by Chris Dixon
Now it was Long and Twiggy’s turn, and they started arguing over who would surf first. This itself wasn’t unusual; they were both always so amped to surf, each wanted priority. Yet after watching Gerlach’s kick out, that argument was turned on its head.
“You’re surfing first,” said Long.
“I went first the last time, in South Africa” said Twiggy.
“No, I did,” said Long. “And I know this break.”
“You’ve never fucking surfed when it was like this,” said Twiggy. “You go first.”
“I say it’s my ski and you can get fucked,” said Long. “You’re going first.”
Twiggy took the rope and ordered Long to drop him on the shoulder of his first wave ever at the Cortes Bank—on the shoulder. Baker was fighting off nightmare visions of being lost in that abyss of foam. At first, it seemed like Greg had chosen well. He hurled Twig onto an endlessly long, slopey beast. But the refractions and the strange, Jalisco-straddled shelf atop Bishop Rock turned what seemed like a makeable wave into its opposite. After ten seconds of bliss, Twiggy was suddenly skateboarding down a 70-foot vertical rollercoaster. Senses crackled. He felt everything—the minute ripples on the water, the unbelievable speed, the jet of wind in his ears, and the deafening roar at his heels. The present stretched out forever, then in an instant it was over. He kicked out after a half mile, gliding up and over the shoulder of the wave to gently come to a stop on its back. A minute or so later, he suddenly couldn’t catch his breath, and he started dry heaving. What the hell is going on? he thought.
“It’s basically an adrenaline overdose,” Long explains. “Twiggy had heard it could happen, and I went back and read up on it. Heavy drug users have the same thing.”
“Every wave I had the dry heaves,” Twiggy adds. “Every fucking wave.”
The water was indeed smoother at the top of the point. Parsons and Long slowly round-robined their friends into a few more, playing it as safe as they could. Gerlach tried a carve or two, but man, that was scary. Better to just point it and run like hell for the exit at fifty-five miles an hour.
“It really feels a lot like flying,” says Gerlach. “But then it’s like riding a motorcycle over some big fucking bumps and then down a gnarly hill and then going off a big jump—but there’s a monster chasing you, too. So it’s not like you can do the jump and then just pull over and pop a beer. And it burns your fucking legs man. At the end of one of those waves, your legs were just burning.”
Twiggy compares it to snowboarding, but “snowboarding, you can stop and say, ‘There’s a rock there and there. I’m gonna have to right, then left, then shoot straight down.’ Surfing these waves, you’re making all those little decisions in a fraction of a second.”
In the ensuing hour, the tide drained off a bit, the wind-chop waned, and the huge refraction waves became less pronounced. The waves also began to break in a somewhat more predictable fashion. Everyone watched awestruck as a single, butter-smooth rogue peak detonated even farther outside. It was terrible and wondrous, easily better than 100 feet high. It hurled forth an arcing, almond-shaped cerulean barrel—utterly symmetrical and with perhaps six stories of hanger space inside. As it roared down the reef like a Saturn V rocket, the spray was surely 150, 175 feet high. “Oh my God,” recalled Parsons. “It was just the biggest, the best wave I ever saw.”
The swell was still building when Gerlach dropped Parsons onto a mere 65-footer. It was Mike’s first ride, and it lasted nearly a minute. His second one, too. Some of the longer ones—they traveled better than a mile from start to finish and actually seemed like they would simply unfold and roll along the entire Bank without ever offering an opportunity to escape. It was hell and heaven all rolled into one.
After another half hour of working out the jitters, the surfers began to recognize the patterns in the sets: how often they arrived, where to line up with the boils and the occasionally visible buoy. Some waves were certainly hitting something—on the inside. As a wave rolled in, boom, a massive, spitting geyser would explode straight up into the air. The fear of being shoved into that violent explosion was at least somewhat subsumed by the delicious harpooner’s cocktail they were now experiencing—that longed-for rush of adrenaline, dopamine, and epinephrine. They began to surf more unconsciously, intuitively.
Still, Long says, “I was just shaking. It was so far beyond anything I’ve ever surfed in my entire life.”
The surfers moved so far up the point and became so obscured by the spray and swells that Rob Brown occasionally wondered if they hadn’t simply disappeared. When either team went for a wave, it was three or four lonely, mysterious minutes before they were seen again.
This left Brown essentially on his own in the most frightful shooting and driving conditions he had ever imagined. It was a terrific struggle—keeping one eye in the viewfinder and one eye out for rogues, while pressing the shutter, changing lenses, steering, and throttling up to keep the Ocean Cat from being buried by wide-breaking waves. He thought longingly of the first time he had ever photographed Parsons at Cortes; then he had only nearly died once.
Wybenga, meanwhile, was so deliriously seasick he could hardly hold the video camera. He had tried climbing up onto the tower with Brown, clutching the outside rail like a sailor on a mast, and managed a few one-handed shots, but that only made the seasickness worse. They were so far away from the surfers that getting a good video shot was nearly impossible. Rob would call an alert to him, he’d hit record, then the Surfer would disappear behind an 80-foot wave in the foreground. Then he’d throw up and flop back down on the deck, wanly wiping vomit from his chin.
From a temporary perch atop a swell, both men watched Twiggy take an endless drop down another wave, a cascading beast that through Brown’s 300mm viewfinder brought a frightfully close-up look at Twiggy’s desperate charge for the exit. On any other day, it would have been the biggest thing ever ridden. Yet the ride was about to be topped in the next moment. Brown saw a tiny speck racing far outside.
A monolith was lumbering up the final stair steps and standing straight up. It eclipsed anything in Parsons’s experience. His ski is capable of better than sixty miles an hour, and yet Gerlach was only able to get him in by intersecting the wave at an angle. Parsons just made it through the shower of offshore spray and then over the huge hillock of the wave’s backside. He looked over his left shoulder as he dropped the rope. “I just remember concentrating so hard and thinking, ‘Oh shit, this is a bomb. Don’t fall. That’s all I can remember.”
Snips bent his knees deeply to absorb the bumps and plummeted down the wave and deep into the trough. Inside swells obscured him from everyone, including a flummoxed and cursing Rob Brown. Parsons was navigating dimensions of forward, downward, and side-to-side motion like an aviator. He was also traveling faster than he ever had on a surfboard. The wave itself was surely traveling at better than fifty-five miles an hour, which meant Parsons was going ten to fifteen miles per hour faster than that. Then, quite without warning, his acceleration suddenly ceased.
“You’re going as fast as you’ve ever gone and it feels like someone’s pulling an emergency brake,” he says. “It’s happened on the three biggest waves of my life, and it’s a crazy feeling.”
It had happened on his giant wave at Jaws in 2002. Just beneath the rear of his surfboard, a shockwave had built up as the water began to boil behind his cavitating fins. Parsons crouched deeper and pointed the board straight down, expecting the cavitation to quickly abate as he slowed—like it had at Jaws. But it didn’t. The rampaging wave kept moving faster than Parsons, and it began to reel him in like a fish on a line.
“He starts going backward up the face of the wave,” says Long. “That’s the only reason we could see him. The only reason he came into the frame on Rob’s camera is because he was being sucked back up. I’d never seen anything like it—never seen anything so big in my life.”
Brown clicked the shutter on his camera as the wave roared and t
umbled down the point, creating another explosion of white water 150 feet high. To the edge of this maelstrom, Parsons was being sucked farther and farther up, his angle of descent climbing through sixty, seventy degrees. By the time he was pointed nearly straight down, the wave was beginning to cascade above him. Parsons began talking to himself. “It’s gonna hit you, but you gotta make this. Point it. Just stay on. You can’t fall. You can’t die.”
Then, finally, as the world was crumbling, the water resumed its normal flow around Parsons’s fins. The effect was something akin to flooring a Porsche. Parsons rocketed forward and angled off toward an exit onto the wave’s shoulder, still a full half mile in the distance.
Clouds burned off, and the wind died, leaving mild, bluebird conditions. Individual moments were subsumed in a deluge of adrenaline, and the session became a supercharged blur as wave after wave was hunted and slain. Gerlach found his groove and tore across several 60-footers. Eventually, though, he caught one he didn’t like. It was too bumpy, and the board didn’t feel right. He kicked out early and waved for Parsons. Twiggy had slung Long onto the very next wave. It seemed Long’s wave would swing wide enough that Gerlach would be able to simply float over its shoulder.
Parsons circled around for a pickup, but Gerlach was fairly mesmerized watching Long. The wave was surely 75 feet tall. It was like something from another world. Parsons screamed at Gerlach to grab the rescue sled. “I’m in the straps,” Gerlach said distractedly, meaning that his feet were still firmly fastened on the board. “I’ll just grab the rope.”
Rather than grabbing the tow handle, Gerlach clutched the rope itself, near the ski, figuring they’d make an easy low-speed cruise away from the wave, which would sweep unbroken underneath them. This way, they’d have a ringside seat to Long’s behemoth. Then Gerlach took a hard look. He had badly misjudged. Long’s wave was going to crush them.
Parsons pulled Gerlach up with his 165-horsepower ski. But the foam was thick, and the ski’s impellor struggled to get a grip. Gerlach steadily worked his way back along the rope while holding it in a painful death grip. He wasn’t going to reach the handle. The ski dug in and they rapidly accelerated.
“I looked back,” he says. “The wave just looked 1,200 feet high.”
Ahead of them, the ripping current and refraction waves had morphed the inside impact zone into a class five rapid filled with motocross berms. Parsons would have to clear the berms at sixty miles an hour with Gerlach hanging on behind like a mogul skier fleeing an avalanche.
As he describes it later, Gerlach contorts his face, mimicking his concentration and the blistering pain in his palms: “Mike’s just pinning it, pinning it. There’s no, ‘Mike, you gotta slow down.’ There’s no ‘Oh, I don’t know what I’m gonna do.’ I was like, ‘Fuck I’m gonna ace this shit.’ I gotta—nail—these—jumps—right—now. Here comes the first one—knees to the chest, flying, Yeahhhh! Here’s another one, whooooh, uhhhh. I almost fell.”
They covered several hundred yards before the wave chased them down and devoured Gerlach. Parsons made it a little farther, but he too was soon swallowed whole, despite traveling at the ski’s absolute top speed—sixty-five miles an hour.
Gerlach was hurled down deep. It was black and cold, and he was down for a long time. Despite a hefty life vest, he didn’t pop up. His lungs began to burn, and then he was suddenly carried back to the surface as if rolling in a column of snow. He managed a gulp of air, which saved his life, before again disappearing.
“The explosion just shot-putted me like a torpedo,” Gerlach says. “I felt like a reporter in a wind-tunnel. I’m just going so fast underwater. It was roaring down there. I came up again, but I couldn’t get a breath. Then it nailed me again. Just hit me so damn hard.”
Gerlach probably spent two of the longest minutes of his life underwater.
Parsons was farther inside when he was obliterated, which was his saving grace. His life jacket and the emergency cutoff switch attached to his wrist worked. He sputtered to the surface after a half minute of violent flogging, amazed to find the ski right next to him and simply astonished that neither it nor Gerlach’s lead-weighted surfboard had bashed him in the skull or slit his jugular. Then he saw Gerlach, not fifty yards away and waving. Parsons prayed as he mounted the ski, which fired up with a heavenly roar. Knowing he had only seconds, Parsons yanked his friend out before the next wave plowed through.
The surfers all retreated to a safer area, outside the impact zone, as perhaps ten more waves in the set raged past. It sank in with all of them that if Parsons hadn’t reached Gerlach when he did, and if Gerlach hadn’t managed to outrun the wave for a considerable distance, Twiggy’s nightmare would have come true. Gerlach would have drowned in that watery caldera and been rolled so far they’d never have found him.
Naturally, the question of quitting didn’t come up. Instead, they firmed up the chain of command. Whoever was driving the Jet Ski was in charge, and whoever was on the surfboard was to follow orders without hesitation. The driver was Captain Ahab.
“No more debate,” Parsons added pointedly. “I say get on the sled, you get on the frickin’ sled.”
The weather held. By three in the afternoon, the tide began its slow rise and the swell lurched up another notch. Greg Long wanted his own Moby Dick—a wave bigger even than Parsons’s and Twiggy’s. Twiggy drove far up the point, and Long harpooned one right at the apex that wasn’t as big, it was bigger, and neither Rob Brown nor Matt Wybenga could see a damn thing. They didn’t get a shot.
“I let go of the rope and all I could do was go straight,” Long says. “But you couldn’t go fast enough. I just couldn’t believe it. I’m going as fast as I’ve ever been on a surfboard, and it still felt like I was just going backward.”
Which, in fact, he was, just as Parsons had earlier, traveling up the wave, not down it. Parsons and Gerlach gaped as Long completely disappeared into the white water as the lip chandeliered above him.
I’m not going to make it, Long told himself. I’m going to get annihilated.
Countless tons of water blasted onto his back, and he was completely blinded for what everyone figures was better than three full seconds—the longest of his life. He crouched as low as he could. “Sometimes, if it hits you like that, it’ll blast you right out into the clear if you can just keep your feet in your straps,” Long says.
And that’s what happened. The wave literally gave birth to Greg Long. He rocketed out of its maw at what must have been seventy miles an hour.
When he kicked out, he was vibrating on another plane of existence. He shook uncontrollably and then promptly puked.
Today, Twiggy says, “That was probably the biggest wave ever ridden.”
Everyone nods.
Parsons readily concedes that Long’s wave was bigger than his—perhaps 80 to 85, maybe 90 feet. Not quite 100 feet, but damn close. The trouble is, with no photo, there is no way to objectively measure it. So, at the end of the day, at that year’s XXL awards, and in the history books, Parsons’s wave would stand as the biggest ride—ever.
A diminutive Mike Parsons on what today remains the largest ride ever documented, on January 5, 2008. This wave has been estimated to be around 80 feet high. The height of the exploding whitewater is anyone’s guess. Photo: Rob Brown.
The sun dropped low and clouds began to billow in from the west. The main surge of swell abated, allowing the surfers rare occasions to lay down a carve or edge into the temple of a gargantuan, spellbinding tube. Eventually, the wind stirred until it was putting a mild chop on the water. “I’m going, ‘Is the day over yet?’” says Gerlach. “Jesus. So far so good. Let’s get the fuck out of here.” The teams decided to return to the boat. But before they did, Long and Twiggy paused in the water, just watching and taking it all in.
“We watched one of those sets way, way up the reef,” Long says. “Easily 80 feet, just breaking in slow motion. I vividly remember how insignificant I felt—witnessing so much of nature�
��s energy converging on a single reef in the middle of the ocean. It was just one of the most humbling, majestic things I’ve ever experienced.”
Their day wasn’t over yet. Parsons strapped on a tiny headlamp and his orange drysuit and manned the Jet Ski for the ride home. The first winds of the next approaching storm began to rake the ocean. As Brown steered the catamaran away from Cortes Bank, with Parsons in his wake, it began pissing rain and the chop returned with a vengeance. The boys huddled in the tiny cabin to ogle photos. Matt Wybenga was completely delirious. The few rides he had filmed from his seasick perch were so woozy—seasickness-inducing themselves, really—that they were unusable for anything but home movies, and to this day, only a tiny handful of people have ever seen them. They are utterly terrifying.
Meanwhile, Parsons was enjoying a new round of torture. Now that night had fallen, Mike couldn’t see the swells he was battling until he rammed them head on with concussion-inducing force. “I’m saying, fuck, fuck, fuck, you guys, don’t lose me back here. And when it’s dark, you’re always thinking you’re going to hit something. I’m like, if I hit a whale, I’m just dead.”
Parsons waved his hand over the pathetic headlamp trying to signal the boat, but Brown was fixed on the bow, his only thought to get home, while everyone else looked over his photos and decompressed over a beer.
“It’s just wham, wham, wham, back there,” says Parsons. “I’m pinning it so hard, like, fuck, why won’t they slow down? Gerr’s probably telling them a bunch of shit and they’re all laughing.”