Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [104]
Rob Brown’s gaze returned to the waves. Dana Brown’s far larger sportfisher had been allowed to drift into almost the same spot. Rob watched incredulous as another wave lumbered onto the reef. He grabbed his VHF microphone and yelled to the captain to move his ass. The boat just sat there. Then he heard the captain say, “Oh my…Oh my God!” A cloud of diesel smoke rose as he finally throttled his engines, the boat nearly broadside to the wave. It disappeared completely in the trough and then wallowed, sideways, up its five-story face.
“We’re going, ‘He’s dead, he’s dead,” Rob says. “We’re gonna have to go save these people. Then he just rolled over the top, going, ‘Uuuggggggh!!’”
Rob shouted into the VHF. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“Oh my God,” said the captain. “I couldn’t get it in gear quick enough.”
This was indeed Sunset Beach—juiced on a tankerload of steroids. At Sunset, most waves break off the northernmost top of the point and peel down from there. But some waves instead load up their energy onto Sunset’s West Bowl. There, they grow, warble, and barrel in a most spectacular and unpredictable fashion. Surfers spend lifetimes trying to get Sunset wired. This crew had a few hours at best. As the tide slackened, the best waves were now jacking up onto the Cortes Bank’s version of the West Bowl, a spot that would come to be called “Larry’s Bowl.” And they were still growing.
Aboard the Pacific Quest, Evan Slater and Captain John Walla marveled at waves that were just achingly beautiful. Eventually, Slater could bear no more. “If this was five years ago, before everyone had safety blankets,” he told Walla. “We wouldn’t think twice, we’d be paddling in, no problem.”
“Okay, let’s go have a closer look,” Walla said. He knew full well that if they paddled out, they were going to get close enough to try and catch one. It looked intense out there, but it looked surfable.
James Thompson sat on the roof of the Pacific Quest casting a fishing line. Mike Towle was behind the wheel. Walla called up to Thompson. “Hey, we’re gonna put on our suits and paddle out. You in?”
“Umm, no,” Thompson said.
Of the waves, Slater says, “It looked 15 to 20 feet, which was manageable—with the occasional 30-footer. From the channel it really did look doable.”
Slater, like Skindog, was measuring by the macho Hawaiian big wave surfer’s scale; judging the simple top-to-bottom face height, he meant the waves looked 25 to 30 feet, with the occasional 40-footer. Despite what would happen a little while on, it’s always been surprising to me that Slater and Walla’s paddle into the unknown isn’t a more celebrated event. Partly this has to do with the fact that all the focus at the time was on towsurfing, and also, in later written accounts, the modest Slater would downplay what actually happened. Yet it’s fair to say that, up to that day and at least until January 2008, Evan Slater and John Walla committed either the bravest or the stupidest act in the long, storied history of big wave surfing. Probably both.
“There’s one thing I wanna say,” says Slater in his defense today. “What we did was probably pretty dumb. It wasn’t meant to be any publicity stunt or getting attention kind of thing. Looking at the waves from the channel from the boat, it honestly—it was pretty hard to tell how big it was.”
Evan leapt into the deep water, clutching his nine-foot-eight Rusty, a big, stable paddle machine you might use for the biggest Hawaiian outer reefs. Walla followed atop a 10-foot Rich Hynson. About a quarter mile of rapidly shoaling water separated them from the surf zone. To Slater the water felt thick, foreign. “It was like the stuff they add to cling peaches,” he says. “I think it has to do with this idea that the ocean is different, denser, when it’s so cold and you’re a hundred miles offshore.”
They immediately noticed that, from eye level, the swells were steaming in incredibly fast.
The duo took up a wary position off the kelp-tangled western edge of Larry