by John Long
It is, quite simply, the most remarkable surf spot on the planet: Cortes Bank, a massive seamount whose submarine peak rises to within a few fathoms of the surface 100 miles off the coast of southern California. Giant North Pacific swells rolling over the bank create waves of almost unimaginable size-some of the biggest waves ever ridden, and these attempted only by jet-powered tow-in teams. But in 2010 New York Times reporter and longtime surfer Chris Dixon signed aboard for a different offshore expedition, sailing over the horizon with a team of intrepid big wave riders bent on tackling Cortes barehanded.
"When we were here the last time," Greg Long says, sweeping his arm toward the clanging bell buoy atop the Bishop Rock, "it was a whiteout the whole length of reef. And all the way up, I mean, you know how long the bank is, there were waves spotting and breaking all the way down right up to here in front of us. You could see waves breaking in slow motion, 5 miles away."
"As far as the eye could see, it was just a huge square of whitewater," adds Grant Baker in his Durbanese dialect. "We had to sit way out past the buoy, and the waves were coming right through the buoy. This area in here was a nightmare, all the fucking whitewater. If you lost your guy, he was gone. He would have just been lost in the expanse and you'd never find him. It was just so scary."
Baker and Long were recalling January 5, 2008. It was the day they teamed up with hellman boat captain and photographer Rob Brown, Mike Parsons, and Brad Gerlach and motored off into a tiny opening of calm air between the pinwheel arms of one of the deepest lows ever recorded in the North Pacific. On this Hail Mary mission into surfing's greatest unknown, they returned with the rightful account of how they surfed the largest waves ever documented. I recounted the tale for the New York Times. The article, accompanied by Brown's famous photos of a diminutive Mike Parsons outrunning a cerulean avalanche, ended up being the week's most heavily trafficked sports story on the Times' website, even outranking the breaking news of Roger Clemens's steroid abuse. But for me, the story didn't end there.
Since that time, this 16-mile-long ridgeline, a sunken island that the first California settlers probably walked atop 10,000 years ago, has become an obsession for me. In fact, I imagine my mania for the place has come to somewhat resemble that of Long. But rather than surf the Cortes Bank, I'm writing a book about it. I ponder the fact I'm actually out here, and the company I'm with, and shake my head. With all the bizarre, terrifying, and fascinating stories I've heard over the last year, it's the strangest deja vu: a homecoming to a place I've never visited.
This is Long and Baker's first visit to Cortes [together] since 2008. The fact that we can sit right off the Bishop Rock buoy, which serves as a small island for Cortes Bank's bickering troupe of sea lions, means that the waves are decidedly smaller than they were then. But this expedition is no less historic. Last summer Long, Sam George, Bill Sharp, and a young San Clemente hellman named George Hulse joined Surfing magazine's late, great photographer Larry "Flame" Moore on a successful, if unsung, paddlesurfing mission out here.
Long and a few of his closest colleagues have lately been rewriting the book on the kind of waves it is physically possible to paddle into. What better laboratory for this ongoing experiment in mortality, Greg reasoned, than the 12-foot-deep pinnacle of Bishop Rock? But he didn't just want to do the deed with Baker or Parsons (who was inexplicably absent from this trip); he wanted to include a cadre of the best big wave surfers in the world. Long brought up the idea to photographer Jason Murray, who has joined him on expeditions to spots only they will ever know. Long worked the surfer angle, inviting his brother Rusty, Peter Mel, Nathan Fletcher, Kelly Slater, Mark Healey, and Chilean hellman Ramon Navarro. Murray would work to sort out the transportation.
The last time Long and Baker visited these waters, they napped in surfboard bags in the open hull of Rob Brown's go-fast boat while trading frigid hours atop their second jet ski in a surplus navy survival suit. This time, Murray's well-placed calls yielded interest from Jerry Herbst, a billionaire with family interests in Vegas casinos, convenience stores, oil, and a racing team. He'd let them travel aboard his glittering 105-foot Westport, a yacht named Mr. Terrible, for the cost of fuel and crew.
A day before we boarded Mr. Terrible, Long and Baker had been in Hawaii, with no idea that they would soon be trekking out to Cortes Bank. The hardest-working duo in big wave surfing had spent the winter of '09-'10 jetting between the West Coast and Hawaii in a manic, epic quest to score El Nino's greatest bounty. With a healthy, long-period swell looming, there had been quiet chatter of a post-Christmas bank job, but the winds were looking particularly unfavorable. Thus, Christmas Day found Long and Baker enduring back-to-back, near-death experiences at Peahi (Jaws). Frustrated, and possibly nursing a slight concussion, Long needed rest. But then the call came from Murray. The winds were backing off.
By 11:00 p.m. on December 26, the dusty four-wheel-drive Econoline that doubles as Greg's mobile home rumbled to a stop in front of Terrible Herbst's waterfront Newport Harbor mansion and spilled out an overstuffed cargo of surfboards, surfers, and Long's and Baker's girlfriends, Kate Lovemore and Jess Spraker. Minutes later Bill Sharp rolled his video camera as a bleary-eyed Long greeted a team of the best big wave surfers on Earth.
For some reason, apparently unclear even to himself, Kelly Slater chose to simply say hello to everyone at the dock and then drive toward LAX on a quest to chase a big Atlantic swell through the Caribbean to Morocco. As Mr. Terrible passed the gilded palaces along Newport Harbor, Mark Healey's cell phone rang. Long laughs at the ensuing conversation: "Kelly says, 'I was just driving down the road, and I didn't really realize, did I just drive away from that whole production? That's a once -in -a-lifetime opportunity. I drove back. Can you guys come back and pick me up?"'
Long settled down alongside Pete Mel to a plate of tamales and took what appeared to be the first hard look around since LAX. "I almost drowned yesterday. Now look at this. I'm sitting on a yacht eating tamales."
It was a sense shared by everyone else on board. When the call came to me nine hours earlier that the mission was on, I was cruising down a hill on a skateboard with my four-year-old daughter in front of my mom's house. In Atlanta.
Through mouthfuls of tamales, Long told of his particular vexation at the punishment he and Baker had endured at Jaws, wondering whether to blame it on a bad set of fins, his board, or his surfing. "It's a pretty weird experience to think that you fucked up that bad," said Long. "It was everything you don't do. I did the Skindog. We were out there before the sun comes up and the first big wave. I haven't towed into something like that in I don't know how long."
"So, you got maybe a little overzealous, no?" Mel chided. "Slightly? Would that be the first mistake?"
"No, I mean, we sat there and watched a couple of sets go through, and it's a deceiving wave, because if you let go on the peak, then you're way too deep. You can't make forward momentum because all this water's drawing back. Let go at the shoulder, and then you're actually in the peak. I let go too early on my first wave, and it was massive. I got stuck behind it and took the west bowl on the head. The next wave I started going down the face and started to try to turn, but the board didn't want to. I was dealing with all the bumps, and as soon as I got to the bottom, it was like, bump, bump, bump, and I just fell straight on my face. Then I'm just like, skip, skip, skip, whoooosh. I'm upside down looking out of the tube getting the suplex. It was the most violent flogging I'd had in a long time."
The discussion turns to wipeouts, concussions, and near-death experiences. Slater and Baker recount hilarious and frightening stories of the amnesia they suffered after brutal wipeouts in Java and South Africa. Then someone asked Mark Healey about his recent excursion to ride on the backs of great white sharks off Guadalupe Island. It's an idea that for a world-champion spear fisherman-cum-hellman like Healey seems perfectly normal but that to everyone else seems perfectly insane.
When talk turns back to horrifying wipeouts, the subject o
f Mavericks reappears, in particular, a hellish hold-down endured by Neil Mathies ten or so years back.
"He played it off on film, but he buckled his back," says Pete. "I think he went back, but he never rode a wave. He was like, 'This isn't enjoyable anymore. I'm over it: Which I think is way more admirable than trying to fake that you like it. It's like, 'I frickin' love this. I swear I do. Umm, I'm supposed to love this? Wait, I don't love this; I'm scared shitless!"'
"For me, it totally depends on the kind of mood I'm in," Slater says, strumming a vintage Kamaka ukulele. "Like the day before the Eddie, I was like, 'Fuck it: I'm not even into it. But then I got there the morning of the contest, and I'm like, 'Let's go!' Then when I get out there, it's like, for me, I don't know that I'm going to go out there and push myself on a big wave. But then I get out there, and I'm like, 'My God, these things are perfect. If I wipeout, I'll just hold my breath for twenty seconds: There's something to be said for putting yourself in a situation. Once you're in it, you're like, 'Well, I have to deal with it now:"
Before we turn in, Nathan Fletcher, a guy I've never met before but come to like a lot, briefly recounts a tale related by his uncle Phillip "Flippy" Hoffman of an experience off San Clemente Island, a spot we're due to pass in a couple of hours. "You don't know what to expect out here, really." Fletcher says. "It's at the edge of the continental shelf. Anything can happen. My uncle was out on a day, and it was 15- to 18-foot. All of a sudden, a 100-foot wave-a rogue wave-came, and they were motoring up it, and the boat went over the falls. He had to jump off and swim to San Clemente Island. He said it's still the biggest wave he's ever seen."
At dawn the next morning, the possibility of a rogue wave seems unlikely but not out of the realm of possibility. A quartermile off the bow looms a strange apparition. Solid lines of a new swell bump on the horizon in the middle of the ocean. The first rises glacier blue beneath diffuse morning sunlight, a majestic A-frame peak, perhaps 25 feet from trough to crest. Its concussion and the subsequent geyser of whitewater shatter the morning quiet like an artillery burst from the hills behind Trestles. Baker grins and then shouts below deck, "Healey, eeets a left!"
After motoring out on a scouting mission with Healey, Greg wants to be the first one in the water. But first he wants to give the comely Jess a chance to peer into his world from the back of his ski. In the distance, the WaveRunner makes a solo drop down a wave perhaps 20 feet from top to bottom. Greg expertly pilots right along the wave's massive flank. When they pull back up to the boat, Spraker is amped on adrenaline, and her eyes are like saucers.
"Nothing I've ever done comes close to that," she says. "And he said that wasn't even huge. I'm like, 'Oh my God, are you nuts?' Oh my God. That was so fun. The wave just exploded; we were getting sprayed by it. I was screaming. Oh my God. Kate and I always say Greg and Twiggy, they're drug addicts. Now I can see exactly why he does this."
Before long, it's my turn. One of the crewmen, a young fisherman named Nate Perez, has been ferrying surfers out to the lineup on a spare ski. He's not wearing a wetsuit, and so I figure I don't need mine either. Perhaps 50 yards from Mr. Terrible, I sense this is a mistake. My mind turns to a story I've been researching about a crew of crazy entrepreneurs who sought to create their own island nation atop Cortes Bank by sinking a massive concrete freighter on the exact pinnacle of rock that lies dead ahead. The leader of the operation went to sea with no life jacket, clad in fur apres ski boots, a sweater, and cashmere pants. The mistake nearly cost him his life.
I peer down into the water, hoping for a glimpse at the wreckage of the ship. But all Perez and I can see is a forest of palm kelp, big, scary swirls of current, and an occasional tornado of what I can only imagine must be schooling sardine. Out at the peak, the surfers sit in a loose bunch, scattered in a circle at least 75 yards across. Every so often a sea lion surfaces and slings a yellowtail into the air. A seal carcass floats out at the edge of the lineup. Healey's jokes about sharks scare the bejeezus out of everyone.
The waves are shifty beasts. Some hit far up on the peak, capping over and rolling down the line like mutant runners off Old Man's. Others rise up into explosive cone-shaped wedges that Slater says remind him of Sebastian Inlet on steroids. Others shift a little farther to the east and jack up into steep, deep slabs that I can't imagine trying to paddle into. Ramon Navarro can, though. He strokes hard, and the wave drops out from under him. He slides down on his back like he's at a water slide, snaps his leash, and is pummeled on the inside. A few minutes later, Alfie Cater makes the same mistake. From a ringside seat, his freefall to hell is gut-wrenching.
We edge closer and watch Slater and Long stroke into a pair of bombs. There's the barest whisper of south wind. But it's enough to blow a cascade of spray off the wave's hulking back. The rainstorm shower is the only thing you hear until the tremor that's unleashed when the wave folds over. I've never heard or seen anything quite like it, not while sitting on boats at Todos Santos or Mavericks and certainly not standing on the beach or the point at Waimea Bay. Silence punctuated by showers, hoots, and explosions.
Healey and Long slide down the face of a beautifully tapered right-hander. Fletcher sketches into a steep bomb atop a terribly skinny 11-footer. I never see Healey ride a left. For documentarians like Bill Sharp or Murray, or the surfers who casually call waves like these "20-footers," you can sense that it might be possible to eventually lose your sense of wonder at a scene like this. But because I have no desire to surf waves like these, just being out here is absolute sensory overload.
Perez idles around, trying to keep us away from impellerchoking strands of kelp, and we both just marvel at the whole damn thing. I've delved deeply into the geologic origins of this rock and have pieced together what I hope is the first coherent line of history on the horribly tragic details surrounding its discovery and first charting. I've listened to divers spin fantastic tales of the wonders that lie below. I've interviewed a man who traveled out here with legendary treasure hunter Mel Fisher on a hilariously ill-fated attempt to find the gold of a Spanish galleon. I recently located a man who surfed out here alone in 1961 and have interviewed another legendary big wave surfer whose boat sank out from under him in the middle of the night. That he is alive today is pure miracle.
I'm sitting on the ski pondering these imponderables and staring down into the depths when I finally get a view of the bottom, or the top if you think of the Cortes Bank as a 6,000-foot mountain. The water's as clear as an aquarium, and it's impossible to tell how deep it is, but you can clearly see dark rock interspersed with patches of very, very white sand. Golden fish, they must be garibaldi, weave through the forest. So complete is our distraction that Perez and I fail to notice a dark lump outside. When we do look up simultaneously, the view is, frankly, terrifying. A grayblue wall the size of a house has erased the horizon and is bearing down. Perez fires the ski. Nothing. He hits the starter again, and the engine fires. I pray we've not sucked up any kelp as he guns it. We're nearly erased.
On the flight home to Charleston the next morning, I ask myself if the previous day really happened. Even though I've logged hours of interviews and unearthed rare photos and footage, the Cortes Bank has never actually seemed like a real place. Now that I've actually been out there, I'm not exactly sure if that feeling has changed.
The Basque fishermen of the French and Spanish coast have a long history of seafaring, maintaining a centuries-deep respect for the giant Atlantic storm swells that sweep the Bay of Biscay. But in recent years a new generation of Basque watermen has been exploring the coast, discovering waves of a previously unimaginable size. In 2002 French surfer Vincent Lartizen was part of the first team to pioneer the bombora reef called Belharra, a previously unknown wave off the coast of the Cote Basque. Photos of that and glassy peaks-helped reconfigure the global big wave surfing maps. Yet Lartizen wondered what Belharra might be like on a really big swell. In the fall of 2008, he got his answer.
For at least two years, before we ev
er caught the first wave, I'd heard stories about Belharra from the local Basque people. They told us about this giant wave breaking way outside the port of St. Jean de Luz and how it was the fishermen's dread. They said that on the really big swells, the waves were so huge you could see them breaking all the way from shore. So, whenever the swell was up we sometimes would look out at Belharra and say, "Yeah, we should go out there someday." But from land, so very far away, it looked like just another big wave-nothing more than that. Then finally, during the huge swell that hit the Atlantic coast in 2002, we decided to go out there and have a close look. And it was a real shock.
The offshore reef at Belharra is located 3 kilometers out west from the breakwall of St. Jean de Luz. During our first exploration we could see it breaking, even from the water level, on the back of the ski. We just grabbed our boards, took aim on the break, and gunned it out there. And the closer we got, the bigger it grew. Breaking so far from shore, with nothing around it but water, the wave seemed to rise off the sea like a mountain. It's a very wide wave with a high peak, and it races across the reef with great speed-much different from other big waves we had surfed in France and even in Hawaii, where the waves slow down as they reach the shore. At Belharra, the swell does not slow down over the reef-at all. So in terms of size and speed, that first session was a shock, very intense.
Following our initial adventure we would check the charts and buoys, all winter long, watching for the swell to get big enough to make Belharra break once more. Over the next five years we had several good sessions out there but nothing close to that first day. It wasn't until 2008 that another huge swell was predicted. But the buoys showed that it was so westerly that it wouldn't be good for Belharra. Morning high tides would flood the place, which is also not good, so we decided instead to head for Spain and some better-known big wave breaks. Two days before the big swell hit, our preparations for Spain were nearly complete. On the next-tolast day in France, I thought, I'll just check out Belharra in the morning, on our way over to Spain. Then the morning comes, and the swell is huge, and we call a friend who lives right there at St. Jean de Luz-it was winter, so dawn was around 8:00 a.m.-and he says, "Yeah, it's breaking. Every five minutes there is a wave. And it doesn't look small."