Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [101]
Ten minutes later, dawn’s early light revealed a shimmering plume of spray. A Himalayan peak rose to life far off the bow. It was shaped like a great, volcanic cone—43 million pounds of water, terrible and unrideable. Its foam exploded an unknowable number of feet into the air and churned the surrounding waters into a 360-degree maelstrom of confusion. Then as the set swung closer to the boat, a second peak was revealed. A righthand wave stood majestically before throwing out a yawning barrel whose size was, again, impossible to estimate.
Pacific Quest took up a position near the Bishop Rock buoy, its bell clanging a lazy wake-up call. On the shoulder of the waves, the surfers saw that the real locals had already beat them out—a floating posse of argumentative sea lions with fins pointed to the sky.
Unloading the WaveRunners was a precarious affair that Evan Slater likened to moving pyramid stones. It had been tough enough to maneuver the hoist at the dock. The skis were raised via a pair of slings, and they were now swinging wildly in the swells. When Randy Laine’s thousand-pounder was jacked into the air, its rear end slipped and crashed onto the deck of the Pacific Quest. Had the nose also slipped, the ski’s next stop would have been the engine room.
The moment Skinny and Mel’s ski splashed into the water, an amped-up Skindog sped off toward the waves without so much as a good-bye. “Fuckin’ selfish Skinny,” Mel laughs. “I wanted to be the first one out there.”
Skindog edged in. Away from the boat and bell buoy, the air became still and quiet—seeming to suck up even the sound of the idling ski. The ocean’s surface was lumpy and a bit confused, a condition surfers call “morning sickness,” and there was a good deal of kelp. Suck a few fronds into the ski’s jet impeller, and you might become a sitting duck.
A set began to shoal.
“It’s 8 feet,” Skinny said to himself. “No, it’s 10. No. Ohhhhh Jeeesus.”
He tore back to Pacific Quest. The waves were easily 20 feet from top to bottom and building.
Rob Brown was quietly freaking out. This swell was still coming on. The strongest, deepest long-period bands were still an unknown number of miles out. There was no way to know when they would arrive or how they would react with the bottom. At Maverick’s and Todos, the seafloor produces a very pronounced takeoff zone that makes photographing from a boat a reasonably easy endeavor. If you know what you’re doing, you can safely hang a hair’s breadth from the edge of disaster. This wave, though, was dangerously shifty—like Sunset on Oahu. Different sets seemed to focus on different sections of the reef, and Brown had seen waves capping on other distant shoals—Maverick’s-size peaks. As energy filled in and tide dropped, waves might shoal across other spots on Bishop Rock where nothing was showing. No one really knew what lay on the bottom, either. Brown knew that the chart guide map showed a wreck to the inside covered by a mere three feet of water, but he had no idea where it really was or what that really meant. Nobody did.
One of the few who might have told them wasn’t there. Santa Barbara diver Ben Wolfe has dived the Jalisco’s wreck probably six times. Once, he was even left stranded for a day on the Bishop Rock buoy when the current swept him away from a dive boat whose crew didn’t realize that he’d gone missing.
Wolfe and his friends still dive inside Jalisco in search of lobster, reaching as far into her decaying innards as an engine room that leaks oil to this day. She’s now in at least three pieces, and Wolfe is reasonably sure that a big portion of the concrete behemoth has been pushed just inside the surf zone. “There’s fifteen, twenty feet of water over her collapsing deck, and she’s not going anywhere,” he says. “She’s covered in marine growth, and barely recognizable as a ship.”
Worse, her concrete is breaking down, battered by waves and eaten from the inside as rust consumes her rebar like a plague of metal termites. As more concrete