Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [105]
“We’re really whistling in the dark on this one,” Walla said to Slater.
Evan agreed. He says, “Once you got out there, you realized, not only how difficult it was to actually get in a spot to catch one of those waves, but how vulnerable you were.”
The towsurfers were a quarter to a half mile up the point. If something serious went down, and someone on a ski didn’t happen to see the paddlers—which was the likely scenario, since none of the towsurfers even knew Slater and Walla were paddling out—there was no hope of rescue by boat. Essentially and for all practical purposes, Slater and Walla had just trekked alone into an utter wilderness. They couldn’t tell where to line up, there were no points of reference, there was too much current, and the waves were far shiftier than Todos Santos or Maverick’s, seemingly bending in and almost approaching at a sideways angle compared to the North Peak—just like Sunset. Then there was another factor, not noticeable from the boat—four-foot-tall refraction waves were marching across the big waves at a perpendicular angle, putting a bizarre bounce on the water. Stroking in was going to be incredibly, incredibly difficult. But when a solid wave, 25 feet on the face, swung toward them, Walla nonetheless started paddling.
“Go, go, go!” Slater shouted.
“I was kind of in it, kind of not,” says Walla. “I was like, dude, no. I backed out.”
The leading edge of the swell’s steeper, twenty-second energy was sweeping the Cortes Bank and another set quickly followed. Walla and Slater paddled over the waves, exhaling through the storms of spray with a whoosh. “Next set, for sure,” Slater told Walla.
A few years after the death of Foo, and not long before his horrific knee injury at Maverick’s, Evan Slater was nominated for a “Worst Wipeout Award” at the 1997 Surfer Magazine Video Awards. He endured a three-story upside-down elevator drop to hell at Maverick’s that drew horrified gasps from the crowd and was augured to the bottom. Yet he climbed his leash, found the surface, and paddled right back out to the lineup. From that moment, everyone at Surfer regarded Evan Slater as both preternaturally calm and almost certifiably insane. I asked him what he was thinking when he took the drop, and I will never forget his answer.
“I was thinking I was gonna make it,” he said. “A big wave’s different from a small wave in that you have to start paddling so far before the wave comes. So you can’t start paddling with any hesitation. You have to know you’re going to make it. I know that sounds kind of weird, though, because sometimes you don’t.”
“Evan always eats shit,” Walla says with a laugh. “Every session. He’ll get some sick ones, but he’s always the guy who’s like, air-dropping 40-footers and getting slammed. He’s just crazy when it comes to big waves. He’s a lunatic.”
A lunatic was about to eat shit.
Slater and Walla noticed the next set. Gerlach, Parsons, Mel, and Skindog noticed it, too. It was absolutely huge. These waves seemed to be focusing on both the North Peak and Larry’s Bowl. Arms dug and throttles roared.
Slater set his sights on the first wave. He paddled like his life depended on it—since it did. Walla echoed his words—”Go! Go! Go!”—as he stroked over the top of the wave in the opposite direction. Slater passed Walla running downhill at better than twenty knots.
“I was hell-bent on trying to catch it,” says Slater. “I put everything I had into it.”
Slater was close, but not close enough. The wave, eventually, barely rolled beneath him. An old Sunset Beach adage suddenly echoed between his ears. “Never paddle for the first wave of the set.” Slater was now thirty, forty yards inside of Walla. With a dawning horror, he looked over his shoulder.
“I paddled over Evan’s wave and there was another one,” says Walla. “It was the full thing—a seven-, eight-wave set. I was like, ‘Oh,