by John Long
It was one of the biggest swells in modern surf history, with record waves from Hawaii to California. Such was the epic backdrop for Chris Dixon's tale of the death of a big wave rider and the birth of a legend. In particular, Dixon, a longtime surfer and New York Times reporter, scored a major scoop with an account of Laird Hamilton's rescue of fellow Maui tow surfer Brett Lickle in 80-plusfoot surf, a feat that could be described only as Herculean-and one that didn't appear in any of the surf magazines.
The wave was bigger than anything Laird Hamilton and Brett Lickle had ever seen-80, maybe 100 feet high. Though they were fleeing flat-out on Hamilton's personal watercraft (PWC), the great wave closed fast. "Our only words were Laird yelling 'Go go go!"' Lickle remembers. "Then it was like hitting the eject button on a jet fighter."
Hamilton, riding the rescue sled towed behind the PWC, dove off at 50 mph as Lickle took the avalanche full force. Tumbling in continents of foam, Hamilton's twenty-pound surfboard rammed fin-first into Lickle's calf, flaying him open from his Achilles to the back of his knee. The pain of the bone-deep gash was blinding but irrelevant because if Lickle couldn't kick his way back to the surface, then somehow swim a mile to shore, he knew he was a dead man.
The monster wave that overtook the two big wave veterans was one of thousands that coursed across the northern Pacific ahead of a historic December 2007 storm, a cyclone that formed when a dying tropical depression over the Philippines met a frigid blast tumbling down the Siberian steppe, found warm water, and went nuclear. "The moisture supercharged the storm," says Sean Collins, chief forecaster of Surfline.com. "It was like throwing dynamite on a fire."
Within a couple of days, a 1,000-mile line of hurricane-force winds screamed east across the loneliest stretches of the Pacific. Mountainous swells piled up on one another, ripping weather buoys from their moorings. "Swell data showed 50-foot waves," Collins adds. "Occasionally there was a 100-footer." Bill Sharp, director of the Billabong XXL Big Wave Awards (the Oscars for surfing's top hellmen), says, "It's the most extraordinary week I've ever seen in big wave surfing."
In the underground world of big wave surfing, news of a great storm travels faster than the waves. Before dawn on December 3, scores of Hawaiians were tuning their PWCs and hitching the rescue sleds as forecasters predicted a swell that might flip the switch at Oahu's famed Waimea Bay or, better yet, a slew of outside reefs (which produced the legendary rides of 1998, then the biggest waves ever surfed). But Hamilton had a hunch that the forecasts were wrong, that the best surf would be at Maui, 120 miles east. By daybreak, with Maui's North Shore under siege from unsurfable 50-foot walls of water, Hamilton revised his plan. Mist and storm clouds obscured reefs farther out to sea that might translate the chaotic waters into titanic waves. So Hamilton and forty-sevenyear-old partner Lickle set out on their PWC from Spreckelsville for a reef called Outer Sprecks.
"If anyone had any idea about the waves on the way, they would have turned on the tidal wave warning systems," Hamilton says. No small craft, much less surfers, would have been allowed on the water. In retrospect, Hamilton could have used the warning himself.
It took another day for the waves to make landfall in central California, but there, too, surfers were primed for a good old Pacific Ocean beatdown. At the foggy crack of dawn on December 4, half a dozen tow-in teams left Half Moon Bay for Mavericks, California s most celebrated big wave venue. Another twenty-five teams motored out from Monterey Harbor, 100 miles south, to a remote corner of rock-strewn shoreline. Maps call it Pescadero Point. Surfers call it Ghost Tree.
The ominous name derives from bleached trunks of dead cypress at the end of 17 Mile Drive, the Monterey-to-Carmel road along some of the most dramatic coastline on Earth. On rare winter days with the proper westerly vector, waves focused by the deep Carmel Canyon rear upward of 60 feet in deadly proximity to black, car-size boulders. Don Curry, a chiseled forty-eight-yearold big wave master and personal trainer, forged his legend here at Ghost Tree and at Mavericks. "The waves are right there," he says. "It's the only place you literally feel the waves shaking the ground. If you don't make the drop, you'll bounce off the rocks. You're dead."
In the days before personal watercraft, a few brave locals paddled out to challenge Ghost Tree, but waves heaved in too fast and broke too close to allow anything beyond scratching in at the end. Curry, for one, charged other big waves nearby, and on the biggest days he could always count on one surfer to paddle out with him: a larger-than-life contemporary named Peter Davi.
Davi was a forthright, bearish surfer of Sicilian descent, one of the few who had paddled into big Ghost Tree surf. One of six children with roots in the Monterey Peninsula generations deep, his grandfather Pietro Maiorana was a pioneering seine fisherman during the days of Steinbeck's Cannery Row. Although not above accepting an occasional tow, Davi believed surfers should earn their waves-a quaint attitude tolerated by some and revered by others.
On December 4 longtime friends Anthony Ruffo and Randy Reyes gave Davi a ride on their PWC out to Ghost Tree, where photographers, resting surfers, and spectators were floating outside the big waves. Among them was Kelly Sorensen, owner of Monterey's On the Beach surf shop, who had sponsored Davi for twenty-one years with clothing and gear. Sorensen watched as Davi and Mavericks regular Anthony Tashnick tried to paddle in. "Tazzy" managed two short rides, but the waves were too fast and mostly rolled underneath them. Davi paddled his 8'6" board over and sat on the back of Sorensen's PWC, and the two gaped at the horrifying wipeouts of the tow-in boys and the barrels big enough to drive a bus through.
Curry, a tow-in regular at Ghost Tree since 2002, rode a 60-footer on March 9, 2005. That day's poundings were also legendary. Justen "Jughead" Allport broke his leg in four places, and Tyler Smith took a 50-footer on the head, his brother's rescue attempt nearly killing them both. Several of that day's waves, including Curry's, earned surfers nominations for the coveted XXL Ride of the Year award. So on such a colossal day at Ghost Tree, Curry wasn't surprised to see twenty-five teams vying for waves.
Up at Mavericks, Peter Mel had surfed two amazing waves and was up on his third when it hit an undersea ledge and jacked vertical, sucking the bottom out of the wave. As the six-story wall of water folded and detonated, Mel simply ducked, covered, and prayed. "It was like I was run over by Niagara Falls," he says. "I thought it was going to tear the limbs off my body." His partner, Ryan Augenstein, rushed in and stopped cold. The ocean was so churned, the impeller couldn't get a grip in the foam-like a car spinning its wheels in snow. As another wave bore down, the PWC suddenly caught, Mel grabbed the sled, and the two shot to safety. "It was one of the most amazing saves I've ever seen," Mel says. At 12:30 a rescue team motored out. A crab boat named Good Guys had foundered, its two fishermen lost to the waves.
Down at Ghost Tree, Anthony Ruffo had tow-surfed into four menacing bombs. Davi was determined to tow into at least one wave on his traditional paddleboard. "I'm forty-five years old, and I want one of the fucking waves," he said from the back of Sorensen's jet ski.
"Those were the last words I heard him say," Sorensen says.
Laird Hamilton had guessed right. The farther offshore from Maui he and Lickle got, the clearer it became that the storms' big swells were setting up hills of water 50 feet high, hills that were crashing over the reef and offering rides three-quarters of a mile long. "It was absolute perfection," Lickle says. "Not a drop of water out of place." As the waves grew, so increased the boils and chop on the face of the waves, and the pair found it nearly impossible to control their skittering boards. So they returned to shore to pick up Hamilton's favorite: a 6'7" hardwood missile shaped by Hawaiian Dick Brewer, thin as a water ski, heavy, and fast. By the time they returned, Outer Sprecks had gone mutant.
Helicopter pilot Don Shearer, who's flown film and rescue missions during Maui's hairiest swells, whirred in under the low ceiling and was completely awestruck by combers twelve to fifteen stories tall. "I've seen every big swell that's com
e in since 1986," he says. "This was far and away the biggest I've seen in my life."
"They were sucking the water off the reef, breaking top to bottom," Hamilton says. "We could barely get into them, even at full speed."
The aluminum fin on Lickle's board had bent, so Hamilton tent him his hardwood Brewer. The foot straps were too wide, but Lickle couldn't resist the opportunity to chase down "the two biggest waves of my life." But as he blasted down his third the entire wall reared up in front of him, ready to close out. With no chance to outrun it, Lickle dug a rail and desperately arced up the top, narrowly flying over the folding lip. He was done and took over the driving as Hamilton, the most celebrated big wave surfer of all time, grabbed the hardwood board and the tow rope and readied for a few bombs. Then the horizon went dark: It was a rogue wave, straight out of The Poseidon Adventure. Not surprisingly, Hamilton wanted the rogue. Lickle pegged the throttle.
March 9, 2005. It will be remembered as the day Ghost Tree, the Mysto deep-water break off Pebble Beach, California, went huge, perfect, and nearly homicidal. And if personal watercraft are eventually banned in the Monterey Bay Sanctuary, tow-surfers may look back on March 9 as the most memorable day of a short-lived golden age.
-Ryan Masters, Heroes and Ghosts
After releasing the rope, Hamilton felt as if he were flying. Plunging down the wall, he violently bashed over dire ledges and warbles, barely staying upright, focusing far ahead for the line. Suddenly the wave lurched up into a closeout. Tearing along at 40 knots, Hamilton's only hope was to dive into the wall, kick like hell, and pray he didn't get sucked over the falls as the wave thundered shut.
Lickle, tracking behind, was horrified when the wave closed out. Then his buddy popped up unharmed but waving frantically: The next wave was even bigger. Hamilton grabbed the sled, and Lickle nailed the throttle, shooting toward land at 50 mph. It wasn't fast enough.
The wave hit us like we were going backward," Hamilton says.
Lungs near bursting, Hamilton and Lickle finally surfaced in choking foam. "I could barely keep my chin above the surface," Lickle says. Another wave followed, then another, dragging the pair a third of a mile until they reached calmer water. Then Hamilton heard Lickle say something like "tourniquet." Pulling his leg out of the water, Hamilton was shocked by the carnage. "It had to be taken care of right there," Hamilton says, "or he was going to bleed to death."
Almost a mile of sea and shorebreak lay between them and safety. Shearer's helicopter flew over, but he couldn't see the pair in the continents of foam. Hamilton ripped off his wetsuit and tied a sleeve tight around Lickle's leg. Then he spotted the watercraft a quarter of a mile away, floating perfectly upright. He gave Lickle his vest and said, "I've gotta go."
As Hamilton swam off, Lickle came to know what it means to be alone.
"I had bled out to the point of weakness," says Lickle, who could only drift, wondering if he'd ever see his family again. "I've got kids, twelve and seven."
Lickle's light-headed fog broke when the PWC arrived with his butt-naked buddy at the helm. The ignition lanyard gone, Hamilton had used stashed headphone wires to MacGyver a replacement. When he punched the ignition, the waterlogged engine fired right up.
Hamilton yelled into the radio for EMTs as Lickle knelt on the sled, trying to hold his calf closed for the grueling twelve-minute race to Baldwin Beach Park. By the time the watercraft ground into the sand, paramedics were waiting.
To hear locals tell it, Peter Davi was the most loved, feared, and respected surfer from the Monterey Peninsula. He chased wintertime swells from Big Sur to Santa Cruz to Mavericks. In his teens he'd left for Oahu's North Shore to take on the world's most towering waves-and outsize egos. With his size, talent, and force of will, he befriended Oahu's most imposing watermen, from Marvin Foster and Johnny Boy Gomes to Michael and Derek Ho to Garrett and Liam McNamara. "Because Pete charged hard and was so big, he could have been a bad boy if he wanted to," Liam McNamara says. "But he was a gentle giant, a soft-spoken family man who earned respect. He took care of you like a brother."
In the mid-1980s Davi lived on Sunset Point, where he earned the nickname "Pipeline Pete." "I had my most memorable sessions at Pipe with him," says McNamara. "I remember him and Derek Ho coming out of double barrels together, waves no one else could have made."
"He was a good surfer, built like a lumberjack," Hamilton says. "There weren't many bigger. And he was always a gentleman."
"The big Hawaiians really loved the guy," says Ruffo, whom Davi called "Ledge," for "Legend." "He was a big haole [foreigner] who had their respect when the locals were still punching people out. He opened the door for a lot of Santa Cruz guys like me and Peter Mel."
With money he earned fishing in 1986, Davi and his girlfriend Katrin Winterbotham bought some Big Sur property, where they planted fruit trees, fertilizing them with the guts of fish he hauled in. Two years later they had a son, Jake, who grew up with his dad hunting wild boar, surfing lineups from California to Oahu, and scouring the beaches and hills for shark teeth, arrowheads, and slabs of jade. A picture in Jake's room shows Davi wrapping a burly arm around a towheaded little kid in a pink wetsuit.
At Ghost Tree, Reyes handed Davi the rope and towed him off Sorensen's ski onto a wave-no monster but plenty dangerous on a paddleboard with no foot straps. The big man played it safe, riding near the top beside Reyes. Ruffo feared Davi would be trapped between the whitewater and rocks, but Davi somehow raced around the corner. "Everything was cool," Ruffo says. "We laughed about it."
Davi told Ruffo he was going to paddle back to Stillwater Cove, a fifteen-minute arm-powered journey. Ruffo offered him a ride, but Davi refused. "He was almost mad at us for suggesting it," Ruffo says.
What happened next is unclear, but a friend of Sorensen's claims he saw Davi catch a wave near the end of Pescadero Point, only to wipe out, snapping his leash. "He knew what to do," says Sorensen. "He was so big he could float just sitting in his buoyant wetsuit." But Stillwater Cove is full of shelf rocks, with a particularly bad one in the middle. As Davi drifted toward it, Sorensen's friend saw him rise on a swell. Then a sheriff ordered spectators off private land on the point.
Fed up with the crowds, Ruffo and Reyes called it a day. "Every time a set came, five teams would go for the same wave," Ruffo says. Rounding the last rocks 200 yards from Stillwater Pier, Ruffo saw something bob up in the wake of another jet ski. A seal? Then he saw a body floating facedown. He thought it was a diver until spotting the snapped leash. "I wasn't ready for that moment," Ruffo says. "I'm thinking, Is that Pete? We were just confounded. At a moment like that you don't know what to do. I jammed to the pier and yelled to someone to call 911."
Ruffo was back in less than two minutes, jumping into the water and pulling the stiff body of Peter Davi up onto his ski. When he steamed in over the rocks, paramedics were waiting and administered CPR for twenty minutes but to no avail. Peter Davi was declared dead at 1:28 p.m. An autopsy revealed he drowned after blunt force trauma to the head and chest.
"I've taken a lot of shit for saying this," Don Curry says, "but on that day, Pete just wasn't in the shape you need to be to go out there and paddle for waves. I'm not slandering the guy; I'm just stating the truth. That's the tragedy: His death was unnecessary. Pete didn't need to go down."
Another surfer, speaking on condition of anonymity, pins the blame elsewhere: "On a day like that, you have to pay attention to people in the water, no matter what," he says. "Pete had been in the water for two hours, he lost his board, and there were huge seas and currents and rocks. There were more than twenty skis out there, with five teams resting out the back, drinking water and talking on cell phones. And all these media guys clicking away." When word spread through the water of Davis death, some of them continued surfing. "A crew of Santa Cruz guys shut down their skis and formed a circle, but others acted like nothing had happened. That was fucking wrong."
"Peter Mel called me that morning on his way to Mavericks,
" says Ruffo. "He said, 'I just want to tell you to be careful today. Pete usually tells me anything but that. I was like, What the fuck was that, dude? It was in my head all day. It's what made me go in. We all like living on the edge, but not to the point of doing things that are stupid. That's what made me mad about what Don Curry said. This wasn't stupid. Davi was out there way before this. He was a solid waterman and fisherman. There was no reason to think he was doing anything wrong."
It's the night before Christmas Eve, and Jake, Katrin, and Ruffo are hanging out at Peter Davis Monterey home. It's a modest place, decorated with artifacts from a life on the water. Jake shows off a thirty-pound rock of jade his dad unearthed, a replica of Peter's grandfather's grandfather's fishing boat, and a palmsize fossilized shark tooth his dad found up in the mountains. "Dad should've had a museum," his eighteen-year-old son says. "If you liked something, he'd give it to you, even if he'd never met you."
Jake says Pete looked out for everyone, no matter how big or small the waves. "'Two feet to twenty, he always said," Jake says, recalling a day in 2002 when his dad pulled four tourists from the freezing waters off Carmel Beach. The fifth, a kid, died in Davis arms. Davi did time in 1998 on drug and firearms charges, but Ruffo says jail was a wake-up call. "We all do crazy shit," says Ruffo, who was busted in 2005 for selling meth. "But Pete paid his debt. He worked hard, fishing every day." He may have turned his life around, but there was another factor in Davis death. The toxicology report, issued on January 10, revealed that at the time of his death Davi had methamphetamines in his system at a level of 0.75 milligrams per liter-more than enough to make him intoxicated and potentially impair his ability to survive an accident in dangerous surf.
The evening of December 3, as Peter Davi prepared to head out to Ghost Tree, Jake and some friends were sitting on Oahu's North Shore, watching waves crash in the twilight, when a pair of surfers were sucked out by a rip current. Commandeering a jet ski, they charged out and saved the kids from being lost at sea. The next morning Jake was trying to sleep, but his phone kept ringing. "Around twenty people called me," he says. "They told me something bad had happened; my dad was lost at sea. I'm thinking, Lost at sea? No fucking way. Not my dad."