by John Long
"Jay talked about how we're only here for a short time and be kind to everyone," said Clark. "Embrace the positive and let the negative go through you. It was stirring, and you couldn't help buckling from the raw emotion. I was three and a half years old when JFK died, and the emotion in the Rio was as strong for Jay as it was for the president. Everyone was feeling the loss of a magical human being."
On Friday night, Frank Quirarte got the same response when he hosted a benefit premiere for Return of the Drag-In at the Capitola Theater. Quirarte's benefit showing also raised thousands of dollars for Kim Moriarty. Frank held on to Kim's shoulders as she choked out a speech and thanked everyone for remembering Jay and helping her through a hard time.
Jay's body was returned to Santa Cruz on Friday the 22nd, and there were thousands of friends and fans there to say goodbye. At Pleasure Point on Tuesday, June 28, almost two thousand surfers and ocean-lovers paddled out into the kelp, and Jay's ashes were released into the ocean that had given him so much life.
Name: Lurker
Date: 06-18-01 23:17
I am coining a new phrase that will help me deal with the stress of surfing in crowds and aggroness in general. Live like Jay. Today I was driving, and I started to get road rage, but then I started to think about Jay's life and his aloha nature. I started to not care that we were going too slow. I know it will help when I'm out surfing and get mad. Live like Jay! You can't go wrong. A hui hou, Jay!
When Jay so famously torpedoed over the falls at Mavericks, it was my pleasure to interview what was left. Jay was a Pleasure Point guy, and it was good to see a Pleasure Point guy go beyond Sewer Peak legend and accomplish something on the world stage. Truth is, that now-famous Bob Barbour photo of Jay taking a plunge for the ages knocked another Jay image off the cover. The photo in question, taken from the water, showed a nuggety sixteen-year-old Jay dropping in steep and deep in a power stance, with the hook of the lip throwing over his head. Crouched in the middle of all that power, glaring out past the terrible shoulder, the position of his arms and the circular lip made him look like the character in a Mickey Mouse watch. That was Jay Michael Moriarty, always looking around the corner for the next big thing. And finding it, too.
I knew only of his courage. He was loved and respected. There are only good things to say about Jay. He was happy. We ask ourselves, Why so young? So many more things to do and time to share. Yet, maybe he learned what he needed here. Maybe he was saved from the burdens of living. We mourn out of our own selfish desire to be with our loved ones who have gone. But if we knew that they were in a better place and at peace, wouldn't we celebrate their fortune? Heroes linger, and Jay's deeds will be spoken of around campfires for many generations to come. Our time and place of departure are a great mystery. We know only that it will come, and it is written: When I go, please have a party for me. Jay would want his passing celebrated. It's one of the unspoken rules of his kind. Goodbye, Jay, a man of the sea. There you will always be. Keep an eye on us.
Your brother,
Laird Hamilton
DIFFICULT AND DANGEROUS MANEUVERS
As far back as the eighteenth century, some of the earliest accounts of the Polynesian pastime drew attention to the Hawaiian Islanders' penchant for heavy water-i.e., big ass surf. Consider the following passage from The Three Voyages of Captain Cook Round the World, which could just as easily be describing a contemporary session at Waimea Bay. Seventy-five years ago, Tom Blake, surfing's first serious historian, provided even more detail of an early epic session in his seminal book Hawaiian Surfboard, illustrating that, despite not knowing what actually causes big waves, there have always been surfers daring enough to ride them.
The surf, which breaks on the coast round the bay extends to the distance of about 150 yards from the shore, within which space the surges of the sea, accumulating from the shallowness of the water, are dashed against the beach with prodigious violence. Whenever, from stormy weather or any extraordinary swell at sea, the impetuosity of the surf is increased to its utmost height, they chose that time for this amusement, which is performed in the following manner: Twenty or thirty of the natives, each taking a long narrow board rounded at the ends, set out together from the shore. The first wave they meet they plunge under, and suffering it to roll over them, rise again beyond it and make the best of their way by swimming out into the sea. The second wave is encountered in the same manner with the first; the great difficulty consisting in seizing the proper moment of diving under it, which if missed, the person is caught by the surf and driven back again with great violence; and all his dexterity is then required to prevent himself from being dashed against the rocks. As soon as they have gained, by these repeated efforts, the smooth water beyond the surf they lay themselves at length on their board and prepare for their return. As the surf consists of a number of waves, of which the third is remarked to always be much larger than the others, and to flow higher on the shore, the rest breaking in the intermediate space, their first object is to place themselves on the summit of the largest surge, by which they are driven along with amazing rapidity toward the shore. If by mistake they should place themselves on one of the smaller waves, which breaks before they reach the land, or should not be able to keep their plank in a proper direction on the top of the swell, they are left exposed to the fury of the next and, to avoid it, are obliged again to dive and regain the place from which they set out. Those who succeed in their object of reaching the shore have still the greatest danger to encounter. The coast being guarded by a chain of rocks, with, here and there, a small opening between them, they are obliged to steer their board through one of these or, in case of failure, to quit it before they reach the rocks and plunging under the wave make the best of their way back again. This is reckoned very disgraceful and is also attended with the loss of the board, which I have often seen, with great terror, dashed to pieces at the moment the islander quitted it. The boldness and address with which we saw them perform these difficult and dangerous maneuvers was altogether astonishing and is scarcely to be credited.
-Captain James Cook, The Three Voyages of
Captain Cook Round the World
The template for a successful pro surfer's career generally looks like this: early amateur success, first photos in the surf magazines, first sponsorship deal, subsequent promotional surf trip/ magazine travel feature, a season or two on the qualifying pro tour, more photos, new, more lucrative sponsors, a jump to the world championship tour, more surf trips, more endorsement ads, success on the tour for a few years, eventual retirement, and finally a magazine profile chronicling the sweet ride. But surfers like Greg Long, the most successful professional big wave surfer in the world today, took a different path to the top: a totally new type of ride, examined by talented surf journalist Brad Melekian.
It was February of last year. The swell he had been waiting for his entire life had lit up the California coast the day before, but it did so at night, leaving him on land and predictably outraged. The next day was sunny and warm, and Greg Long and I sat in the uncrowded enclosed patio of a plastic-tables-and-chairs Mexican restaurant in San Clemente, where he trembled with frustration.
"We would have caught the biggest waves ever ridden at Todos Santos," he lamented between pulls off a lunchtime beer, "if the timing had been just a little bit different."
Greg was downright gracious with his "we." I just sat, and watched, and listened. He drummed the table nervously and looked out the window of the restaurant before launching into the facts, without prompting, as I knew he would. "When Brad Gerlach caught his 68-footer out there two years ago, the buoy was reading 17 feet, and the swell direction was 270 degrees. Yesterday the buoy peaked at 20.9 feet, and the swell direction was 270 degrees. You do the math."
I had already done the math, which was exactly why, were it not my job to get a sense of Greg Long's disturbing commitment to big wave surfing, I wouldn't have even considered being anywhere near Todos that day. For one thing, a storm w
as battering the entire West Coast with 20-knot south winds and rain projected for the next two days. So foul was the weather and so rough the ocean that the harbormaster at Ensenada closed down the harbor and wouldn't allow boats out to Todos. "Not to worry," Greg said, "we'll lift up the chain blocking access to the water, slide the skis under, and get out that way."
For another thing, the swell was supposed to hit late in the afternoon on a Sunday, peak at night, and be gone by first light, which meant that there was little to no chance that we were even going to see the big waves if they arrived, and if they were rideable, in the storm. I mentioned this on the phone to Greg.
"Well, here's the thing," he said. "I could surf Uppers-maybe go down to Blacks-but if I did that I'd go crazy. I'd much rather go down to Todos and see that it's no good. At least then I tried."
So it ran for the past two months. A glossy mainstream men's magazine tapped me to shape a shotgun-riding profile on Greg Long, and I was thusly thrust into the puzzling and hard-driving orbit of a no-bullshit twenty-five-year-old focused on discovering and taming the world's tallest waves at the exclusion of anything else.
The Todos Santos mission, for example, was hands down the most energy I'd ever put into not going somewhere. Greg and I spoke on the phone a dozen times in a matter of hours the day before the swell was to hit, followed by another dozen times over the next twelve hours. We spoke so many times, amid the updates on swell direction, wind speed, and buoy readings ("Buoys are massive up north!" Greg texted between phone calls), that his name spontaneously appeared in the "Favorites" list on my cell, a feature I didn't know the phone had. Meanwhile, while we were speaking at eleven at night, it was pouring rain and howling onshore wind. Not to worry. We spoke again at 4:30, when it was still raining, still windy, and Greg was still raring to go.
Over the last month, with every hint of swell Greg would call with possibilities: to make the ten-hour drive from his San Clemente home to Mavericks, where we'd sleep in his van and be up at dawn; to motor 105 miles out to sea to Cortes Bank, where 100foot waves could conceivably be ridden, maybe; to steam out to a handful of island breaks that Greg said he might be able to take me to but that I could never write about; to investigate a heavywater slab that he said a bodyboarder in Huntington Beach once told him about but that he wasn't sure was really even a wave; or to wake up hours before first light to drive to fetid Ensenada and sneak jet skis out to Todos Santos for a swell that sounded like it would never be anything at all.
One Friday afternoon, Greg was in his van driving to Mavericks when he stopped on the side of the 101, took out his laptop, and called me. He told me that he was headed to Mavericks but that there was a change of plans and that now we had a boat booked for Cortes and that we'd leave in the morning. "Okay," I said and started to get ready. He called fifteen minutes later. "We're going out to Shark Park." Fifteen minutes later: "Mavericks." An hour later: "Todos." An hour after that: "Mavericks" after all, and lucky for him, he was already halfway there, "but it probably wouldn't be that good, so don't bother coming."
Such is the hurry-up-and-wait, tightrope-walking life of the modern big wave rider, and so went the entire big wave season, until the only swell that showed full promise decided to appear at night. Greg went to Todos Santos that day, regardless. I stayed back. He and Mike Parsons had a paddle-in session and then stayed at a harbor motel in northern Baja, where Greg presumably lay in bed and listened to giant waves crash in the distance, the waves he had been waiting for his whole life breaking in lonely explosions, Greg trembling with fury.
The next day he and I surfed the tail end of that swell at a crowded beachbreak near his house. There is almost nowhere in the world that he would like to surf less.
Greg Long grew up in Orange County in the 1990s and became a professional surfer, which makes you wonder. He is neither insufferable nor obnoxious. He has absolutely zero sense of entitlement. And he's uncannily focused on what he wants and pursues it with dogged enthusiasm regardless of his circumstances.
What Greg wants, very simply, is to surf big waves, the biggest in the world, in fact. Twelve months out of the year if he can. And, hopefully, if things go well, he'll push himself into situations that cause others to rethink the limitations of big wave surfing.
But in a big wave world sometimes co-opted by opportunists looking to extend their sagging surf careers, Greg isn't interested in the trophy-hunting element that seems to have overtaken the sport. Instead, he pursues his surfing thoughtfully, with purpose, and in the tradition of previous generations.
It's in this sense that Greg is as much of a purist as one is going to find in the modern big wave scene-as adept on a gun as he is on a ski and willing to put in an uncanny amount of time and energy to score waves regardless of the financial rewards or in-print accolades.
This, to be sure, is refreshing in modern surfing but particularly in big wave surfing, where self-promotion has taken deeper root than in any other arm of the modern scene. Much of Greg's outlook can be traced back to his upbringing. He was raised in the surf industry's backyard in Orange County, yes, but he was as much a part of that world as he was removed from it. He was brought up in the state park employee housing alcove, steps from the sand in San Clemente. It's a small cluster of houses that's easy to miss, and when you're inside the tiny, wooded neighborhood, it's hard to believe that Interstate 5 is there at all, let alone a tenth of a mile from your back while you're focused on the sound of sea directly in front of you.
For Greg and his older brother, Rusty, it was the proximity to the ocean and the people who understood it, rather than the proximity to Lower Trestles and the people who ripped there, that seems to have had the most reverberating impact through the years.
Their father was a celebrated lifeguard captain and local surfer (he recently retired and skipped town after thirty-plus years of service), and he passed down his knowledge to his boys through the years.
Greg's first taste of big wave surfing came as a teenager with a trip to Todos Santos, and it immediately threw him into the conflict by which the rest of his life has been shaped-follow the well-worn path of professional surfing or do what you want and ride big waves.
"I was sixteen when I went out to Todos and caught my first really big wave," he remembers. "And after that, that's all I wanted to do. I remember one contest in Newport that I went to rather than going down to Todos with my friends. They came back and said it was the biggest in who knows how long, and I was in tears. I was up at the contest in tears-literally crying-when I got the voice message. I was just devastated."
Still, Greg eventually became the dark-horse winner of the NSSA nationals at the age of eighteen when that title still carried a lot of weight. It's a feat that's hard to reconcile with Long the big wave surfer today, but even after he's eschewed jersey-surfing, Greg still relishes this as one of the proudest moments of his surfing career.
"I'll always count that as one of the things I'm most proud of," he says. "There wasn't a person on the beach who thought that I could win that thing, and I worked hard, and I did it." But that taste of contest victory seemed to have been enough. After high school, when most of his friends set off on the formulaic route laid out for them by the ASP, Greg decided to make his own path.
Along with Rusty, the two made names for themselves in two ways-as big wave surfers and as peripatetic searchers willing to poke around for weeks and months in search of a wave to themselves. They succeeded in both regards. On the big wave front, early accomplishments included a slew of scores, perhaps most notably a stealth Cortes mission with Gerlach and Parsons that established the Longs to anybody who hadn't been paying attention. And, as searchers, Greg and Rusty seemed to have an uncanny knack for disappearing for days and then coming back to town clutching photos of themselves in the treacherous barrels of heaving waves that nobody had seen before but that were supposedly right under our noses.
But it was always just that: the Longs, the Long brothers. It seemed impossibl
e to talk about Greg without talking about Rusty. Magazines ran profiles on both brothers together. Companies sponsored and marketed them together. Until recently, when Greg set off with fierce determination to ride the biggest waves in the world, come what may. He drove his van to Mavericks every weekend and slept in it, and he motored off on his jet ski at any sign of a major swell. Rusty, meanwhile, had devoted himself to travel. He continued to prove his worth as one of the world's hardestcharging barrel riders, but he spent time building a house on a plot of land he bought in Mexico. He took up organic gardening. He fully immersed himself in the slow pace of travel. There's no discord, Greg says, just two brothers pursuing divergent interests.
For his part, 2008's big wave season (which Greg turned into a twelve-month-out-of-the-year affair) was a coming-out party for Greg, an announcement of his solo tour, and a vindication.
The defining moment of that year, no doubt, came in January 2008, when Greg, along with Grant "Twiggy" Baker, Parsons, and Gerlach, braved a bracing storm and 15-foot seas to head out to Cortes Bank and surf the biggest waves anybody had ever seen. Getting to that moment was vintage Greg Long.
Twiggy was in San Francisco, hanging out after a Mavericks session, when Greg told him to get to SoCal in a hurry. Baker couldn't reconcile Greg's enthusiasm with the fact that throughout northern California power lines were down and the forecast called for only more storm. He came anyway.
Long, earning yet another Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Awards nomination, charges off the bottom of a 65-footer at Dungeons, Capetown, South Africa.
PHOTO © AL MACKINNON/BI LLABONGXXL. COM
Greg and Parsons saw something they liked in a forecast that called for one fierce storm to die with another one directly on its back. It looked like there might be a small, slight window of time that they could surf between the two storms. One hundred five miles out to sea. Alone.