by Chris Dixon
Mauro laughs. “After twenty years, I had just paid for all Mike’s pent up frustrations with me.”
Sharp, Walker, and Mauro motored back that night in a light fog. They watched in awe as small spinner dolphins played off their bow wake—bioluminescent organisms turning them into sparkling purple torpedoes. “Then we just went into this area that was an electromagnetic freak show,” says Sharp. “The compass started spinning and all the electronics just went zonko.”
Walker piloted dead ahead into the emptiness and promptly freaked out several minutes later when Fried Neck Bones crossed the lingering phosphorescence of her previous bow wake. They were in a Pacific Ocean Bermuda triangle. “Then a few minutes later we just sailed out of it,” Sharp says. “You always hear stories about places with these magnetic anomalies, but you never actually expect to see one. It was terrifying. Like something out of Poltergeist.”
By fall 2005, it was clear that Larry Moore was losing his battle. Right from the moment of his December 2002 diagnosis, Flame fought his brain tumor with the same relentlessly sunny intensity he put into battling fellow photographers. He egged his doctors on, demanding more radiation, deeper doses of chemo, and risky surgery. After better than two years of this hell, he was still choosing photos—now alongside editor Evan Slater—from his old perch at Surfing. One day when George Hulse stopped in, Flame excitedly described the incredibly precise and noninvasive “gamma knife” that would be used for his next brain surgery.
Flame kept working longer than he probably should have. He started to fall frequently and wrecked his car more times than his wife, Candace, could count. Eventually, a reaction to an overdose of chemo nearly killed him. When he came home for good, Hulse became a regular confidant. “He was reaching out for companionship and friendship, and of course our Christian faith was a bond,” says Hulse. “But I mean, he had been my mentor. Had such an effect on my life. I was just humbled and honored that he reached out for me.”
They prayed and laughed a lot about the past. The memories of surfing, of course, took center stage. Hulse had first been introduced to Flame by Brad Gerlach on a perfect afternoon at Trestles. “I got a sequence in the magazine,” Hulse says. “And Brad just heckled me, like, ‘Aw man, how come I didn’t get the shot?’ Then there was a time, just Flame and I went down to this beach break in Mexico. I hooked up into a barrel—and he was right there. He goes, ‘I think that’s a cover shot.’ And it was.”
Sometime after their first trip to the Cortes Bank, Hulse made a journey out to a secret wave on the western edge of Kinkipar with Flame, Chuy Reyna, Dave Parmenter, and Gary Clisby (owner of the Pacific Quest). Everyone had been surfing well outside when Hulse noticed Flame lying on his surf mat with his head down. He paddled in and asked how Flame was. “He goes, ‘I’m seasick. I’m puking.’ I said, ‘You going in?’ ‘No, I came out here to get shots.’ So I decided to surf the inside bowl with him. I did this kind of low hook with the lip of a wave coming over me. When I made it back out, he goes, ‘You won’t believe the shot I got while I was puking.’ That was my last Surfing cover.”
Flame’s final days were, of course, hell on Candace and Colin, and Flame knew it. He had a goodly number of friends—grown-up Salt Creek rats—to help out where they could around the house, but they could only do so much. In the end, Candace’s dad reeled in much of the slack. Her father had once been a stern taskmaster, not open with his words. “But he became Larry’s appendage.” Candace says. “And the experience—it just changed him—changed him entirely. I mean, that’s what Larry did—he changed people’s lives.”
“I want you praying for my wife,” Flame told Hulse at the end. “And I want you to speak at my memorial. I want you to tell all the people there. Tell them that I know I’m going home to be with the Lord and that I’ll be okay. I want you to get up and tell them that.”
Larry “Flame” Moore died peacefully in his home on October 10, 2005, and George Hulse fulfilled his promise.
Six days after Flame’s passing, a dawn paddle out in his honor was planned at Salt Creek. The night before, lightning and thunder shook the foothills of southern Orange County, and a notice was sent out that the event would have to be postponed. Bill Sharp curses the fact that he was among those who heeded it. Yet George Hulse, Mike Parsons, Evan Slater, and a great many others didn’t get the message. As maybe 150 surfers hit the water, a hole appeared in the clouds, bathing Salt Creek in perfectly front-lit “Larry light” and enshrining everyone beneath a rainbow. “There was definitely some higher power at work,” says Slater.
The following New Year’s Day, Candace carried Flame’s ashes down to Salt Creek to cast them into his sacred waters. As she walked along the sand with Flame’s sister, Celeste, Candace noticed that they were sort of being followed by a black balloon. They walked out onto the rock jetty, which had served as a base for thousands of Flame’s photos, and released his ashes. The balloon was eventually blown out alongside them into the cold ocean. They watched it bob through the waves until it was just outside the breakers, and then it just took off and flew away in the direction of the Cortes Bank. “And we just watched it and watched it,” says Candace. “Until it was out of sight.”
A single great storm would follow in the wake of Flame’s death. It blasted across California, leaving but a small window of big, clean surf down south. On December 20, 2005, Greg and Rusty, Snips and Gerlach bounced down to Todos Santos with Rob Brown. It was shockingly big, and everyone paddled out but Gerlach, who was not too proud to admit that the very idea of paddle surfing that swell scared the shit out of him. “It was like being at a strip club,” Brad said. “Look, but don’t touch.”
Gerlach’s trepidation was validated when a 50-foot set cleared the lineup. Skis were thus fired, and Todos grew and grew, until it was performing the best impression of Cortes Bank anyone had ever seen (though Sean Collins estimated that the waves at Cortes would have been around 30 percent bigger). At around 3 p.m., Parsons towed Gerlach onto a wave that made him look like an ant on a halfpipe. The following spring, Gerlach would take home his first Wave of the Year XXL Award and a check for $68,000. He missed breaking Pete Cabrinha’s world record by two feet.
A couple of months after Brad’s ride, in early 2006, very long-period ripples borne of a distant Alaska-bound low again pulsed toward Cortes Bank. Parsons, Gerlach, and Brown found empty waves perhaps 15 to 20 feet on the face. They were all alone. “I was just putting my board on a rail at a thousand miles an hour,” says Gerlach. “It was big, it was slopey, sometimes it was hollow on Larry’s Bowl. Dream surfing. Just us, out by ourselves at our favorite spot in the world.”
They said a prayer for Flame, hoisted beers in his honor, and motored home.
Perhaps in deference to Flame, the swell window at Cortes would not reopen for almost two more years. The 2006–07 season passed without incident at the Bank, but the winter of 2007–08 opened promisingly. By late November, Hawaii had been pumping and Maverick’s had already awoken three times. Sean Collins attributed this to an intensifying cold La Niña episode. While the literal polar opposite of a warm El Niño, extreme sea-level temperature contrasts found during a La Niña can still trigger massive, violent wobbles in the jet stream. The same could be summarily said for big wave surfing that winter, which became a watershed season that careened between unprecedented highs and sobering lows.
During the last week of November, the season’s first truly great frigid blast tumbled off Siberia and was pumped up with the warm steroids of a dying cyclone in the lower latitudes. The storm wouldn’t actually begin to peak until it was due north of Hawaii. Thus, when Maui was blitzed on December 3, the swell angle was too north for Jaws. Laird Hamilton and his friend Brett Lickle instead made a stand a few miles off the coast at a pyramid-shaped wave they call “Egypt.” After Lickle hurled Laird onto a wave that he told me was surely better than ten stories tall and the biggest thing he had ever surfed, the duo was overtaken by another wave, despite motoring f
lat out at fifty-five miles an hour. They were obliterated. The aluminum fin on Hamilton’s free-flying, twenty-pound board then flayed Lickle open from his Achilles tendon to the back of his knee. Despite surfacing amid three vertical feet of choking foam that had been painted pink with Lickle’s blood, Hamilton coolly and heroically ripped off his wetsuit, then fashioned a tourniquet, swam a lonely, naked half mile for the Jet Ski, and raced back to shore ferrying Lickle before the life completely bled out of him. It was not only the heaviest session of their lives, but also a validation of the core gospel Laird had been preaching from the temple of Jaws for a decade: Big wave surfing is not a game or a contest or a lark. And it doesn’t matter what technology you have or how skilled you are, any wave could be your last.
The mammoth storm continued to develop unusual characteristics—particularly an incredibly broad wind spread that led computer swell models to paint the eastern half of the North Pacific in a great violet orb. “We had a complicated forecast for that storm,” Scripps researcher Bill O’Reilly told me a week after the storm. “You’d usually see something like that in an El Niño year, but we’re seeing a strong La Niña. I think some are still scratching their heads over how and why it developed like it did.”
A couple of days later, the storm’s swells destroyed the Southeast Papa buoy eight hundred miles northwest of San Francisco. Before Papa blinked out, he was rolling above seas with significant heights of better than 50 feet. This means that the highest one-third of the swells were around 50 feet, while a great many others, perhaps ten percent, were far larger—in the 80-foot range. According to Sean Collins, the Papa buoy was very occasionally, but most assuredly being buried by waves better than 100 feet high.
“You go out in the midst of a storm like that, and you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—those waves get in phase and you find yourself in front of the highest one-tenths—at that point you’re in a world of hurt,” said Collins. “People just aren’t usually there to see it. When they do, it’s a huge phenomenon—that’s when you have a situation like the Andrea Gail. But really it’s a common occurrence. It happens all the time.”
A giant swell like this puts Collins in a touchy situation. The first time I ever fully appreciated this strange, central dilemma of his life also happened to be the first time I ever saw a giant wave in person. I traveled out to Todos Santos in February 1999 with Collins and Surfline’s Dave Gilovich in a primitive attempt to webcast the Reef@Todos big wave contest for Surfermag.com.
Collins had been responsible for the forecasting call, but as our boat rounded the corner, we saw nothing but a few surfers bobbing off a nasty crag of rock in a serene, open ocean. Tens of thousands had been spent by sponsors and poverty-stricken competing surfers, and it was flat as a lake. The God of Surfline cursed himself, but kept anxiously repeating, “It’s gonna show. It’s gotta show.”
Suddenly—and I’ll never forget this as long as I live—a humpbacked shape appeared off the rocks. A dreadlocked South African named Cass Collier dug hard, and this wave, the scariest damned thing I had ever seen from land or sea, swept beneath him at warp speed. I had no inkling a wave could move that fast. And I had no idea a human was capable of negotiating such a roaring, beastly thing. Seeing a 30- or 40-foot wave in a photo or video is one thing. Seeing one up close, watching that spray, and hearing that primal roar is just an otherworldy experience. Cass Collier stuck his drop. Collins breathed a sigh of deepest relief and looked like he’d just ridden his own 20-footer. The contest was on.
Fast forward a decade. As a titanic swell sweeps the Pacific, Sean’s phone lights up with calls from guys like Greg Long, Mike Parsons, and Laird Hamilton, all of whom want good, big, empty waves and need his advice. Sean doesn’t want to send hordes to Jaws, Todos, or Cortes Bank, nor does he want to throw a good friend off the scent. Like any newsroom editor, Collins knows the value of a Surfline exclusive, but on the other hand, Sean has a business to run broadcasting surf forecasts to the world. If he plays up a swell too much and lineups get crowded, he might catch hell—from Laird in particular. If he misses, or worse, undercalls a forecast, Surfline subscribers raise hell because he’s “blown a call.”
The purists who hate Surfline would say that’s just as well. They blame Collins for the crowds, anyway. And indeed, I don’t pity Collins, nor does he ask for sympathy. Being surfing’s fiber-optic kahuna is a pretty decent life—something surfing’s “beach bum” forefathers could have never imagined. Consider this, however: Sean’s mania for forecasting is the result of the same gnawing inquisitiveness that led him to sit on his roof endlessly counting and timing waves with a stopwatch, to carrying a huge old weatherfax machine into the Mexican desert and juicing it with a car battery, and to the later founding of Surfline. These were pioneering efforts, and they arise from an impulse Sean Collins can’t control. Some call Sean an Ahab, but really he is no less a high-sensation seeker than any other big wave Surfer he has ever spilled the beans to or argued with. He finds the same sort of rush in nailing the forecast for a great Pacific storm as Laird Hamilton, Mike Parsons, and Greg Long do in reaping the benefits of his knowledge. Plus, Sean Collins probably rides more empty waves than you, I, or anyone we know.
On December 4, Greg Long, Mark Healey, and Pete Mel awoke to find Maverick’s enshrouded in a death veil of fog. Long and Healey had surfed giant Waimea Bay the day before and were still jet-lagged from their flight. They had been receiving regular updates from Mike Parsons, who that morning had targeted a recently discovered towsurfing spot in Carmel. The wave was another freak of nature that on precisely angled west swells shook the earth in front of a beach strewn with VW Beetle-size boulders. Amazingly, it broke within a nine-iron shot of the Pebble Beach Golf Course. The spot’s proper name was Pescadero Point, but a Carmel local and Maverick’s veteran named Don Curry named it Ghost Tree, after the bleached, gnarled skeletons of Tecate cypress that loom above the break.
Skindog and Peter Mel had been first to tow Ghost Tree back in 2002. For better than two years, everyone had managed to keep the wave under wraps—a feat on par with hiding King Kong behind a line of ornamental shrubbery. The wave promised to be every inch the equal of Maverick’s, and its discovery augured well for future finds along the California coast. On December 4, 2008, Parsons sent word to Long that conditions off Pescadero Point were sunny, perfect, unbelievable—and crowded as hell.
Long and Healey bombed south to catch up with Parsons at Ghost Tree, while Pete Mel and his friend Ryan Augustein tentatively motored out in the fog to Maverick’s. It was as mean as they had ever seen. Grant “Twiggy” Baker and Grant Washburn were also towsurfing together at Maverick’s, and they were alternating between amped up bliss and mortal terror. At one point, everyone watched in horror as Darryl “Flea” Virostko was launched by a wave that seemed to have been forged by Neptune himself. Yet everyone was astonished when Flea emerged from his wipeout not only conscious but ready to go again. He would later state with certainty that someone had grabbed him and brought him to the surface. Mel was clean and sober by this point. Flea was not. Had he not been sizzling on meth, the outcome of the wipeout might have been different. Of course, had he been thinking straight, he might not have gone in the first place. “I basically ate shit,” Flea would tell a stunned anchor Julie Chen the next day on CBS’s nationwide Early Show broadcast.Augustein soon dragged Mel onto an equally deadly wall that offered a hellish beat down. “I thought it was going to rip my limbs off,” Mel says.
At around 12:30 P.M., a rescue boat motored by in the fog, asking Mel and the other surfers if they’d seen a vessel in distress. A crab boat called Good Guys had gone down, and her two crewmen were lost to the waves.
Meanwhile, at Ghost Tree, everyone was towsurfing except for two surfers, a Monterey local named Peter Davi and a buddy of his named Anthony “Tazzy” Tashnick. Davi was one of the only surfers to ever dare paddle at Ghost Tree, and he generally took a dim view of towsurfing. He and Tashnick were stra
ddling traditional big wave guns among the watercraft-bound mob, and Davi was not giving an inch. He was big and rugged—a Laird Hamilton–size commercial fisherman whose deep Italian roots extended from Sicily to the North Shore of Oahu to the old wharves of Cannery Row.
Pete Mel called Pete Davi the kind of guy you didn’t want to cross, but if you became his friend, his generosity was literally without limit. He’d find so much jade along the Big Sur coastline that he was just constantly giving it away—even to people he barely knew. Davi had been something of a mentor to Mel, Flea, and many of the other Santa Cruz boys, paving their way onto the North Shore of Oahu. “We called him Pipeline Pete,” Mel says. “He brought me in and introduced me to all the North Shore guys you feared most in my early days out there. That was just an incredible benefit to me.”
Both Parsons and Gerlach knew Davi from the North Shore. Mike had always been particularly impressed with his charges through seemingly impossible Pipeline barrels on a bright green board. “Pete got big ones,” Mike said. “He charged. Charged.”
The morning Mike Parsons and Brad Gerlach were warily towsurfing Ghost Tree, the waves were frightful and as crowded as the worst days at Jaws or the Cortes Bank. This was due in equal parts to the wave’s stupendous barrels and the fact that NOAA was finally about to make good on a no Jet Ski policy that would extend along the California coast from Maverick’s through Carmel and down beyond Big Sur. This might be everyone’s last chance to towsurf. On their very first wave, Mike Parsons slung Gerlach onto a small “shitty” warm-up wave and Brad kicked out right next to Pete Davi. “He was just right there laughing at me,” Gerlach says. “I kind of laughed, too. Pete was a pretty cynical guy. I took it like, ‘Wow, that wave was a piece of shit. Why are you towing around catching a piece of shit like that?’”