by Chris Dixon
After trying to scratch into a few himself, Davi realized that the only way to ride Ghost Tree today was towsurfing. He seemed amped up and agitated. If Pete Mel had been there, he would have instantly recognized why. Davi told his buddies Anthony Ruffo, Kelly Sorensen, and Randy Reyes, “I’m forty-five years old, and I want one of those fucking waves.”
Reyes towed Davi straight off a ski he was sitting atop and out onto what would be his first and only wave. It was no monster but still plenty tough to ride on an 8-foot 6-inch paddle surfboard. Ruffo was sure Davi would be pinched between white water and rocks, but Davi knew Pescadero Point like the back of his hand and rocketed safely around the corner. “Everything was cool,” Ruffo said. “We laughed about it.”
After the wave, Davi didn’t return to the lineup. Despite offers for a lift back to shore, he instead turned to make the nearly mile-long paddle back to Carmel’s Stillwater Cove, a deep, wide embayment of vicious currents and abrupt shelf rocks. He tried to catch a smallish wave into the cove by riding around the inside edge of Pescadero Point, but he went down and his ankle leash snapped, sending him onto the rocks. Without his board, he was left to swim alone toward the beach. After he had made it fairly far into the cove, a local saw him rise on a swell that was about to crash down onto a slab of reef.
An hour later, the news rippled through the lineup: Anthony Ruffo had stumbled on Davi’s body. A posse of Pete’s buddies formed a circle in deeper water off the wave’s edge and lowered their heads in Pete’s honor. Some surfers ignored the news altogether and went on blithely doing their damnedest to kill themselves—an act Davi’s friends considered a pinnacle of disrespect. After hearing the news, Parsons and Gerlach motored over into the deep water, badly shaken, and talked with several of their friends. Parsons in particular felt a painful déjà vu. Should they get out? Quit surfing? What was the best way to honor a guy they knew as a maniacal charger?
From the outside, it may be hard to fathom the reaction of the surfers that day, particularly those who didn’t even pause. Most of the other surfers, even after sending Davi their prayers, returned to surfing. Yes, the swell was a rare monster, but had big wave surfing reached such a manic, fever pitch that even death was skipped over like a boil at the bottom of a wave?
“We really talked about it,” Parsons said. “It was one of those situations where, we decided, if it happened to me, I want my friends to keep surfing. I mean, if it’s closing out at Waimea, and you decide to get out—where it’s just way too heavy for everyone—that’s one thing, but that wasn’t the case. It was huge, unbelievable, perfect. I know some people bailed who were really close to him, but everyone dealt with it in their own way. Most of the guys felt that the best way to honor Pete was to ride an even bigger wave. That’s what Brad and I decided—let’s ride one for Pete. I mean, when Andy Irons died in 2010, Greg, Shane Dorian, Mark Healey—we were all Andy’s close friends, but we still went to Cortes Bank. Andy wouldn’t want us to miss an insane day. Neither would Pete. They’d want us to pull in.”
By the time Skindog, Greg Long, and Mark Healey reached Ghost Tree, the mood among the remaining surfers was explosive and somber. Parsons eventually honored Davi by towing Gerlach into a hellbender with a barrel almost comical in scale, but every other wave, even the most out-of-control rogue peak, was spoken for. When Healey bunnyhopped an exposed boulder on a wave Greg Long hurled him onto at around fifty miles an hour, the cushion of water thrown out by the explosion was all that saved him. After that, Gerlach, Parsons, Healey, and Long packed it in and headed south toward Todos Santos.
When word of Davi’s death reached the parking lot at Maverick’s, Peter Mel, Flea, Garrett McNamara—all the guys up there—were extremely upset by the death of their friend. Flea was particularly shocked, since he’d only that day survived a wave he was certain had killed him. He would tell Pete Davi’s son Jake that he was not only certain that someone grabbed him and pulled him off the bottom, but that someone had been Jake’s dad.
A month later, Mel, Flea, and Peter Davi’s friends and family were doubly crushed when a toxicology report showed what many had quietly feared: Davi had methamphetamine in his bloodstream. Had it led him to make a decision that would kill him? No one will ever know. If any good could come out of such a tragic loss, perhaps it was the eventual redemption that would lead Flea to his own crusade to help others kick the stuff.
“That damned meth,” Mel says. “It’s just so addictive. So fucking gnarly. I mean, it caught a few of us just so off guard. When I look back, I realize how lucky I was to pull out. Because it almost destroyed everything in my life, too.”
The next morning, Greg and Rusty Long, Mark Healey, Mike Parsons, Brad Gerlach, and photographer Jason Murray reached Ensenada on their way to Todos Santos. Winds offshore would be too heavy for a session at Cortes Bank, but as the swell ran southward down the Pacific Coast, Todos Santos should be just as epic as Maverick’s and Ghost Tree. But by the time they reached the lineup at Todos, the exhausted crew was running on adrenaline fumes. Offshore, they found Evan Slater and Colin Smith, who had motored down from San Diego to paddle surf, and a few towsurfers already in the water. When Healey, Slater, Parsons, and the Longs paddled out, the verdict had been rendered: No goddamned towsurfing till the paddlers were through. “You can’t be towing through a committed crew,” said Rusty. “That’s the cardinal rule.”
Gerlach was happy to sit and watch, but though Mike paddle surfed, he wasn’t feeling it. “I was like, if I survive this, I’m good,” Parsons says. “But Greg, Rusty, and Mark—they were just in a zone.”
Greg paddled well outside. As if on cue, he managed to strong-arm onto a boiling slab that Jason Murray called 45 feet high. Then at around 11:30 A.M. , a set loomed the likes of which no one, not even Parsons, had ever seen from the deck of a paddle surfboard. Snips and Greg desperately clawed to the top of the first wave, trying to get over it, and looked back over their shoulders. They were a hair’s width away from being flea-flicked six stories straight down. “I was done after that,” Mike says. “Done.”
Parsons left the lineup, and then, Greg says, “It just got bigger and bigger. The biggest I’d seen in my life. We were paddling and I swear it was bigger than the tow wave Brad won the XXL on the year before.”
Brad agreed. This Todos swell was even bigger than the one that had produced his 68-foot XXL winner in December 2005.
Greg somehow dug into and rode a beast that was later determined to be 53 feet high. Afterward, as he returned to the lineup, another giant set loomed. Everyone went into a dead sprint, again paddling over, not into, the waves. “I was terrified,” Greg says.
Rusty actually tried to surf the second wave in the set, but he didn’t quite catch it. At approximately 65 feet, it would have been the greatest wave anyone had ever paddled into, but Jason Murray is quite sure that Rusty would have died. So is Rusty. “It would have been hideous,” he says. “I had a little guiding hand pulling me back.”
Unfortunately, as Greg feared, not everyone made it over, and Healey and Evan Slater were among a group that took a watery skyscraper directly on the head. Murray roared in on a Jet Ski to find a shipwreck zone of broken boards and half-drowned bodies.
“Everybody was sitting out the back, after that, really spooked,” says Greg, musing on this three-day run between Waimea, Ghost Tree, and Todos. “We packed it up. I went in, had a margarita, and thought about the wildest three-day swell chase of my life.”
The session was a bellwether—arguably the biggest paddle session in history—and a few things were becoming evident to Greg, Twiggy, Rusty, Healey, and the core group of hellmen who were their friends. “The idea kind of came to us—that there was something kind of missing,” says Greg. “That we really hadn’t explored paddle surfing as thoroughly as we could.”
After all, dedicating yourself to towsurfing was damned expensive, and it just didn’t get really, truly towsurfing big terribly often. If you trained yourself to hold yo
ur breath for four, five minutes, until you found the point where you blacked out; if you practiced hard-core yoga to prepare for twistoflex hold-downs; if you had a couple of towsurfing skis to run rescue—then perhaps you could both ride and survive waves now considered only even possible from behind a Jet Ski. It was, as they say, a wake-up call.
And the session really got Greg in particular to wondering: Had Evan Slater and John Walla been dinosaurs or were they actually ahead of their time? Could you paddle in at the Cortes Bank when it got big? A few weeks later, a Pacific storm forecast seemed to promise the chance he hoped for. Yet it soon became evident that maybe he shouldn’t mothball his tow surfboards just yet. Looming well out over the horizon was the greatest storm Greg Long, Mike Parsons, and indeed the whole West Coast had ever seen.
To this point, the 2007–08 winter season had produced a historic run, even if it had been marred by a death and several near-tragedies. Yet for some it wasn’t enough.
“I’m fiending—completely fiending to go out to Cortes,” Mike Parsons told me one afternoon that December. “I’m constantly looking at the sun and the conditions. I’m obsessed with it. When is it going to happen? I think Greg’s probably the most like me. We’re just wondering, why can’t the swell be today? But then you have to remind yourself, that’s exactly why it’s the coolest place in the world.”
Every day after the mist settled following that early December storm, Mike Parsons and Greg Long checked the weather models with an eye on Cortes. Then, a few days after Christmas, Sean Collins sent out the word: The models were showing that a bomb was about to explode off California in about a week.
This bomb would come to be known as the January Fourth Storm, and it developed into a once-in-a-century weather event. To this day, no one has completely hindcasted the storm to pinpoint how it originated. The variables that spawn legitimately extreme weather events are staggeringly complex and are thus almost impossible to predict more than a week out. That’s why eight or ten days before a major weather event, supercomputers owned by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, the U.S. Navy, and NOAA often spawn wildly divergent models. Yet from the moment that the first in a line of powerful disturbances began dumping copious snow on Mongolia, all three major models came into unexpected agreement: something resembling an ocean-size hurricane was loading up and aiming for the entire U.S. West Coast.
While most of the western seaboard prepared to batten down the hatches, Sean Collins found this storm tricky to forecast for the handful of surfers driven wild with excitement at the possibilities it augured. If the storm played out according to models, its massive swell seemed poised to arrive at roughly the same time as the raging weather. There might be giants, but from Maverick’s to Cortes to Todos, a thousand-mile-wide blast of fearsome winds would probably tear the waves to shreds. Western big wave surfers watched, waited, texted, and lied about where they might, or might not, be headed.
By New Year’s Day 2008, the first of three mammoth storms had wound up into a monstrous counterclockwise gyre that swallowed half the North Pacific. But unlike the early December storm, this one didn’t really become turbocharged until after it had passed east of the Hawaiian Islands.
It was the kind of storm Ross Palmer Whitemarsh or the crew of the Andrea Gail would have recognized immediately. At the steep wall separating high- and low-pressure gradients, the upper atmosphere became a two-thousand-mile-wide tornado that accelerated the jet stream to better than 240 miles an hour. The jet slithered like an out-of-control firehose preparing to lash the coast with rain and wet snow. Behind lay a tremendously unstable and far colder air mass whose thunderheads dotted the satellite map like city-size kernels of popcorn. Surface winds that ranged from category one to three in strength linked the first and second storms just as a third began to exit the Russian coast.
On Thursday, January 3, the first low roared ashore between Washington and Oregon. At the Walla Walla airport near the epicenter, sustained winds topped fifty-five miles per hour while gusts hit seventy-eight. The barometer made a remarkable drop of 9.5 millibars over the space of three hours before bottoming out at 28.93, an all-time record low pressure for the station. By Friday morning, the chaos had extended down to the San Francisco Bay Area: Howling winds uprooted ancient oaks and littered San Francisco with debris, and a record 2.1 million customers of Pacific Gas and Electric were cast into darkness. The first fatality occurred early that morning as well. At 6:10 A.M., Rosetta “Rosi” Costello was driving down a rural road near Gold Hill, Oregon, when winds blew the top of a massive pine tree onto her car, killing her instantly. Just over two hours later, a hard-core commercial diver named Todd Estrella led the rescue of the crew of a six-hundred-ton tug that had been blown off its anchorage in San Francisco’s Richardson Bay. When Estrella’s own dinghy lost its mooring, he went after it. But the tiny boat capsized in 8-foot waves. Complications from hypothermia would take Estrella’s life.
All told, the storm would claim at least fourteen souls.
Early Friday, January 4, the second low was preparing its assault on the coast. Nearshore buoys showed big, steep, and stormy waves—22 feet at fourteen seconds off Eureka—but the far stronger long-period energy—a great unknown—still lurked over the horizon. Mike Parsons and Greg Long studied the charts with a mingled sense of dread and fascination. Their initial thought was to line up Twiggy and Brad Gerlach to surf Maverick’s or maybe Ghost Tree, but they weren’t sure. The loss of the Papa buoy’s wind and swell readings meant they couldn’t be certain of the size and timing on the forerunner swells till they hit the California buoy. At that point, the swell would be a mere 350 miles west of San Francisco, less than a day away. They’d need to pull the trigger on where to go before that. As they wrestled over questions of wind and wave, they realized that losing the Papa buoy had set their forecasting abilities back a couple of decades.
Twiggy was in San Francisco, trading constant phone calls with Long in San Clemente. But conditions from Seattle to the Bay Area were going straight to hell. The storms would soon barrel in from Los Angeles clear down to Ensenada and Todos—one probably indistinguishable from the next. But then an interesting feature began to show on the wind models. It was probably a digital mirage, but still. “Get on a flight down here,” Long told Twiggy.
The moment Long hung up the phone, it rang again. Mike Parsons had one question: “Have you seen the winds?”
Long quickly phoned Rob Brown. “I want you to be on call for Cortes.”
It was at moments like this that Rob Brown wasn’t sure whether he liked owning such a bad-ass boat. It provided him with a tenuous living, sure, but dammit, he was also handcuffed to it—and to these damn big wave surfers who helped pay his bills. One of these days, they were going to kill him.
Parsons had a frantic series of conversations with Sean Collins on Friday afternoon. Normally, when winds hacked the waves along the shore to shreds, those same winds rendered Cortes Bank the wildest and most unsurfable spot of them all. But the models showed this strange fissure of calm appearing off San Clemente Island between the first and second storms. On Saturday morning, it seemed possible that the winds would rage from the south until the violent pinwheel arm of the second storm passed from west to east, pulling a northwesterly blast in its wake. Parsons needed to know: If this happened, and the windfields essentially canceled one another out, would a brief window crack open at Cortes Bank?
One part of Collins loved this, all the possibilities, nuances, and difficulties a forecast like this presented. But his dear friends were preparing an Everest summit in the midst of a hundred-year blizzard. Anyone—or everyone—aboard Rob Brown’s boat could die. Easily. He didn’t want to be responsible for that.
“There’s no doubt the swell’s big enough,” Collins told Parsons. “Ray Charles could call that one. But here’s the thing. You’re driving out into the biggest storm in a decade in a thirty-foot boat trying to tow a ski. You get out there, and say the wind
starts to lay down, it’s still going to be lumpy and crappy. If you’re really lucky, it kind of cleans up. But if the front comes through early, you’re screwed. It’s going to be an absolute hell ride.”
Brad Gerlach didn’t follow the conversation too closely. All he knew was that a big storm was coming, and if something was going to happen, Parsons would call, and the surfing would surely take place along the immediate coast. When his phone rang on Friday at his home in LA, he was thus caught completely off guard. “I want you to be ready for Cortes,” Parsons said. “It might be the biggest ever.”
Gerlach had just started dating the girl he today considers the love of his life. Aleksei Archer watched as her new beau now nervously and methodically loaded seasickness patches, jackets, leashes, and his wetsuit gear into a duffel bag and grabbed his towsurfing boards. She knew Brad surfed big waves, but she was unaware of what, exactly, that meant. As Brad methodically checked his foot straps, her eyes lit up. “Foot straps!” she said. “What a good idea. Why doesn’t everybody use those?”
Parsons then called an experienced surf videographer and friend named Matt Wybenga at his home in San Clemente. “Get your stuff together, we’re going to Cortes tomorrow morning.”
Wybenga was a bit stunned. He had been listening to tree branches snap in his yard.