 2004, Sean Collins remained true to his word. He continued to include the Bank in his wave models, but he, and everyone who went out there, basically quit talking about it. The change was stunning.

  Greg Long and Grant “Twiggy” Baker stare into the abyss at the Cortes Bank on the Everest expedition, January 5, 2008. The wave ahead of them is easily higher than 80 feet. “As far as the eye could see, it was just a huge square of whitewater,” said Twiggy. “If you lost your guy in there, he was just gone. He would have been lost in that expanse, and you’d never find him. It was just so scary.” Photo: Rob Brown.

  It wasn’t like Collins was the only one who knew how to stitch chart data together. Anyone could have made reasonable predictions of the winds and conditions with a little effort. It’s thus downright amazing to consider that between 2004 and 2008, only eight to ten surfers ventured out to the Cortes Bank. Perhaps seventy-five people and athletes showed up in a single day in January 2004, and perhaps two million surfers live within a hundred miles of the Cortes Bank. It wasn’t like big wave surfing suddenly became unpopular, or the XXL contests were canceled. Billabong’s half-million-dollar prize for the first person to ride a 100-foot wave still stood, awaiting a taker. The sudden lack of surfers at Cortes, then, would seem to underscore a few simple facts: Without a heaping dose of spoon-fed data, an ability to quickly leap through a small open window of opportunity, a captain who knows the waters, and cojones the size of boulders, the Bank is just one of the most dangerous, difficult places on Earth to ride a wave.

  The surfers who did venture out were, and largely are, part of Sean Collins’s inner circle: Gerlach and Parsons, the Long brothers, and a small smattering of Hawaiians. Collins continued to make less-obvious forecasts for Jaws, and the break eventually became somewhat less crowded. Even without surf alerts, Jaws remained a whole lot easier to access, while the Bank became a sort of private terrordome.

  In fall 2004, nine or so months after January’s Cortes Wank, the first secret Bank mission was launched, and it included Steve Long, Bob Harrington, Greg and Rusty Long, Mike Parsons, Brad Gerlach, and Rob Brown. The swell was enormous and the weather perfect as their two boats rounded Catalina. But just off San Clemente, the teams disappeared into a thousand-mile-wide bowl of pea soup fog. The journey became a chilling trip into inner space. Steve Long and Harrington tried to give the entire Bank a wide berth, but huge swells do strange things when they interact with a fourteen-mile-long mountain. All around Bishop Rock, there was foam from broken waves scattered across the sea surface, and deep thunderclaps from unseen breakers. Steve had nightmarish visions of rogues rampaging over the boat from deep in the mist. “It was just giant,” he says. “We were scared shitless. We got separated from Rob and his boat and never found them again.”

  Steve Long and Bob Harrington turned back.

  Meanwhile, Rob Brown’s hunting party—Mike, Brad, Rusty, and Greg—motored in close to Larry’s Bowl. The waves were so big and their detonations churned so much air that they created a small circle of clear weather above the impact zone—something like the effect of a cold downdraft at the base of a foggy glacier. Once on a wave, you’d be able to see, but it was too foggy to track the sets as they approached or estimate how big they really were. You might be sitting way out there, with Phantom of the Opera pipe organs playing in the background, when a 60- or 70-footer stormed in before you even had a chance to react. Caught inside, you’d be pushed into the foam and then disappear into the fog—where you might simply never be found.

  As Bob Parsons might have said, Mike and his friends were brave, but they weren’t foolish. No one left the boat.

  In late February 2005, a tightly wound fifty- to sixty-knot storm swept across the Pacific. A small cluster of larger boats reached Bishop Rock carry- ing Rob Brown, Sean Collins, Mike Parsons, Brad Gerlach, Greg and Rusty Long, Brazilian fiend Carlos Burle, and a young Hawaiian named Jamie Sterling. Cortes was in a foul mood. A stiff, frigid breeze blew from the northwest, turning the ocean gloomy, lumpy, and mean.

  Bill Sharp was also there, having hitched a ride with an audacious good ol’ boy surf photographer named Les Walker aboard a tiny twenty-one-foot bass boat that Walker had christened Fried Neck Bones. The boat was a dinghy compared to Rob Brown’s bomb chaser and far, far too small to safely make such a journey, but she held ample gasoline and beer. In addition, Surfer magazine’s newly minted editor, and Parsons’s boyhood chum Chris Mauro, had begged for, and was given, a sp
ot on board.

  The first twenty-second waves staggered across Bishop Rock at around 10 A.M. The winds briefly laid down long enough to lure everyone out, then they turned back on, offering a 60-foot-high mogul field of nightmares. “It was the fucking real deal,” Sharp says.

  Everyone was towsurfing. Gerlach and Parsons traded big, open-faced turns while Greg pulled Rusty onto a horrendous barreling thing that sucked Rusty over the falls and drove him down painfully deep. Rusty called it quits.

  A crew of documentary filmmakers hired by Red Bull convinced Jamie Sterling to don a helmet cam. (The forecasts might have been private, but the results of Cortes missions were still invaluable editorial property.) The goofyfoot struggled to hold a terrifically difficult backside line through the chop. His reward was a forty-five-knot face-plant and a trip through the meat grinder. The camera was gone.

  Parsons idled over on a Jet Ski and ordered Mauro to take the tow rope. Chris was terror-stricken. He’d only come to watch and report for the magazine. He’d never seen Cortes Bank or even towsurfed before.

  Parsons wasn’t trying to terrify Mauro. He simply, sincerely wanted his old friend to experience the grand magic up close. That didn’t stop Mauro from experiencing a frightful déjà vu he’d not felt since Mike ordered him out into huge, predawn Sunset Beach as a kid. After Mauro strapped in, Parsons first tried to set him up for a tough, slingshot whip from behind the ski. Mauro instead dropped the rope and saluted his old mentor with two raised middle fingers. With feet still strapped to the board, he slowly sank to his chest. “I’m out here alone at Cortes, flipping off Mike, and sinking in the middle of a fricking set,” he says.

  Snips gave Mauro just enough time to stare death in the eye before hauling him out and tracking down a somewhat smaller wave. He would ease Mauro in from behind onto what was still the biggest wave of his life. When “Sis” let go of the rope, he thought he was fine—for a moment—then the wave stacked to vertical on Larry’s Bowl and launched Mauro into space. He hit the water like a slab of steak chucked onto a sidewalk before being buried alive. Chris was no longer a full-time surfer. He was a desk jockey. An editor. He had a little baby. As he tumbled and rolled, he thought, What the hell am I doing?