Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [103]
Of course, Rob should have listened to his friend.
Parsons hurled Gerlach onto the first wave on the northernmost peak. Gerlach charged down the line, and as it reached the inside, the wave began to clamshell above him. He was enveloped in a massive, yawning barrel. The biggest of his life. When the wave cleared its throat, a cannon blast of compressed air erupted him from its windpipe and he shot out, still standing, into daylight.
“I remember Brock [Little] telling me that he fell inside a tube at Jaws because Brian Keaulana told him to jump if he felt anything hit him,” Gerlach later told Slater. “But he was pissed ‘cause he said he probably would have made it if he hadn’t jumped. I kept thinking about that as I pumped through these blind sections.”
“Oh my God! Gerr!” Mel shouted to Skindog, who was driving their ski. “Dude, get me into one of those.”
Brad Gerlach, perfect form, Cortes Bank, January 19, 2001. “I wish I was there right now. I think about it so much. I wish I was there.” Photo: Rob Brown.
Rob watched Gerlach’s wave in awe. Between shots, he had been trying to figure out—as best he could—from which point he might most safely shoot. Going around to the far side of the wave and filming from the east, off the top of the reef, was out of the question. Every so often, Evan Slater’s wedge wave thundered clear into the edge of the surf zone. It was easy to see why the nineteenth-century captain of the Cortes once thought he was above a caldera.
A wave unspooled off the top of the point, wrapping onto the reef like a whistle string spun onto a lifeguard’s finger. Rob watched mesmerized as it steamed across the shallows. He sensed his boat turning a bit and looked over his left shoulder. A deep blue wall loomed above the catamaran. The wave had swung wide. It was draining water down off the reef and sucking Rob toward its maw like a black hole. He screamed, simultaneously yanking the wheel to the left and slamming the throttle forward. The boat nosed into the wave’s face and slid backward a bit, the propellers straining to gain a footing, a terrified Connors hanging on for dear life. The wave was feathering, and Rob had a moment to think, I’m looking straight up at the ocean.
The boat climbed to vertical and sailed into the air, its entire twenty-nine feet fully clear of the water. It could have come back down either way, but miraculously, it flopped forward on the wave’s backside, obliterated from view in an explosion of spray. Later, when Rob watched the last moments of the Andrea Gail in the film The Perfect Storm, he was struck with a powerful sense of déjà vu. A half second slower on the draw, and the catamaran would have been pitched backward.
A second, bigger wave loomed through the clearing mist. Brown gunned the engines and pulled up alongside Pacific Quest in deep water. Flame’s voice crackled across the walkie-talkie. He and Bill Sharp had seen the whole thing from Natali’s plane. “That’s the spot!” Flame yelled.
“I almost died,” Rob said, clutching his chest.
“That’s the spot!” Flame was nearly frantic. “That’s the wave I saw before. Tell the boys to get over there! That’s where they need to be.”
Riding together, Randy Laine and Aaron Chang pulled up alongside Rob. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Laine said. “That wave was double, triple the length of your boat. You went straight up it.”
“His big boat just looked like