by John Long
Then the second wave came. I remember thinking, Wow. I've never been down for two waves before. As the second wave pounded me deeper, along with the others wrapped up in those leashes, I knew if I didn't do something quickly I would die. And, yes, I had all the flashes in my mind-images of family, of people I loved, everything rushing up from the deep.
I was barely sixteen years old when I left Rio and flew to Hawaii. I told my parents I would stay on the Islands for a year, work on my English, and return to Brazil and finish university. I was gone for three years. My parents hated me then, but loved me now. And now I was dying. So I had to do something. I had to get air. So I fought and clawed at my leash, one of those with a quick release-I'd almost forgotten. It never occurred to me that I'd have to use the quick release in an emergency situation. I reached down to my ankle and pulled the release, wiggled free from the other leashes, and finally could swim to the surface. This was the closest I've ever come to drowning.
I accept the risks. As a surfer with asthma I know the dangers every time I paddle out. All I can do is do it with love and passion and be dedicated to staying alive. But I'm not going to stop riding big waves because of a bad hold-down at Waimea. And I'm not going to stop because I'm scared to die.
Last year I was driving down Kam Highway at dawn with a Starbucks coffee, checking the surf. It was blown out and rainy, and I was disappointed that I wouldn't be able to shoot. There was no one in the water from Lanis to Waimea to Pipe. I drove by Sunset Beach, and to my surprise there were two little specs way out in the ocean. The swell was a huge washing machine of current and cross chop. I putted over and watched as South African big wave charger Andrew Marr took a monster closeout in to the beach, riding straight until the wave clipped him. A few minutes later he plodded up the beach, retrieved his bike from the lifeguard tower, and slowly rode off. That left the other surfer out there alone. I waited and watched as the other surfer finally got a massive wall from the outside. It closed out, and then there was nothing. The person disappeared. After a few minutes of whitewater, to the horizon I saw the surfer on the beach coming out of the treacherous shorebreak: It was Maya Gabeira. I couldn't believe it. No one saw this; she didn't do it for money or fame.
-Dace Collyer
REALLY GET YOU IN THE HOT CURL!
Waikiki, Oahu, Hawaii. In 1923 an artist named John Kelly sailed over from San Francisco with his young family to do illustrations and etchings for Waikiki's expanding hotel row. By 1928, Kelly's nine-year-old son, also named John, was learning how to surf on a miniature redwood plank shaped by David Kahanamoku, Duke's brother. The younger Kelly soon made friends with two other local haole surfers, a chalk-white scrapper named Wally Froiseth and a quiet, slender, well-dressed boy named Fran Heath. They rode all the Waikiki breaks and even discovered another half-dozen spots within paddling distance of Kelly's house at Black Point, on the east side of Diamond Head. When they weren't surfing, they hung out in an overgrown beachfront lot not far from the Moana Hotel; people started calling them the "Empty Lot Boys."
Kelly, Froiseth, and Heath watched and learned from the top beachboy surfers at Queen's and Public's, laughing in amazement at the manic wave-riding genius of Joseph "Scooter Boy" Kaopuiki, a former state welterweight boxing champion who ran, hopped, and pirouetted from stem to stern on a 15-foot fire-engine-red hollow board, stopping now and then to face the beach, spread his fingers, and waggle his hands like Al Jolson. By the time Kelly and his friends entered high school, however, they looked upon the Waikiki surf scene with a more critical eye. The old guard was just plugging along, doing the same things they had for years: taking the same angles, performing the same tourist-pleasing acrobatic tricks, and riding the same boards.
However, there was still a lot for the young up-and-coming surfer to admire in the beachboys: They dressed well, often got laid, and were the best-connected people in Waikiki. But the beachboys lacked the single-focus commitment to surfing of the Empty Lot gang. "We used to call it 'surf drunk,"' Froiseth later said. "We talked about it, slept on it, dreamed about it; surfing was practically our whole life."
The older surfers, in other words, didn't much care about advancing the performance standard, while the new kids cared about little else. This rarely caused any friction since there were waves enough for everyone. But occasionally the two groups collided-literally, in some cases. A middle-aged Duke Kahanamoku once made a leisurely descent into a wave that Froiseth was already riding, and the two surfers banged together violently. Froiseth came up swearing. A friend paddled over and in a quiet but urgent voice asked if Froiseth knew who he was yelling at-he did, of course-and Froiseth yelled back, "I don't give a fuck who he is!" On the beach, Froiseth was satisfied to discover that the collision had put a fist-sized ding in what, sixty years later, he still dismissively referred to as Duke's "big longboard."
The Empty Lot Boys didn't like longer boards. They didn't like hollow boards either-too buoyant and tippy. Heath was the best surfer of the group and from a wealthy family, and at age eighteen, he had a beautiful new Pacific System Homes Swastika model board freighted over from Los Angeles. On a summer morning in 1937, Heath and Kelly paddled out to a Diamond Head reef called "Browns," located near Kelly's house, to try to ride some overhead waves.
On wave after wave, both surfers kept "sliding ass"-spinning out-as they tried to hold an angle across the steep faces. Kelly stared down at his plank during a backyard lunch break that afternoon and came to what now seems like an obvious design appraisal: too much planing surface in the tail section. The faster the board went, the higher it rode in the water and the less "bite" it had. On an 8-foot wave, the boards were virtually uncontrollable. (Tom Blake had in effect already solved this problem a few years earlier by inventing the surfboard fin, but it hadn't caught on; the Hawaiian surfers were all still riding finless boards.)
Kelly, on the spot, convinced Heath to hand over his stillnew Swastika. After setting the board on a pair of sawhorses, Kelly walked into the garage and returned with a small ax. He stood for a moment looking down at the board's stern and with a determined overhead swing buried the ax blade 3 inches into the rail. Both surfers then got to work, giving the blocky tail section a more streamlined profile. From corner to corner, the board's back end shrunk from about 18 inches to 5 inches, and Kelly and Heath blended the new rail lines to meet the original plane shape just below the board's halfway point. They also thinned out the edges and reshaped the bottom surface near the tail, giving it a boat-hull roundness.
Later that afternoon, with the new varnish coat still tacky, the two surfers paddled back out to a still-humping Browns lineup. Kelly had the new board, and on his first wave it bit into the wave face, and he was able to draw a high, fast angle toward the deep-water channel. Froiseth and Kelly customized their own boards the next day. Not long afterward, Froiseth shouted out, "These things really get you in the hot curl!" With that, the new narrow-tail design had a name.
The hot curl design, like the plank and the hollow, had no lift in the nose or tail; viewed from the side, the top surface was perfectly flat. Because it had less surface area, it paddled slower than the other boards and bogged down in small, flat waves. With a few exceptions-including a sharp-tongued little Queen's Surf dynamo named Albert "Rabbit" Kekai-the Waikiki beachboys had no interest in the hot curl; hollows and modified planks remained the rule in Hawaii for another ten to fifteen years. Still, Kelly's new board introduced continuous rail curve, thinner edges, and a rounded hull shape, all of which became standard board design features.
Kelly's new board was one of those developments that, in hindsight, seems both wildly modern and woefully overdue. Modern surfing begins at the turn of the century with George Freeth and Jack London, Alexander Hume Ford, and the Outrigger Canoe Club. Lagging by a full thirty years, modern surfboard design begins with the hot curl.
-From The History of Surfing, by Matt Warshaw
The new millennium got off to a bang in California, where during
the winter of 2001 a series of epic northwest swells slammed into the West Coast-and straight into a new era of big wave riding based 3,000 miles east of Hawaii. And who better to chronicle this massive attack than Evan Slater? Slater's role as former editor of Surfer magazine belied his reputation as one of the state's most committed heavy-water surfers, having built considerable cred for his almost reckless charging behind the peak at Mavericks and Todos Santos. Back in 2000, Mavs was starting to firmly establish itself as home to the most consistent big waves in the world.
Rrrrrrrrmmmmmmm . . . ruddaruddaruddarudda . . . rrrrrrmmmmmmm!
What the hell's that sound? A swamp buggy in Florida Everglades? A British Columbian forest sacrificed to the almighty logging industry? A Modesto bikers' rally? Good guesses but no cigar. Believe it or not, that jarring, teeth-grinding noise is the clatter you're sure to hear this winter at the West Coast's marquis big wave spots.
Of course, this is nothing new at places like Jaws and the North Shore Outer Reefs, where ten years ago big wave superheroes like Laird Hamilton and Darrick Doerner replaced their Zodiacs and 10-foot brewer guns with Yamaha XL 1200s, high-tech life vests, and 20-pound, 6'10" pocket rockets. But tow-in surfers are no longer relegated to those faraway places. They're pulling off at the Circle K for a refill of Jumbo Java and asking you, as you sit in your favorite Jurassic Park catching one wave per hour, if you mind if they "tow."
The inevitable has happened. West Coast big wave surfing has loudly and boldly entered the machine age, and there's no killing the switch. Like the liberated sharecroppers or cobblers from 150 years ago, they're producing ten times the yield with a fraction of the effort, and they're laughing all the way to the channel. But historically, machines have always had an uneasy alliance with nature and have turned us into God. The Industrial Revolution was a win/win scenario for stamping out shoes in Hamburg or feeding the masses in Ireland, but when you're taunting 60- to 70-foot walls of water at the heaviest reefbreak in the world, one mistake can send you back down to Earth. Way down.
Tow-in trouncings are a risk that more and more surfers are willing to take when the surf borders on the supernatural. Take this past holiday season, when a late-December low-pressure spun over Hawaii and sprinted toward the West Coast. Buoys were off the scale-in the 40- to 50-foot range in northern California and Oregon-and only one swell in Mavericks' short documented history has come even close: October 28, 1999. This was the day deemed unsurfable by conventional means, the day Peter Mel, Ken "Skindog" Collins, and Jeff Clark inspired at least a dozen other Mavericks surfers to pick a partner, find some capital, and get their mitts on a WaveRunner. "If you would've stood on the cliff and watched those guys surf out there that day," said tow-in convert Matt Ambrose, "you would've gone out and bought a ski right then and there. I promise."
With the prototype deemed a success, this latest Mavericks blower-landing at dawn on December 22-kick-started the tow factory into production. No fewer than ten teams stomped all over the unridden realm during business hours, while only two paddlein surfers (John Raymond and Mark Renneker) even made it out. The following day, Todos Santos caught a smaller but still-sizable share of the swell and faced a similar scenario: While a handful of young chargers were struggling just to make the drops, Mike Parsons and Brad Gerlach raged with their machine. Even with the engines on idle, the West Coast's fuel-injected big wave riders are still buzzing.
Mavericks, December 22, 2000: The Gambit
At approximately 7:00 a.m., big wave godfather Richard Schmidt, with the aid of partner Adam Replogle, towed into the first legitimate 25-footer of the morning-on a four-fin, 7-foot soft surfboard. Seriously. "It's one of those Surflight boards that Jim Richardson from Hawaii has been working on for the past few years," says Schmidt. "They have been a solid core, but they're soft, almost like bodyboard, on the outside. The best thing about them is that they flex a lot, and all along, I thought they'd make a perfect tow board because they tend to absorb the bumps.
"When we first pulled up, it was still really early," continues Schmidt. "I told Replogle that we should hang and watch a few sets, but he was like, 'Nah, nah. Let's get on it!' That huge one was my very first wave-it just lurched over that second bowl. It wasn't exactly the safest wave to test my theory, but luckily, I was right. The board worked."
The Wormhoudt brothers, Peter Mel, Ross Clarke-Jones (Mel's usual partner, Skindog Collins, was in Costa Rica for Christmas), Jay Moriarty, and Jeff Clark were also on the early shift, and as soon as news spread about Schmidt's mutant double-up, the fading game was on.
A Means with No End
Karl Marx warned us about the dead-aim efficiency of machinery way back in 1844. The more consistent output from the machine, he said, the cheaper the value of the product and of the worker himself. This might help explain why on this day no one seemed to even blink at the countless 40-foot waves detonating across the Mavericks bowl while antlike surfers skittered across the massive walls, carving and cutting back as if they were surfing a fun, low-ride day at Cardiff Reef. Thirty-footers are a dime on days like December 22; 40-footers, standard issue.
Amazingly, it's the 50- to 60-footers and beyond that guys like Mel and Moriarty now fend for, and this swell-too west to be ideal but ridiculously large-provided a few opportunities. First up (after Schmidt's predawn Loch Nessie) was Jay Moriarty. Jay has paid his dues. At sixteen, he probed Mavericks' deepest, darkest corners during one of the most famous wipeouts of the decade. Now, at twenty-two, he's teamed up with the marshal, Jeff Clark, on the tow frontier. Clark drove most of the morning since he separated a couple ribs surfing the left at Mavs earlier in the week, which gave Moriarty unlimited tow miles. Since tow-surfing is much about the driver's skills, it helps to have the Mavericks caretaker on the throttle, and Moriarty proved that when he launched into a Hollywood bowl from way back. One 50-yard bottom turn and a quick snap under the lip later, and Moriarty was safely on the shoulder after riding the biggest wave of his life.
"When I saw Jay get that one from the channel," says Pacifica charger Sean Rhodes, "I was like, 'He's got it, for sure [referring to the Swell.com XXL Biggest Wave Wins contest]: No one's going to top that."
But someone did top it-about five minutes later. Two-time Quiksilver/Men Who Ride Mountains winner Darryl "Flea" Virostko has a new theory about surfing Mavericks: He doesn't-unless it's off the charts.
"So many guys will hear the buoys are 10 feet at 17 seconds, and they'll get all jacked and go up there and battle it out in 12-foot surf," says Flea. "I'm not into that anymore. I know I can paddle in. I'm surfing the place now only when the buoys are like 15 at 17 or bigger."
Flea's only Mavericks session of the year began with one of the most gut-wrenching rides ever at the break. A couple weeks after the wave, Flea still acts as if it was no big deal.
"When [Josh] Loya and I got out there, I noticed that in order to make it more critical than any other wave, I'd have to get one and take it way back. That wave didn't look that huge, but as soon as it hit the bowl, I was like, 'Woah, this thing's making a run for it. "
Virostko took a high line in an attempt to thread through the second bowl, but it was no use: A 30-yard slab, 8 feet thick and 20 feet wide, unloaded as he made his descent. For a moment, Flea stood at the bottom of a barrel that looked like a reverse Waimea shorebreak-to the tenth power. Seeing no hope for escape, Virostko straightened off, raced out to the flats as far as he could, and prepared, in the words of Laird Hamilton, for the cement truck to unload.
"It broke, I straightened out, and I remember seeing the cliff for a second just as all this whitewash started to fall over me. It was a pretty good doughnut: I was ragdolled, and my lifejacket ripped off a bit, but I was fine. Give me another one."
"Flea's wave was the first wave I saw that morning," said Noah Johnson, who had flown over the night before from Oahu. "And I thought, 'Oh shit. This is serious. I hope he comes up:" But instead of playing it safe, Johnson hitched a ride with a surfed-out Repl
ogle, who towed the Hawaiian straight up a bomb so titanic that it broke out beyond the normal Mavericks ledge and rolled right through the bowl.
"I towed on that big day at Outer Logs in '98," says Johnson, "and this wave had a similar kind of feel. It was so big that you really can't do anything on it. There's so much face above and below you that you just sort of have to ... survive it. I played it pretty cautious on that one," continues Johnson. "I didn't want to fade too deep because I didn't think I could be mowed by a wave that big and come out alive. I was lucky, too. I barely made it around the first section. I could feel the whitewater nipping at my heels."
Those big days don't happen that often-few waves pass unridden by at least a few brave souls. PHOTO © ROBERT BROWN