by Chris Dixon
“Really?” he said. “Jesus. Well, how big is it gonna be?”
“Big,” Parsons said. “Bigger than anyone has ever seen.”
Greg Long prides himself on being as methodical as Mike Parsons. Still, how much could you really plan for a last-minute mission into the teeth of the worst storm, well, he’d ever witnessed. They had one boat, one driver/photographer, four surfers, and two Jet Skis, and that was it. No one knew any captain besides Rob Brown who could be roused at the last minute on some damn fool crusade to ferry a cadre of thrill-seeking lunatics out to Cortes Bank. Greg did know, however, that having Steve and Rusty on board would improve their odds dramatically. He drove to his dad’s house. “I want you guys to go with us,” he said.
“I’m not into it,” Rusty replied.
“You know what?” said Steve. “I’ve spent the last thirty-five years preventing accidents and shit like this before it happens. It’s too dangerous. You’re going without any kind of a safety net. You don’t have another boat or any kind of a dedicated water safety team. And you know that if it’s big, and you decide to get out of the boat, it’s going to be really difficult to do any rescue. I’m not going to sanction this trip.”
Greg nodded silently and Steve softened a bit. “Look,” he said. “You’re coming from the opposite end of the spectrum from me on this. You guys are the athletes and professional big wave surfers. I know it’s incredibly hard to sink a Jet Ski and that Rob’s boat is incredibly seaworthy. But you really need to think about what you’re doing—what you’re getting yourselves into.”
The rejections left Greg rattled. Two of the world’s best heavy watermen, his family, had just turned him down flat. So what the hell was he doing? He drove to West Marine in Dana Point and updated every item in a too-meager survival kit. Flares, batteries, first-aid gear, and for the first time, he laid down the money for an EPIRB—a satellite emergency transponder beacon. He studied the instructions for this electronic measure of last resort back at his dad’s house.
“I’m glad to see you at least got that,” Steve said.
At Mike Parsons’s tidy San Clemente home, his wife, Tara, then eight months pregnant, overheard frantic speakerphone conversations all day. Mike was flustered, and she was scared. The wind was howling, and the rain was scouring their neighborhood. Normally, you didn’t see the raw, ragged source of a monster swell in these placid southern latitudes, which always tended to make things seem safer than perhaps they really were.
There was no hiding from the potential danger this time. Ten feet of snow was falling in the Sierra Nevadas, and 165 miles per hour wind gusts at Lake Tahoe were creating scouring sandstorms of snow. Mountain rivers were overrunning their banks; normally bone-dry Southern California creeks were erupting into raging torrents and drowning stranded motorists. A levy broke near Reno, Nevada, sending icy water flooding through four hundred suburban homes.
Mike didn’t mean to ignore Tara, but she knew the drill. She had first seen this behavior in 2004 while they were planning their wedding. She needed help with invitations, but Mike was planning a mission to Cortes. Mentally, he was just gone. So this is what it’s going to be like, she thought.
Tara made a conscious decision that day. This was who she was marrying, and she wouldn’t try to change him. She says, “When he really knows a swell’s coming, that’s the only thing he focuses on. Nothing else. Nothing. The dog won’t eat. Things around him will just be…chaos. But that’s how he gets into his mode. He blocks out any fear. I have the opposite reaction. I fixate on something, and it gets worse and worse and worse in my head, and then I get panicky.”
Weather models were changing hourly. Collins was already away from his computer, chasing waves down in Mexico and coaching Parsons on the different wind forecasts by cell phone. One model showed the calm Snips was hoping for, while another—and coincidentally the one Collins typically trusted more—did not. Parsons had everything he’d need, but ominously, he carried neither an EPIRB or even walkie-talkies. Laid out instead was his own measure of last resort—a bright orange U.S. Coast Guard drysuit. It was the same head-to-toe garment worn by Alaskan fishermen, if they are granted the time to climb into survival gear before their boat sinks.
At around 5 A.M. on Saturday, January 5, 2008, Parsons gave Tara a long kiss, told her he loved her, promised he’d be careful, and drove toward Dana Point Harbor.
As the team converged on the harbor, they inventoried their surf paraphernalia. With the wind still howling, Brown realized it would be way too rough to carry both heavy Jet Skis aboard his boat. One would have to be driven. This had been done before, on the oily smooth mission of 2003, but even in the best of conditions, piloting a personal watercraft this kind of distance was exhausting. They had no idea if this was even possible. The surfers agreed to take hour and a half turns driving the Jet Ski behind the boat while cocooned in Parsons’s Coast Guard survival suit. Greg Long drew the short straw and agreed to go first.
Then, once Brown’s boat was in the water, one of her two engines wouldn’t start. As Rob sat there cursing, a weathered old man came forth out of the pissing rain. He jiggled some wires, literally waved his hand over the wiring harness, and then grumbled, “Now try it.”
The engine fired.
Long’s cell phone rang. It was Grant Washburn. He’d kept detailed swell records for all his surfing life. There had never been a bigger swell. “You’re gonna have a hundred feet at the Bank,” he said. “A hundred feet for sure.”
Parsons told Long to prepare to suffer. It was time to leave, now and under full throttle, or “we’re not gonna get there in time to surf.”
The phone rang in the Parsons home. Tara listened as Sean Collins’s voice came in over the answering machine. The winds were not backing down and long-period energy had finally stormed the buoys. Monterey Bay had hit 33 feet at nineteen seconds. When the swell raked the Tanner buoy, it would be 23 feet at nineteen seconds—two new records. “Mike, don’t go,” said Collins on the machine. “It’s not looking good. It’s going to be crazy. Gnarly. Madness out there.”
But he was too late. Six men had set out into the teeth of a mighty gale. They were tiny specks on a vast and angry ocean.
On the Jet Ski, Long did his best to stay in the lee of the Ocean Cat, but there was no shelter. He navigated as if he was Travis Pastrana on a moving motocross course, linking lumps and bumps in the air and occasionally driving straight into the water, his face smashing into the handlebars when a wave loomed higher than the ski would jump.
An hour went by. Long was due to change at twenty-five miles. An Olympic- level athlete waved down the boat. “I can’t take it anymore,” he panted.
“We’ve only gone fifteen miles,” said Parsons. “We were going to tell you to go faster.”
Long kept going, but he was delirious by the time they reached Catalina. “We’re never gonna make it,” a frightened Brown told Parsons. “It ain’t gonna work.”
Parsons switched spots with Long and straddled the ski. “I don’t wanna hear it RB. We’re going.”
Parsons suffered mightily for around fifteen miles, but as they neared San Clemente Island, the sea calmed a bit. A few miles farther, a peek or two of sun. Soon whitecaps slithered back into the sea, and the Jet Ski’s leaps into the air became infrequent. Then as they rounded San Clemente, the groundswell became a thing of wonder. Boat and ski disappeared into vast, twenty-second-long valleys. At the tops of the swells, a strange, snowy chink appeared on the horizon perhaps thirty miles distant. The white whale was breaching.
Matt Wybenga and Gerlach had both taken Dramamine, but when the boat began to plow through the long-period waves, both started battling seasickness. It was a fight Wybenga would lose.
An hour and a half later, they approached the southern edge of the Cortes Bank and were astonished. Waves were rearing up in a hundred feet of water along the entire Bank—across fifteen miles of empty ocean. They had never seen anything like this. No one had. B
rown gave the ancient shoreline below the surface a wide berth.
Billowing explosions filled the air to their northeast above the Bishop Rock. The clanging buoy, normally well clear of the waves, was being buried—just as it had in Flame’s famous photographs of the 1990 Eddie Aikau swell. Everyone was thunderstruck. Inside the broken waves stretched a murderous caldera of suffocating foam. “As far as the eye could see, it was just a huge square of white water,” says 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.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” says Wybenga. “I’ve shot waves all over the world. You could count the seconds from when you saw one throw out as it fell. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four—till it detonated. It was so loud. Then inside, this bubbling cauldron of white water. Waves were hitting and smashing into each other. It looked like death.”
“But the wind was so perfect,” says Gerlach. “It was just blowing offshore into these giant mountains and creating these giant, giant tubes. You’d look at it and you’re like, maybe I could ride that. Then it would clamshell and explode, and you’re like, oh no. Oh no.”
The water still held a mogul-field of south windswell, and some of the long-period waves literally wrapped back onto themselves like a medieval sling atop Bishop Rock. This created bizarre 10-foot-high wave trains that ran sidelong into the big sets. “We had always thought, if it’s 80 feet, it’s going to be perfect dome bowls out there,” says Parsons. “But it looked like The Perfect Storm. This was the first time out there when I was like, ‘Is that 70 feet? 100 feet? How are we even gonna do it?’ The only time I’ve ever been nearly as scared to ride a wave was at Jaws. But this—the consequences were just so heavy. We took forty-five minutes just to piece together—where do we ride, and how do we ride it? It was just so ominous and overwhelming.”
Of course, all four surfers had been mortally scared before—plenty of times. But this was something different. It was a naked, primal fear of obliteration and nothingness; like the first Kinkipar, Archibald MacRae, Rex Bank, Ilima Kalama, and Joe Kirkwood, they felt completely inconsequential and alone among these monstrous, shaggy wrinkles in the earth’s skin. Cortes Bank was huge beyond comprehension. As if to emphasize their insignificance, the possibility of actually disappearing—of capsizing or wiping out and not being found—was palpable. They didn’t need to be caught inside and then swept out into the empty ocean. They could be lost right here. One mistake, and you’d simply float in that choking, boiling nowhere until you drowned or froze to death. But they couldn’t back out. Their whale was out there. This was the hunt they’d been waiting for all their lives.
Gerlach had come this far, and somehow Parsons had always seen him through. He thought back to how unfathomable this day would have been to an eleven-year-old latchkey kid surfing sun-dappled two-footers on a Jesus board with dolphins swimming all around. Jaws, Todos, Ghost Tree—everything he’d ever seen paled compared to this. He tried to shove the fear down deep. Digging through his gear as the boat lurched back and forth brought a wave of nausea. He’d either forgotten or lost the wetsuit booty for his left foot. His front foot would not only be numb with cold, it would be loose in the foot strap. “Two wetsuits, fins, wax, surfboards, no fucking booty!” he cursed. “The biggest day of the entire fucking century and I can’t find my booty.”
Half hoping this might offer a way out, he gave Parsons a hard look. “Are we really doing this?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
Gerlach leapt onto the Jet Ski, still cursing. “Fuck, I can’t believe I went out without my booty. Fuck. Okay, it’s not my day. That’s okay. It doesn’t have to be my day. Every day doesn’t have to be my day. That’s okay. I can still be a good driver, right? I can still have fun.”
“You’re surfing first,” Parsons said.
Parsons was grappling with his own fears; life as he had known it was changing. Wondrous days of fatherhood lay just over the horizon. For the first time since the death of Mark Foo, the possibility of his own death suddenly seemed less important than the effect it would have on someone else. “I thought about Tara and our baby,” he says. “You’re telling yourself, you know, you can’t leave her.”
In a visceral way, he felt the seriousness of his responsibilities as a husband and father tugging against his big wave addiction, and yet he was in a situation where he couldn’t allow himself to think about death or caution. Doubt was as dangerous as the Bank. “The thought process, the decision to go, it’s really quick,” he says. “And you’re not thinking about dying when you’re about to ride a wave—or you’d better not be. If you’re timid, it’s gonna be worse because you’ll make decisions on waves you wouldn’t normally make. You have those thoughts and you listen to them. That’s the balance. For me, I think that the thrill—and whatever it is about riding waves that big—that still somehow outweighs the thought in my mind. I still know I can drown. But I still do it.”
“We were going to surf the world’s heaviest big wave,” says Long. “We were at a point where, no matter how big the swells were—and we’re still that way—we’re going to go out and try to ride it.”
Parsons told a moaning Matt Wybenga. “Look, I know you’re sick. I know this sucks. But just shoot everything. Because it’s gonna happen right now.”
The surfers huddled for a brief conference: Mike would man the ski, while Brad would ride the harpoon, then Greg and Twiggy would take up the hunt next. Without radios, no one would know if anyone—even Rob and Matt in the catamaran—were in trouble. “If you don’t see each other for a while, pack it up and come looking,” Mike ordered. “We’re all we have.”
As the surfers motored off, Rob Brown had a sickening realization. He would have to edge in considerably closer to have any hope of capturing a ride. But so much energy was wrapping onto the Bishop Rock that a great dome of water had literally been piled atop its shallow plateau—it was almost like a mesa of seawater, or the convex bulge when the ocean’s surface is sucked upward in the low-pressure vortex of a hurricane. The sea level simply was higher up ahead, and the ocean poured off the deep sides of the Bishop Rock as a wide, roiling waterfall. It seemed a bizarre contradiction of the laws of gravity and physics; Brown and Wybenga had never seen anything even remotely like it. “I was in thirty, forty feet of water,” Brown says. “And it was just flooding off the edge like Niagara Falls.”
“It’s so hard to explain what we were seeing,” says Wybenga. “It was just baffling. It seriously did look like The Perfect Storm. Just all this energy from the refraction building up on the rocks. It wasn’t just waves coming straight at you, but from side to side.”
Brown told a frightened Wybenga to hang on before plowing straight up onto the bizarre mesa like a jetboat pilot on the Colorado River. They were close in now. Maybe too close. Concentrating on the boat, Brown could pay no attention to the sick Wybenga, who was alternating between feverishly hot and bone cold. Occasionally, during the middle of a dry heave, he would be swept by a wave like a crewman on an Alaskan crab boat. Throughout, he was to yell up to Brown, both to alert him to threatening waves and so Brown would know he hadn’t yet been washed overboard. High atop the swells, perfect waves were crashing down in fifty-four feet of water atop the distant Tanner Banks.
“It was so radical looking when you were up there on top of a really big wave,” says Brown. “I don’t know if the guys surfing really see it because they’re concentrating so hard. But you were looking around at the entire ocean from the top of a big cliff.”
In the water, Gerlach held the tow rope, floating around nervously as Parsons idled the ski, studying the waves. Like a Pequod crewman, Gerlach had the curious sense of being both hunter and hunted. Parsons was trying to calculate where on the reef to put Gerlach—and when. He was like a skilled trapper in the forest—using every sense and a lifetime of physical memory to spot tiny tracks, snapped
twigs, a footprint in the leaves that might indicate the movement of prey. In these waves, such swirling, subtle nuances might mean life or death.
Between the lumps and the bumps, Parsons saw a wave far outside bending onto the reef. He yanked Gerlach to his feet and tracked it down. Gerlach’s front foot, his left one without the booty, was sliding around as he tried to negotiate the bumps. When he let go, Gerlach knew this was the biggest wave he had ever hunted. Long and Twiggy watched in utter amazement. “Here’s one of the best pro surfers I’ve ever seen,” says Long. “Usually it’s like he’s snowboarding—superlow and big carves. But he was barely hanging on.”
The chop was making Brad’s board chatter like the skis of a Super G racer. From seven stories up, he had an instant to weigh his options. This might be the ride of his life, but the looming route to freedom was threatening to thunder closed. Were he, say, 220 pounds, the size of Laird Hamilton, he might generate enough speed to outrun it, but Gerlach barely weighed 160. His choice was to either gun it for the bottom or give up on the wave and make a sharp turn for the top, kicking out over the lip and flying into the air before it exploded so that he landed on the wave’s backside.
Gerlach says, “I was going, yes, no, yes, no, yes…nooooooo.”
He had only ever kicked out over the top of a handful of towsurfing waves—this was going to be one of them. As he did, though, he hit a bump, flew ass over elbows, and was embedded in the wave’s lip. He paddled and kicked like Michael Phelps in a frantic effort to escape through the wave and out the back. Parsons tore in. Gerlach gasped to the surface, badly shaken.
“We’re standing on the edge of life and death out here,” he told Parsons.
Gerlach’s near miss made it clear. They should move off Larry’s Bowl and line up farther to the northeast, farther up the point—farther than they’d ever gone. They needed to straddle Bishop Rock’s mammoth head, taking a position just inside the point where the seafloor began to drop off rapidly. Triangulating based on Jim Houtz’s description and Mike’s reckoning of the buoy location, it seems they were surfing somewhere just above the point where the Whitney Olsen had first tried to position Jalisco. The waves were even bigger up there, surely 70 to 80 feet on the faces, but they were less choppy, since the waves breaking in front of them were knocking down the cross-swells.