by Chris Dixon
Half an hour later, my heart leaps at a strange apparition. I lift my binoculars to see the solid lines of the new long-period swell. The first wave rises majestically beneath diffuse morning sunlight, a perfect A-frame peak. Straight out is the CB-1 buoy, waving back and forth. A sea lion rockets out of the water and climbs aboard. His cousins bark angrily for a moment before returning to their languid naps. Ten minutes later, we’re close enough to hear a wave shatter the morning quiet. I feel the strangest déjà vu I’ve ever experienced—a homecoming to a nowhere I’ve never been. On seeing the waves and actually being out here, the fear and trepidation of the previous few days is just instantly subsumed. All I want is to get out there and see it up close.
A hardy young fisherman named Nate Perez has ferried the surfers out to the middle peak, clad in nothing but a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. I soon jump onto his ski, heart in my throat, wearing jeans and a windbreaker and clutching my unprotected Nikon. A hundred yards out, I think of Joe Kirkwood and his fur boots, and sense this is a mistake. I know it’s dangerous, and really, I’m scared half to death. But for some reason, I don’t really care and I don’t have complete control over my decision to jump on the ski. It’s a strange, almost out-of-body-sensation. I’ve never been hypnotized before—by humans or the ocean—but I think that’s what’s going on.
The waves aren’t giants by Cortes standards, which actually makes them perfect for an inaugural paddle surfing mission. The very biggest are perhaps twenty-five feet from top to bottom. Still, they’re just incredibly powerful—shifty humpbacked bulges of frictionless energy that glide through the ocean with preternatural speed. Some hit far up on the north peak, capping over and rolling down the line like mutant runners at Trestles. Others rise into explosive, cone-shaped wedges that Kelly Slater says remind him of Sebastian Inlet, Florida, on steroids. These cones make it obvious why Captain T. P. Cropper once thought he was above a volcano. Other waves shift a little farther toward us and jack onto Larry’s Bowl in deep, barreling slabs. Out off the middle peak, the surfers hoot. Greg knifes cleanly into a butter-smooth twenty footer. He draws a beautiful turn and angles for the exit—perhaps the first wave paddled into out here since Bill Sharp’s last wave back in1990.
A seemingly makeable wave then sweeps up Ramon Navarro, but it scoops him up far faster than he can paddle. He falls into the air and slides down the face on his back like he’s at a waterslide and is absolutely murdered. Again, I feel this strangely clearheaded and fearless fascination. I mutter to myself, “Wow, what must that have been like? I wonder if he’s gonna go over the ship. Jesus, how hard would I be panicking right now?” Every so often a sea lion surfaces and slings a yellowtail into the air among the surfers. Mark Healey, a man just off a trip to Guadalupe Island where he actually rode on the back of a great white, scares the shit out of everyone with jokes about the sea lion carcass floating out at the edge of the lineup. I had hoped to paddle out on a spare board and snorkel a bit in the zone well inside the broken waves. The poor sea lion has convinced me that’s not going to happen. I’m feeling foolishly brave, but not bravely foolish.
Perez prowls outside beyond the breakers. At every other big wave spot I’ve ever seen, there’s this constant background roar from breaking waves hitting the shore. Not here. The tiniest whisper of south wind is enough to blow a huge cascade of spray off the hulking backs of the swells. This rainstorm is the only thing you hear until the tremor when the wave folds over. It’s a profound silence punctuated by rain showers, hoots, and explosions. Then when the explosions have abated, and the set has passed, it’s again still and quiet as a tomb. Utterly surreal.
When Perez idles back over inside the lineup, and kills the engine, fear is mingled with sheer wonder. We can just see straight down through air-clear water into kelp that waves to and fro like a mermaid’s hair. Perez warns me to keep an eye out for strands that might choke the impellor. Just to our left, the water churns and swirls—thousands, maybe millions of shimmering menhaden swim in a tight tornadic vortex. A sea lion pops up with a loud snort, no doubt snacking on the fish, and startles the crap out of us. We drift in the current above the forest, and eventually catch a glimpse of white, almost like a dusting of snow. With shock, I realize we’re actually staring at the sandy bottom, or really, the top, maybe no more than twenty feet down. I can see Archibald MacRae’s rock.
The sand is intermingled with black stone and forearm-thick trunks of of kelp. Golden garibaldi the size of dictionaries weave all around. A big bat ray soars just off the stern like a spotted pterodactyl. The sunlight throws out the brilliant rays of a divine disco ball.
So complete is our distraction that we fail to notice when the water is drawn down off the reef. When we finally look up from the pit of Larry’s Bowl, the view is equal parts dream and nightmare. The wave is only two, maybe two and a half stories tall, but I’ve never stared down anything remotely this big from the actual firing line. It’s beautiful and expansive and I sort of feel like I’m standing before the kelp forest tank at the Monterey Bay aquarium, but there’s no glass. Like Kirkwood, I see fish, yellowtail and striped mackerel plainly visible. The world seems to move in slow motion—like it’s being shot at 120 frames per second. It would be easy to just stare straight at this seemingly impossible thing until it kills you. Indeed, when Nate first keys the starter, nothing happens. He hits it again and the engine sputters to life. “I hope we didn’t suck in any kelp,” he says as we’re drawn onto the halfpipe base of the wave’s face. We roar out and I look over my shoulder as the wave gnashes its teeth, cursing at the one that got away. I later wonder if this odd, slowed-down mingling of naked fear and slackjawed astonishment is what it’s like to stand before an onrushing tsunami, or maybe, on the deck of a sinking Jalisco.
We pull up to the yacht and time speeds up. The only time I’ve ever felt as high was eight months earlier as I waited an interminable few seconds to hear my newborn son take his first coughing breaths after a dangerous delivery. The water, everything around us, seems to sparkle with a supernatural light. I’m delirious. Spun out. “How was it?” asks one of the crew.
“I’m just celebrating my survival,” says Nate.
At nightfall, the yacht veers off towing five skis, the captain taking a similar route over the Bank that brought us here, through waters between 70 and 150 feet deep. Pete Mel has stroked into several bombs and is the only one who was out on the 2001 expedition. I ask him about the difference. “Towsurfing, you’re just waiting for a wave to come and positioning yourself wherever you want,” he says. “You’re not sitting out there trying to read the lineup and the boils. Today you had a completely different mindset. It was actually way more intense.”
On the dark stern deck, Greg and Rusty high-five and relax over a couple of beers. Off the port quarter, Rusty sees a dark shadow. “What the hell is that?” he asks Greg.
A black hillock falls forward and rampages toward the boat. Long yells up to the bridge. But the captain has already seen the rogue. Everyone feels the yacht accelerate wildly. It makes a perilous downhill plunge and then seesaws back up as the wave passes beneath us.
Three of the skis have snapped off the towline. The spooked captain pulls out off the edge of the mesa while Long and Ramon Navarro grab tiny flashlights and walkie-talkies, wetsuit up, and head out. They zip back and forth between the blinking buoy and the lit-up yacht for half an hour, their flashlights twinkling, as they dodge lobster trap marker buoys. Nothing. Finally, a wave rears up and Long is carried high up a twenty-five-foot face in pitch darkness. He catches a glint off in the distance and roars off to reel in the skis. Back aboard the boat, he considers what he’s seen. “If we’d been running fifty yards farther over,” he says, “we would have yardsaled a super yacht.”
The beer flows and the conversation soon nervously, and then hilariously, resumes.
A quiver of paddle-surfing boards on the deck of a boat that would set sail for Cortes Bank, on December 26, 2009, carrying a team
of the best paddle surfers on earth. The boat would later be nearly swamped by a rogue wave atop the Bank. Photo: Jason Murray.
November 1, 2010.
It would be not quite a year before I’d again see waves above the Bank. At first, the forecast looks like a repeat of January 2008, but the storm takes a more northerly track and the swell loses some of its punch between Hawaii and the mainland. Still, it’s going to be way, way bigger than it was eleven months earlier. I call Jim Houtz to ask if he’d maybe like to climb aboard the boat with a group of big wave surfers whose obsession with the Bank at least matches his own. “Are you kidding?” he says. “Sign me up.”
Bill Sharp and Jim Houtz have towed a trio of skis down to San Diego and we meet Captain Scott Meisel and the hilarious crew of a ninety-foot sportfisher called Condor. The engine throbs and Bill Sharp takes a seat alongside Houtz. “Now tell me this story,” he says, “I wanna hear about the fiasco on the Jalisco.”
Houtz thumbs open a scrapbook and is soon encircled by a small troupe of wonderstruck watermen.
A little after midnight, I retire to a tiny bunk. The swells soon reach a near carbon copy of January 2001’s 15 feet at twenty seconds. I imagine that’s why I have terrible, awful dreams of a ceaseless, rolling earthquake. When I’m finally overtaken by a world-ending tsunami, I wake with a jolt, bang my head on the bunk, and stumble out onto the dark bow for some air. On the bigger swells, Condor lunges skyward and reverberates with a giant shudder as she drops into a black hole. The hour would put us a short distance off San Clemente Island, and of course, I can’t help but think of Nathan Fletcher’s story of his uncle Flippy. But again, the sense of fear is again replaced by wonder. The ocean is a living thing and we rise and fall on her deep breaths.
There’s little comfort off Bishop Rock five hours later. Captain Scott assures us we’re in 180 feet of water, but a packing foam plant might as well have exploded out here for all the froth. Rob Brown approaches at dawn, ferrying Jason Murray, Greg Long, Mike Parsons, Mark Healey, Shane Dorian, Ian Walsh, and Jeff Clark. All are bleary eyed from the previous day at Maverick’s where they would learn of the death of their friend Andy Irons. Out on the eastern horizon, daylight reveals the summit of Kinkipar. It’s the first time even Snips has ever seen the island from Bishop Rock. If you were standing on the summit of Mount Thirst right now, you’d be granted a dazzling view from Catalina to Santa Barbara to San Diego clear out to this bizarre patch of open-ocean white water.
The waves are just fricking massive. Bigger by an order of magnitude than anything I’ve ever seen—ever imagined. And yet they’re only 50, maybe rarely 60 feet high. Way, way off in the distance a monstrous and completely unexplored lefthander tears along Bishop Rock’s eastern edge. Spinning like a fifty-foot-tall Tasmanian devil, we reckon it must be a mile long. The surfers stuff flotation pads beneath their wet suits that make them look like bulging action figures (which, of course, they are), and four skis peel away looking for all the world like X-wing fighters attacking the Death Star. Sharp and I jump onto Rob Brown’s boat. He brings us in close to Larry’s Bowl and orders us to keep an eye on our port flank for rogues. The waves are much steeper here than out by the Condor. They loom far above us, threatening to break. Rising to the top of a swell, I recall Matt Wybenga’s description of the boiling zone of damnation inside the broken waves. It looks like death. I’m sickened, but there’s a part of me that really, really wants Rob to pull in even closer.
From a position that Brown calls “relatively safe,” but feels anything but, I make a few new observations. One: When it’s massive out here, the cacophony produced by a steady progression of 40- to 60- foot waves is not only that of the thunder, but of the gales they create as the air struggles to get out of their way. The waves don’t just roar, they howl. Two: When Greg Long yanks Snips onto a giant, he barrels down the line making these beautiful turns. Suddenly, though, the water explodes 150 feet into the air behind him like a depth charge—a roiling cumulonimbus cloud sprinkled with rainbow dust that Parsons’s completely unaware of. A wonderstruck Jim Houtz reckons maybe the wave bashed some part of his ship. Three: When I later replay the shaky footage from my video recorder, a quick, blurry pan reveals something black and immovable way out there in the white water—right where MacRae’s pinnacle should be—right where the Jalisco met her doom. I show it to Sean Collins and Bill Sharp. Both think it’s just the face of a wave. Yet Rob Brown disagrees: “I see a big rock,” he says.
A line of fog looms on the northern horizon. Minutes later, it buries us like a sandstorm. Motoring back to the mother ship, Sharp muses, “How would you like to be cruising along out here in your clipper ship in the eighteen hundreds, and you’re in a fog bank like this. Suddenly you come upon this place and you say, ‘Hmmm, what’s that? Sounds like cannon fire.’ Oops.”
A couple of hours of laughter and incredible fishing pass back aboard the Condor. Then as suddenly as the fog appears, it’s gone. “Towsurfing’s too easy,” says Healey, after reeling in his second yellowtail. “Let’s paddle.”
I didn’t expect they’d actually paddle today. I mean, the swell has dropped a bit, but the breeze has risen and the waves are still damn big. Long, Healey, Ian Walsh, and Shane Dorian are not even sure if it’s possible to paddle in out here at this size, but they reckon that the westerly wind at their backs and the resulting chop might allow them to sort of “chipshot” into a few waves. Still, the playing field is so vast—bigger than any other big wave spot. There’s a sort of resigned understanding that they’re going to be absolutely annihilated, but they still man their harpoons.
Greg Long paddles into a cerulean monster and defines the future on November 10, 2011, atop Bishop Rock. “When you’re paddling all alone out there, when you really look at the place and feel its immensity,” he says, “you can’t just help but feel that there’s something so much greater—so much more significant at work than you.” Photo: Chris Dixon.
The paddlers will soon agree with our observation from the boat. The waves look way bigger with a person set against them. “It’s so eerie out there,” says Long. “It’s impossible to figure out. You just have to pick a spot and hope it will come to you and then hope you don’t have a 60-foot fucking white water come and take you out. It happened to Healey and me. You paddle over the top of one, and there’s another one, just breaking fifty, a hundred yards outside of you. It’s like, ‘What do you do?’ Relax, take a couple of deep breaths. Then when it hits you, it hits you hard.”
Healey is more succinct. “I was just thinking to myself, so this is what it feels like when you don’t stand a chance.”
I can’t help but recall Healey’s words four months later, when a paddle session in waves about this size at Maverick’s will widow the wife of Sion Milosky, and leave his two beautiful young daughters without a dad. Nathan Fletcher will discover his best friend’s body. A similar brush with mortality nearly widowed Shane Dorian’s wife a year earlier at Maverick’s. While trapped on the bottom, Dorian decided something had to change.
Today, when Dorian is pushed down very, very deep onto the Bishop Rock and is quite certain he doesn’t want to be down any longer, he pulls a little ripcord on his shoulder. This pierces the casing of a metal CO2 cartridge, instantly inflating an air bladder woven into his wet suit—the same principle behind an airline life vest. He rockets up through perhaps forty feet of foam and returns to the boat sporting a huge hunchback but quite alive. This simple invention might have just saved his life. As far as Mike Parsons is concerned, if he and his buddies are going to keep risking their necks out here, Shane Dorian has just defined the future.
The next morning, Long, Parsons, and I ride back up to San Clemente with Jim Houtz. Long is still decompressing from the paddle session and the throttling he and his friends have survived. When he considers all the stories—Jim Houtz and all the other people the Bank has nearly, but not quite killed—the fact that he’s been surfing over a shipwreck site—he senses a touc
h of the divine at work. Someone, or something, has been looking out for scores of people through the years on Bishop Rock. “When you’re paddling all alone out there, when you really look at the place and feel its immensity,” he says, “you can’t just help but feel that there’s something so much greater—so much more significant at work than you.”
Houtz agrees. “What happened to us that day in 1966—the way those waves just came out of nowhere, the fact that everyone survived—it really was hand of God stuff.”
To James Houtz and Joe Kirkwood, the Bank held the promise of a resurrected Atlantis, a Nietzschian citadel. Mel Fisher and Ilima Kalama sought the bounty of a sunken Treasure Island. For Greg Long and Mike Parsons, the Cortes Bank is a sort of supernatural Everest—an ethereal, momentary mountain that holds the promise of growing higher with each expedition. For all of us, this ghost wave pulls like Melville’s whale, an enigmatic monster that lures you out for the hunt—and nearly kills you every time.
I’ve been profoundly humbled by the Bank and deeply honored to tell its stories.
Three generations of Cortes Bank fanatics. From left: Mike Parsons (world record big wave surfer), author Chris Dixon, Jim Houtz (a former world record setting deep diver and a founding father of the nation of Abalonia), and Greg Long, back in San Clemente after a successful if not terrifying tow and paddle-surfing mission to the Cortes Bank, November 10, 2010. Photo: Chris Dixon.
ENDNOTES
I must note a great deal of editorial assistance from two people. The first is my mother, a supremely talented editor and researcher named Gloria Ricks Taylor. The second is talented and hopeful surf journalist and U.S. Air Force pilot, Captain Steve Stampley. Both went so far above and beyond in helping me to chase down facts, copy edit, and fit this book together that it’s almost inconceivable.