Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [100]
Early that same day, photographer Robert Brown had driven his catamaran out to Catalina Island with a sailing buddy named John Connors, who also happened to be his insurance agent. The pair anchored off Avalon and paddled Brown’s tiny inflatable to town. They had dinner and rented rooms in a local hotel, intending to land a few hours’ sleep before heading out to join everyone at the Bank. Then around midnight, Brown flipped on his weather radio. The Tanner Banks buoy had suddenly lit up with something Jim Houtz would have recognized immediately. The swell height was a relatively small 8 feet, but the period was an astonishing twenty-five seconds. It’s going to be fricking huge, Brown thought, and there is no wind.
Brown leapt out of bed. “Let’s go,” he told Connors.
They hoisted the inflatable above their heads, walked past the noisy bars of Avalon, and stroked back out to the catamaran. Brown hailed the Harbor Patrol. “We’re going to the Cortes Bank,” he said.
“You are?” Came the reply. “Well, good luck with that.”
Brown followed his newfangled GPS around the backside of San Clemente Island. The military was conducting bombing and artillery exercises and the vast bombing range was lit up by huge flashes and laser-like tracer fire and wracked by deafening explosions. It looked like an attack from Star Wars.
The captains of all three boats had agreed to make contact on the VHF to keep one another apprised of their progress. Brown hailed them all through the lonely night as he motored toward the unknown. No one answered.
The surfers aboard Pacific Quest turned in at 10 P.M. They’d all had a beer or two but were still jittery. Parsons lay in a bunk in the bow, feeling the long, low swell build as the boat nosed farther into the open ocean. The Santa Ana wind was disconcertingly strong when they had left, but now it seemed to be laying down. He kept asking himself, What the hell is it going to be like out there?
At around 1 A.M. , the sound of silence woke Peter Mel. He found Walla, Thompson, and deckhand Mike Towle assessing a situation. One of the fuel filters had apparently clogged, starving an engine. Walla replaced the filter, but the engine then refused to restart. An hour of checkouts yielded nothing. Perhaps there was air in the fuel line. Maybe a pump had failed. No one knew.
Walla fired the remaining engine and continued on. “He didn’t yell at anyone,” says Mel. “He never blamed anybody. And in the end, there was no debate. We’re going.”
“Johnny, wake up. Wake up, dude.”
Walla took a groggy look around the darkened cabin of the pilot house. It was 4 A.M. James Thompson’s face was bathed in a soft, green glow. He was staring transfixed at Pacific Quest’s tiny lithium radar screen. Eerie pixelated lines were flickering into existence, scrolling down, and then fading back into black.
Thompson was well spooked. A huge freighter had steamed across the black horizon, but her lights had been suddenly and then regularly eclipsed by some barrier between the boat and Bishop Rock. Then these ghosts began to haunt the radar screen.
“What the fuck is that?”
“It’s the Bank,” Walla replied, his finger following a line as it began a matrix-like descent. “Those are waves.”
Everyone soon gathered round the radar screen, watching real waves detonate virtually in the invisible distance. Evan Slater saw a strange, symmetrical beauty in the imagery. Dana Brown’s and Rob Brown’s boats were tiny blips. The waves were anything but.
The sky still lay under a smothering blanket of stars and the ocean was an inky, infinite black. Walla crept northward, keeping the Bishop Rock to his northeast flank. They couldn’t see a damn thing. Above the idle of the Pacific Quest’s single engine came a crack of distant thunder followed by a long roar. The glass in the windows shook a little.
The radio crackled. Rob Brown crawled into position, too, keenly aware that other shoal spots on