The Big Juice: Epic Tales of Big Wave Surfing

by John Long

  The pair did continue their bid on a Childs glacier wave. They've also continued to push at the boundaries of tow surfing. But depending on when you catch him, Garrett may or may not allude to the fact that the "rush" received a mortal blow that day.

  Last summer Kealii towed Garrett into some frightening Teahupoo bombs and equally incredible wipeouts. As Garrett emerged from one of the best waves of the day, Kealii swooped in on the ski to pick him up. Kealii was ecstatic. "I didn't get the rush," Garret said.

  "What?!" Kealii shouted. "Are you nuts?"

  BUZZY TRENT, KING OF THE BIG WAVE BEASTS

  George Downing, Wally Froiseth, Woody Brown, and a few other Waikiki surfers were all riding finned boards at Makaha by the end of 1951 and stroking with confidence into 15-plus-foot waves. The new equipment was fast and stable and miles ahead of the hot curl in terms of traction. If the boards weren't all that maneuverable, it didn't really matter. A high, tight, cleaving line to deliver you from the Point through to the Bowl on the heaviest wave of the day-that's what mattered.

  The big wave push was further boosted when a small and equally committed group of California surfers turned up at Makaha. It was a nice, quiet, easy scene. Apart from the occasional beered-up weekend scuffle, everybody got along well. Makaha was too remote and provided too much surf for there to be any territorial problems, and plenty of bonding opportunities were generated by shared moments of big wave terror and accomplishment.

  The mainlanders were led by Walter Hoffman and Murray "Buzzy" Trent, both of them young Malibu regulars in the early postwar years. Hoffman was a big, strong, corn-fed nineteenyear-old who got along well with everybody. He'd met and befriended George Downing in 1949 at Malibu and later that year sailed to Waikiki for a three-month summer visit. He returned the following year. In 1951 he extended his trip into the winter season and began surfing Makaha regularly.

  Hoffman had an 8-millimeter movie camera, and he mailed a few rolls of Makaha footage back home to his older brother Phillip ("Flippy" to friends and family) and Trent, both of whom watched and rewatched the grainy color film until the projector bulb finally blew out. All three surfers flew to Hawaii the next winter, in 1952, along with a revolving crew of another half-dozen Californians. They camped on the beach at Makaha for days at a time in army surplus tents and lean-tos made from tarps and scavenged wood. They ate triple-decker peanut butter sandwiches and went through a few hundred cans of VanCamp's pork and beans.

  Just about every photograph Walter Hoffman took that year embodies the frontier surfing ideal: empty waves, coconut palm-frond hats, boards scattered along the beach, a nine-surfer group shot with everybody tanned and smiling and barefoot, arms draped over each other's shoulders. It was all that. It was also consecutive days of flat-surf boredom, violent bouts of diarrhea, staph infections, and an assortment of tropical-borne skin conditions. "We all got sick," Flippy Hoffman remembered. "We all had boils. Carbuncles. It looks pretty in the pictures, and it was. But a lot of the time it was awful."

  Living conditions were much improved the following year when the Hoffmans rented a pitched-roof wooden shack a few hundred yards off the beach at the foot of Makaha Valley. More southern California surfers showed up, including surfboard designer Bob Simmons in his first and only visit to Hawaii. (Simmons drowned less than eighteen months later while surfing Windansea in San Diego.)

  Walter Hoffman and Trent had by that time distinguished themselves as the company's two most gung-ho surfers. If they were both well off the mark set by Downing in terms of skill and wave knowledge, they matched him for raw courage. Hoffman, in big surf at Makaha, was as cheerful as he was fearless, paddling out like it was a mess-around summer afternoon at Queen's or Malibu. Trent's focus on big surf, on the other hand, had shifted from intense to monomaniacal.

  Trent made a lot of other surfers nervous. He was a chatterbox and liked attention, and on a lazy afternoon among friends he'd hold court for hours, telling jokes and stories, pulling faces, and making big sweeping gestures with his arms. Everybody laughed-but Trent was a little off somehow, as if all settings had been turned up to "10" and left there. Raw ass-kicking masculinity came off him in waves. Trent had cinder-block arms and shoulders, a tiny danseur waist below a row of corrugated abs, and a smash-nosed face set low on a huge, blunt head. He was a fighter and a bully in high school as well as an all-state fullback who could run a ten-second 100-yard dash. Trent's birth father taught Buzzy that "suffering makes you like steel." With a note of approval, Trent later said his father was a "mean son of a bitch" who used to turn loose the family dogs on any Depression-era poor who made the mistake of stopping by the family house to ask for food. Trent's stepfather, meanwhile, passed on a deep and abiding love for German military history and Teutonic glory in general.

  During Trent's Malibu apprenticeship in the forties, he came under the tutelage of Bob Simmons. They sometimes drove out to ride the winter heavies at a break near Santa Barbara called Ventura Overhead, and Simmons told the younger surfer, "You ride anything, got that? You're a big chicken if you don't take off on these waves!" Trent nodded and did as instructed. He became a tight, clenched surfer. He couldn't swim very well, but he'd been diving for years, and he could hold his breath underwater for three minutes-wipeouts weren't especially scary to him. Plus, every bad wipeout, he believed, made him that much harder and tougher.

  Trent arrived in Hawaii in late 1952 and never left. Although the big surf meant a lot to all the visiting Californians of the era, and three or four others would also move to Hawaii permanently, nobody took it on the way Trent did. He lifted weights, skipped rope, shadowboxed, and took long thigh-burning runs through the sand at a time when training was nearly unheard of among surfers. He closely examined other surfers' big wave equipment and had new boards built that were even longer and racier. He also formulated a grim, heroic, death-or-glory view of big wave riding-an attitude that was passed on virtually unchanged to each succeeding generation of big wave surfers.

  This last bit was a remarkable one-man achievement. George Downing, Wally Froiseth, John Kelly, and a few others had built specialized equipment and pointedly gone out to ride oversized waves. But none of them saw the need to redefine himself as a surfer. They invented big wave surfing; that was enough. Trent invented the big wave surfer.

  For reasons that can only be guessed at-a natural showman's instinct, a bully's insecurity, a genuine belief that conquest is the transcendent human experience-Trent's beau ideal wave-rider viewed the sport almost exclusively in terms of battle and combat.

  The Makaha board that Trent got from Joe Quigg, a wicked 12-footer with a black dagger painted on the deck, was his "Sabre Jet." That name didn't stick, but Trent's description of big wave boards in general as "guns" did. He idolized World War I German flying ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen and told friends that while paddling into the lineup during a huge swell he imagined himself as the Red Baron banking through a hive of Allied planes above the French countryside. Here in the big waves, and only here, Trent believed, could surfing rise above the level of sport and recreation and offer the surfer a chance to drape himself in glory, honor, and valor.

  "We're warriors," Trent once told a big wave comrade, summing up their time together in heavy surf. "We didn't have to kiss anybody's ass. We came, we saw, we conquered. We're Caesars!"

  -From The History of Surfing, by Matt Warshaw

  For fifty years surfers were bound by the 25 foot ceiling-no wave, however big, could be described as being bigger than 25 feet. No one is quite sure why this was so, but in the early part of this millennium, big wave riders cautiously began describing waves by their actual height. Once they did that, the sky became the limit. Former Surfer and Surfing editor Evan Slater, who has ridden more than a few 40 footers himself, examined this new obsession with size-more specifically, the concept of a rideable 100 foot wave. Anything approaching such magnitude was strictly tow-in fare, but the largest day in Mavericks history had some contemplating
tow-in surfing's "unridden realm. "

  The world's best big wave surfers have been scanning depth charts of the world's oceans and speculating where the next tow-in frontier may be when all along they should have just asked Jeff Clark. The man who unveiled Mavericks to the world in 1990 knows that you don't need maps, scouting missions, or passports to find the 100-foot wave. You head to Mavericks, where once-a-year megaswells continue to rewrite the record books. And on Wednesday, November 21, 2001, Mavs added yet another chapter.

  According to Sean Collins of Surfline.com, a "complex low" formed in the Aleutians (meaning a mother of all tempests with a few smaller storms circulating around it) and sent a one-two punch of northwest swell steamrolling toward the West Coast. Mavs was a gunfight on Tuesday, but when news of an Oregon buoy reading of 42 feet at 20 seconds surfaced midday, Clark knew the real showdown would be on Wednesday. "By my calculations, the brunt of the swell was going to start around ten or eleven," said Clark. "So my partner, Jaws surfer Chuck Patterson, and me just kind of paced ourselves and waited for it to come."

  Others did not. Mike Parsons and Keith Malloy (who filled in for a North Shore-bound Brad Gerlach) were the first tow team on it, whipping into 20-footers before first light. Eight other teams soon followed, and Mavs' first real tow session of the year was on.

  The tow fun stopped at around eight with the arrival of the first paddle-in surfers, but most came prepared. While Malloy and Parsons packed it up and headed down to Todos Santos for another incredible tow session on Thanksgiving Day, Darryl "Flea" Virostko, Shawn "Barney" Barron, Josh Loya, Ken "Skindog" Collins, Matt Ambrose, and a handful of others gave it a go with their bare hands. Flea picked off a half-dozen huge ones, Ambrose pulled into a giant second bowl and was clipped on the way out, while Loya nabbed a set that some are calling one of the bigger Mavs waves ever paddled into. Right on schedule, the first 30-foot set arrived around 10:00 a.m.

  "The second that monster came in," said Skindog, "we knew it was tow time. We'd all broken our paddle-in boards, and it was just getting out of hand. You couldn't even get near it paddling in."

  Meanwhile, Clark and Patterson skipped the paddle session and towed at Blackhand Reef, a shallow stab a half-mile south of Mavericks. "It was like Teahupoo in reverse," said Clark. "I even had a two-wave hold-down on one-with a lifejacket. Chuck said, 'I came in to save you, but you just weren't there"'

  Unshaken by their Blackhand beatings, Clark and Patterson headed to Mavericks just as sets started breaking well beyond the bowl. Rain hammered down; winds howled from the south; boats were warned to head back to the harbor. Nevertheless, a handful of hellmen charged full throttle on the historic swell.

  "I watched Alistair Craft going on pure adrenaline," said Skindog. "On one wave, he faded, and the whitewater came close. On the next one, he faded a little more, and it got even closer. On the third one, it just mowed him."

  Surfers at Mavericks are now paddling into waves that were formerly considered "tow-in only." PHOTO © ROBERT BROWN

  Craft's partner, Vince Broglio, came in for the rescue, but by the time he got to him, Craft was far on the inside. Broglio ended up nailing a submerged rock and putting a pricey crack in the ski.

  The building swell also caught up with Flea and Barney. After failing to emerge from a giant bowl, Barney was floating deep in the impact zone with a six-wave set bearing down. Skindog watched in horror from the channel in the moments that followed: "When Flea rushed in to pick him up, Barney tried to grab the sled. But the sled broke like kindling, and he ended up hanging onto the tow rope, which was basically like an anchor. When the first one hit 'em, I was like, 'That's it, Fleas history: But he came flying out of the whitewater a couple of seconds later. And then another one came, and he somehow made it out of that, too. But Barney had to let go after that first wave, and he caught, like, six right on the head, went through the rocks, and just got beat."

  The warriors were falling, but Skindog/Loya (who filled in for Peter Met, who was also on the North Shore), Clark/Patterson, and Brazilians Carlos Burle/Eraldo Gueiros held their ground. Chuck Patterson survived a barrel for the ages. Burle and Gueiros were riding waves that seemed as far out as the Farallons, and Skindog and Loya used every last note from October's Billabong Odyssey training. "It was hands-down the biggest I've seen it out there," said Skindog. "We're talking waves 70, 80 feet on the face. And just nonstop."

  And it got only bigger, so big, in fact, that Skindog figured they'd brushed against the unridden realm for tow-in surfing. "Brock Little said there are no limits to tow surfing," said Skindog. "But I'm not so sure now. On the biggest waves I rode, the ones that broke way beyond the bowl, I'd be going, like, 40 mph, the waves were moving way faster than they were at Cortes, and I was hitting these chops going sideways. I was feeling it in my legs halfway through the wave. Plus," continued Skindog, "we got to see what Mavericks does at that size. The big ones completely missed the bowl, which means, I guess, that it was too big."

  But Skindog's last wave didn't miss the bowl. In fact, the humble 60-footer jacked up ahead of him, and the rest was his-tow-ry.

  "I was on the way outside bowl," said Skindog, "and I thought, 'Cool, I'm way ahead of this thing: But then it hit the double-up and just started jacking and throwing. I had no choice. I was, like, 'Oh my God, I'm going to have to do this: I pulled in way high, started driving, but I couldn't see it bend. It looked like I was going to get swatted, but I kept angling down, down, down, and suddenly I was out. I was like, 'Okay, that's it. Quit. Stop. I never need to come back here again so long as I live"'

  "It was a buttery 30-foot barrel," said Clark. "There was only one of them that really stayed open like that, and Skinny was right there for it."

  And while Clark agrees with Skinny that it was clearly the biggest day ever at Mavs, he's not at all convinced they exceeded the size limit. "It wasn't the size," said Clark, "it was the conditions that held us back. I was, like, 'Bring it on"'

  In fact, Mavericks did bring it on, in early afternoon, just as the last tow teams were counting their blessings in the harbor. According to psycho water rescuer Shawn Alladio, the mythical 100-foot set landed about a quarter-mile outside the Mavericks lineup at approximately 2:00 p.m.

  "I rescued a few people who were swept off the jetty," said Alladio. "I headed back out 'cause I didn't want to miss seeing this amazing sight. I got more than I asked for-a rogue set of five waves all 100-plus feet on the face, closing out. I had 3-mile visibility, and this was a solid 3-mile-wide wall of water moving fast. My partner and I ran for our lives full throttle to get out of the impact zone. When we cleared the first wave, which I thought was all there was, there were four more stacked up, all much bigger and farther out. We had to blast on for the race of our life. It was terrifying. There were no safety zones. The speed was critical. I glanced down at my LCD display and saw the number 5. So we were racing in the open ocean straight into these waves at 50-plus mph in very rough conditions. The fall behind the wave was about 50 feet, straight down, then hit, bottom out, pull throttle, and do it again. An amazing experience."

  The archetypal big wave riders had traditionally been easy to spot: rugged, stoic, hard men, their weathered faces and fighter pilot's eyes seasoned from years of staring into the abyss at spots like Waimea Bay. But no longer. Today's danger-wave surfer comes in all shapes, sizes, and sensibilities, the only common threads being transglobal mobility and commitment to a code of apparent fearlessness in any size surf, from 6 feet to 60. In 2007 Surfer's Journal tapped Daniel Duane, the award-winning journalist and author (his 1997 book Caught Inside is still one of the best ever written about surfing), to profile one of the most fascinating of this new breed.

  Our rented Land Cruiser was bouncing over a bad dirt road on a cacao plantation, and we were all hoping to find a good point break. Aamion Goodwin was in the passenger seat, all 6-foot-6 of him. He's an island boy, and he's big on that island concept of "just cruising," like when you ask somebody what they'
re up to and they say, "Not much, just cruising." I like the way that phrase puts a positive, proactive spin on doing absolutely zero; watching television, for example, qualifies as "just cruising." Getting high in the Ehukai parking lot on a flat summer day definitely qualifies as "just cruising." But getting your cruise on is also a great way to grease through the rigors of international surf travel, and Aamion is such a pro that he cruised right through our New Jersey-toLisbon red-eye, a long day in Lisbon, and a second red-eye out to this mid-Atlantic speck of a jungled island. And now, during the inevitable jet-lagged dog days of searching for surf-driving up every ridiculous dirt road and bushwhacking out to views of the water, squinting into the equatorial sun, and shaking your head and speculating about what the right swell could probably do at the useless bombora you're pretending might actually be a surf breakAamion wasn't just cruising. He was at home, as if he'd been born to the island low-ride, and he kept leaking these freaky little details suggesting the low-tide birth was a simple fact. Like coconuts.

  The island's Saturday market was so third-world chaotic, in such a ruined, postapocalyptic concrete shell of a bombed-out building, that I wondered if I might rather go hungry than try to buy lunch. Aamion, on the other hand, with that self-contained curiosity common in people who've grown up traveling, waltzed into the market, did a little relaxed haggling, bought twenty pounds of coconuts, dumped them into the passenger seat footwell, and, as we went off searching for surf, started hacking and drinking away.

  Later, at the best right-hander we found-a zippy little point with fun bowl sections-a band of local boys hung out watching us, hooting whenever Aamion got air. He's not a big aerialist incidentally, although he can boost if he needs to. Aamion's a waves-of-consequence guy, a card-carrying member of both the Kauai Wolfpack and the serious Pipeline underground, the guy who comes into his own at Cloudbreak and Teahupoo, where his huge frame and Kauai childhood and preternatural calm place him in the freakiest pits.