by Chris Dixon
After twenty or so minutes, the crew finally thought to look back. Parsons was gone. They stopped and drifted around for several minutes, shining the Ocean Cat’s powerful spotlights into the wind and rain. Parsons finally emerged, bedraggled and pissed.
“Jesus,” he said. “Slow the fuck down.”
At 9 p.m., cell phone bars blinked into view off Catalina Island. Bob Parsons and Sean Collins had been phoning frantically. Collins was on the verge of calling the Coast Guard. Parsons jumped into the boat to call Tara. “We did it, baby,” he said.
If Parsons thought the ride home was bad, he was astonished when the team made Dana Point Harbor and the real gale roared in with gusts up to sixty miles an hour. He shuddered to think how bad that would have been out in the open ocean.
The reaction to the surf session, and to Parson’s wave, across both the surfing and nonsurfing worlds was uniform disbelief.
I was terribly fortunate to be asked to cover this story for the New York Times, and the next day I went to Mike and Tara Parsons’s tidy home and sat utterly gobsmacked alongside the exhausted surfers as we watched Brown’s photos and Wybenga’s video flash across the screen of Mike’s Macintosh.
The first to actually break the news publicly on January 8 was, of course, Surfline. The following day, the story I wrote, titled “Surfers Defy Giant Waves Awakened by Storm,” appeared in the Times. In no small part because of Brown’s unprecedented photo of Parsons, the piece became the most emailed sports story of the week. It also became the spark that lit the fire for this book.
News outlets across the country picked up the story over the course of the next week. All had essentially the same reaction: These guys are crazy. Brave as hell, but crazy.
New York Times editorial board member Lawrence Downes wrote an essay titled “The Next Sir Edmund Hillarys: Riders on the Storm,” which raised the surfers into the lofty company of history’s most famous adventurer.
Surfers reacted with their own hilarious versions of the same praise. After Surfermag.com’s prolific bulletin board writer Rickoray posted an entry titled “Parsons XXXXXXXXL,” dozens of posts followed:
Spoonfish: Ghost Tree was huge but that shot is cartoon like.
el_calvo: These are the kind of pictures we would draw in our notebooks in school when we were kids. Never imagined that guys would actually ride waves that big.
phisher222000: 2-4’ Hawaiian style. Minors.
Bonzer5Fin: Surflie [sic] has video. Watched it at a big surf industry office today. All the jaded corporate guys just stood there, stunned.
GetShacked: I used to work on a 35ft. steel fishing boat. And we’d get tossed around in 6’ seas. Doing it in the dark with 20’ seas and a waverunner in tow is just simply a bad idea bordering on stupidity or recklessness. But in their case it totally paid off. Snips balls are far larger than mine.
Then, three months later, a newly minted father, his young apprentice, and an insane boat captain took the stage in Anaheim, California, to count blessings and better than $30,000 of Billabong bounty. There was no question, really. Greg Long’s 53-foot wave at Todos was the Monster Paddle Award winner.
Meanwhile, the photos Rob Brown captured of Mike Parsons represented the biggest ridden wave ever captured on film, for which Parsons won a total of $15,000 and the Billabong XXL Biggest Wave Award. In 2006, Bill Sharp altered the XXL format to represent the resurgence in paddle surfing, and he changed the XXL’s main prize to a $50,000 award for “Ride of the Year”—a prize only open to motion picture entries. With no video, Parsons’s ride was ineligible for the top award, which went to a tow-in Teahupoo barrel by Shane Dorian that beggared description—and earned him Surfer’s second ever “Oh My God” cover.
In the end, Flippy Hoffman, Sean Collins, Bill Sharp and the other XXL judges were not even sure how big Parsons’s wave really was. Normally you’d measure the height of the crouched Surfer in his position on a wave and simply take calipers to determine the wave’s height from the trough to the crest by a multiple of the surfer’s height. But in the photos, there’s a wave in front of Parsons that makes it impossible to see the trough of his wave. Eventually, the XXL judges determined Parsons’s wave to be “70 feet plus,” and Sharp sent it to Guinness to have it declared a new world record. And yet, the wave is “plus” by quite a few more feet. In my humble opinion, hidden behind the wave in the foreground, there must be at least another ten feet of slope height to the trough of Parsons’s wave. This would make it roughly 80 to 85 feet high.
In the fall of 2010, I managed to corral Rob Brown and all the surfers from the January 5, 2008, mission at a breakfast joint in San Clemente called Antoine’s Café. We dissected a session that each Surfer still considers the heaviest surf experience of his life. Scrolling through Rob Brown’s staggering photos, and Wybenga’s drunken video, the air filled with ooohh’s, ahh’s, laughter, and profanity.
“I’d forgotten it was this wild out there,” said Snips.
As Mike, Brad, Greg, Twiggy, and Rob reminisced, the emotions and excitement of the day returned. You could see the jones in their eyes, the longing for the hunt. “You know,” Long said. “I hate to flip-flop on what I said about big wave surfing not being about the adrenaline. But we do put ourselves into a circumstance that you have just such a heightened state of awareness. You just have so much energy pouring through you. It’s like no other experience. I don’t want to admit I’m an adrenaline junkie. But maybe I am.”
They had no doubt that they had witnessed 100-foot waves that day. The obvious question was, when would one finally be ridden?
“Everybody always asks, ‘Can you ride a 100-foot wave?’” said Long. “Well, if you found one that had a user-friendly slope, you could ride one 200 feet. I still think we’re so far from realizing what we’re capable of when it comes to riding big waves.”
“We’ll need heavier boards,” said Gerlach.
“The equipment has to evolve more,” said Parsons, referring to his terrifying cavitation episodes. “We’re bumping against the ceiling.”
Everyone said the reality and, frankly, the stupidity of the mission had sunk in. Gerlach feels this is particularly true when you consider the fact that Brett Lickle nearly bled to death a month before their Cortes mission when he was slashed by an aluminum fin only a few miles off the Maui shoreline. The event left Lickle physically and emotionally scarred for life. “Those fins, they’re just knives,” Gerlach said.
Reminded that he had no walkie-talkie or EPIRB, Parsons said simply, “We were just idiots.”
“If you talk to any accomplished captain of any vessel that’s ever been out to Cortes,” explained Long, “and you tell them you wanna go out there into the middle of the worst storm ever when the seas are in excess of 20 feet? They’ll tell you, ‘You guys are out of your fucking minds.’ Which, essentially, we were. That trip could have gone either way real quick in a matter of seconds. We made headlines because we made it happen, but we could have just as easily been on every single news channel, and everybody across the world would have been saying, ‘Look at these fuckin’ idiots.’ I still think about that regularly.
“But I mean, with everything combined that goes into surfing out there—the wave, the location, the accessibility—it really is the Everest of big wave surfing. That year, 2008, was the opportunity to reach the summit.”
The one regret I heard came from Gerlach, who is still gnawed by the memory of how he backed off the first wave of the day, or what would have been the biggest wave of his life. “I totally regret not going on the wave,” he said. “Other guys more fearless than me would’ve just gone.”
Greg Long interjected: “I watched the whole thing like it was slow motion. If he’d gone down, he would have had his ass handed to him. If he didn’t die, it would have set a different tone for the entire session. That’s the amazing thing about surfing. It’s so instinctual and in the moment. You can always sit there and ask, ‘What if? Should I have?’ But if you’re not
feeling it, if that’s your natural instinct and reaction, there’s a reason for it.”
Gerlach considered this and nodded. “What’s hard about not going is that you regret it. But I’m sitting here today. That’s good, too.”
Parsons reiterated this. Being a dad has definitely changed his perspective on surfing big waves. He wants to be there to watch his son, Grant, ride his own waves, and his budding little daredevil is already giving him a newfound appreciation of how Parsons’s own mom and dad have felt for the last generation of their lives—watching their son lay his life on the line. And yet, while justifying the risk of Cortes Bank is more difficult, it’s still not impossible. “I just can’t imagine not doing it,” Parsons said. “That terrifies me even more than doing it. If I missed a huge, glassy, perfect day at Cortes now, that would eat me up worse than ever.”
Greg Long echoed the sentiment. “I’m fiending,” he said. “Fiending to go out there. Ask anyone who’s been out there and really experienced it: It’s one of the most incredible places in the world, if not the most incredible. Of all the waves and all the places I’ve surfed in my life, without a doubt it’s the most extreme. Without a doubt. I think of all the times I’ve looked around the world for waves, and all it takes is a single rock outcropping in the wrong place and, sorry, you can’t surf it. That Cortes is just another one of the Channel Islands that’s just not quite breaking the surface of the ocean. That it’s so surfable on the right day. Everything about the place—that it came to be at all—is literally a miracle.”
AFTERWORD
”The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its great honourableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great demigods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.“
—Ishmael, from Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick, 1851
I have to hand it to Sam George. Despite working together for several years at Surfer during the late 1990s, and despite possessing what he himself describes as one “of the loudest voices in all of surfing,” he never—as far as I know—betrayed Flame in revealing the Cortes Bank. I was, thus, as shocked as anyone when Swell/Surfline.com revealed the Bank to the world in January of 2001.
My obsession with the Bank took root slowly, taking a backseat to my own addictions to storytelling and the simple need to make a living. In the years after 2001, I continued work as an environmental editor for Surfer and wrote or contributed to around two hundred stories for the New York Times—work with a team of remarkable people for which I am profoundly grateful. I covered murders, wildfires, mudslides, the X Games, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ascension to the California governorship, and Michael Jackson’s freak show of a trial. I spent humbling time with wounded Iraq veterans and people who had lost loved ones to terrorist bombers and tsunamis. On one ill-advised assignment, I flew with a pair of kids who repaired a battered old drug-running airplane and became the youngest pilots to circle the globe. On another, I careened over a thousand-foot-tall sand dune with a drunken sand rail jockey at 110 miles an hour. On another, I sat alongside a maniacal Swedish drift-racing champion in a 500-horsepower Dodge Viper as he slid sideways around Monterey’s tortuous Laguna Seca race course at 120 miles per hour.
I suppose that in some ways, this desire to sit alongside people who have experienced the remarkable is its own form of high sensation-seeking. I know I’ve taken some risks, but in my mind, there’s a big difference between writing about a risky behavior and actually doing it. Still, one result of this work was a simple fascination with thrill seekers. Riding out to witness huge waves at Maverick’s on the back of a Jet Ski with Grant Washburn is the cheater’s way to experience the Almighty, and to me, it makes big wave surfing seem an even more fascinating and lunatic pursuit than it appears at a safe distance on the TV screen or from the sand.
But despite how many people still see them, most big wave surfers are not crazy. They’re a small, argumentative brotherhood—complex, cerebral, raw, and damaged—who take their seemingly insane quest no less seriously than Jacques Cousteau or Sir Edmund Hillary. It’s religion, passion, and science all rolled into one, and they pursue it with discipline and an unrelenting fervor.
The hook for this book was set with the barrage of deadly swells in late 2007 and early 2008. At the end of 2007 I wrote a feature for Men’s Journal that began with the near-death experiences of Brett Lickle and Laird Hamilton on Maui and ended with a heart-wrenching day spent interviewing Peter Davi’s eighteen-year-old son Jake two days before Christmas. Then, when it seemed things simply couldn’t get any deadlier, the Cortes Bank left the surfing world stupefied with pictures of waves better than 70 feet high.
I began diving into what tidbits I could find on the Bank’s history, hoping I might pitch a feature to Men’s Journal or Outside. But the more I actually looked, the less anyone really seemed to know. Every story, even those from the most in-the-know surfers and divers, was half-filled with rumor and conjecture. The facts might easily have turned out less interesting than the rumors, but in almost every case, the actual history of the Bank was far more compelling than the whispers. If Mike Parsons and Greg Long were obsessed with riding the Bank, I became no less obsessed with telling its story.
I would spend at least a thousand man-hours in dusty libraries, on the Web, and interviewing people in person and over the phone before I finally had my first chance to see this great and wondrous ghost wave for myself. The first inkling came with a warning from Jason Murray and Greg Long, a few days before Christmas 2009.
The freshly minted winner of the Quiksilver in Memory of Eddie Aikau, Greg was first bound for Jaws, while Jason was feverishly tracking wind models and working to secure a Cortes ferry. If the winds cooperated, this Christmas Day Jaws swell would breach cleanly atop the Cortes Bank on December 27. Yet by Christmas Eve, the winds off Kinkipar seemed poised to rip the swells to shreds and the stand-down order was given.
I’d like to say I was disheartened, but in a palpable way, I was relieved. The stories of George Beronius, James Houtz, and Ilima Kalama, recently told, were resonating heavily, and actually visiting and maybe freediving the Bank, frankly, scared the hell out of me. But when the call came on the day after Christmas, there was no time to reflect. I was in Atlanta of all places, visiting family and bombing down a hill on a skateboard with my four-year-old daughter when my cell phone vibrated. “Dixie, where the hell have you been?” said Jason Murray. “It’s on. We’re leaving Newport Harbor at midnight.”
Seven hours later, I’m at LAX, shaking hands with Greg Long, Twiggy, Mark Healey, and Flippy Hoffman’s nephew Nathan Fletcher. Twiggy and Greg have thousand-yard stares. Jaws’s tow-in Christmas gift was a near-death experience for both. Twiggy’s hands and feet are particularly shredded, from a trip to the seafloor. “And I did a full backwards upside-down suplex in the barrel,” says Greg, who only two weeks earlier won the Eddie Aikau at Waimea Bay. “Nobody’s doing those anymore.”
Tomorrow, though, Greg doesn’t plan to tow. It’s something he had discussed with me on the down-low a couple of months before. Ever since Evan Slater and John Walla stared down the gauntlet in 2001, Greg’s wanted to see if it’s possible to paddle into big waves on the Bank. In October 2009, he put the top secret invite out to a crew of his closest paddle surfing friends. On hearing this, I’d brought up the fact that Evan Slater faced the most frightful moment of his life paddling the Bank, and that essentially, everyone who’s died surfing, has died paddling. Yet Greg, of course, had been undaunted. The obvious question then was, okay, at what point will you decide it’s just too big to paddle? He’d raised an eyebrow and said, “Well, I guess that’s what I’d like to find out.”
Just before midnight on December 27, we meet Rusty Long, Kelly Slater, Peter Mel, and the rest of a crew of t
he best big wave surfers on Earth aboard a 105-foot Westport yacht, a fantastic luxury vessel somehow rustled up by Murray. The only two missing and completely incommunicado surfers are Mike Parsons and Brad Gerlach. Snips has disappeared to Baja to chase a swell. Brad and his girlfriend Alexsei have been lost in Indonesia for months. Greg settles down to a plate of steaming tamales. “I almost drowned yesterday,” he says. “Now I’m sitting on a yacht eating fresh tamales and heading to Cortes. It’s surreal.”
A Chilean charger named Ramon Navarro has caught a cab all the way up from San Diego. His driver was an elderly guy with white hair and a beard like Gandalf who lit up when Ramon mentioned the Bank, claiming to be a fisherman who used to surf out there. “He knew all about the place,” says Ramon.
Subsequent phone calls to the cab company only reveal the guy’s name: Ziggy. I never hear from him.
Before we turn in, Nathan Fletcher, a quiet and intense guy I’ve never met before but come to like a lot, briefly recounts a tale related by his uncle Flippy of an experience just off the southern edge of San Clemente Island—a spot we’re due to pass in a few hours. “You don’t know what to expect out here, really,” he says. “It’s at the edge of the continental shelf. Anything can happen. My uncle was out on a day and it was, like, 15 to 18 feet. All of a sudden a 100-foot wave—a rogue wave—came and they were motoring up it, and the boat went backwards over the falls. He had to jump off and swim to San Clemente Island. He said it’s still the biggest wave he’s ever seen.”
Flippy Hoffman had not mentioned this story to me. I tell myself that we’re on a big, safe, modern yacht. What could happen? At dawn, a rogue wave seems unlikely but not out of the question. Strong high pressure leaves a gauzy haze on the horizon, making it impossible to tell where sky ends and sea begins. The mirror-smooth water teems with tiny, hookfinned dolphins. We’re still several miles off Bishop Rock, making a southerly approach and passing right along the top of the Cortes Bank with nary a wave in sight. Still, the ocean is oddly woozy, just as Sharp had described on his first mission out here twenty years ago. In fact, he says, the morning’s almost a carbon copy.