Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [107]
On their WaveRunners, Laine, Skindog and Mel rescued Slater and went to hunt for the lost boards. Skinny and Mel were pissed. “It would have been nice if they’d come to us and gone, ‘What’s the lineup?’” says Mel. “But they were on their own mission. ‘We’re gonna paddle. You guys be the motorheads.’”
“At that point, I really felt like a liability,” says Slater. “We’re just, you know, creating more hazards. I thought, this is probably a good time to just watch the show.”
Incredibly, the surfboards were found, unharmed, and returned to their owners. “I guess this is Towville,” Slater told Walla. They climbed back onto their boards and paddled over to the bleeding edge of the breaking waves to watch the greatest spectator event since Ben-Hur.
Walla laughs today. “But Evan, he still really, really wanted to catch a wave.”
Evan Slater (left) and Captain John Walla (right) are all smiles after nearly dying trying to paddle in at the Bank during the Project Neptune mission. On December 23, 1994, Slater and Mike Parsons pulled the lifeless body of Mark Foo from the water at Mavericks. Photo: Rob Brown.
Meanwhile, at the top of the point, Parsons and Gerlach were having the time of their lives, oblivious to Slater and Walla’s near-death experiences. On one wave, Gerlach was pulled to his feet in time to see a huge shark swimming by, and he then became ensconced in another spinning barrel as big as a cathedral—disappearing so far back that he couldn’t see a damned thing. “There’s this feeling—that any second the wave is just going to go booooom,” he says. “And you’re gonna get drilled harder than you’ve ever been drilled before. You’re saying to yourself, ‘Make it, make it, don’t fall.’ If you make it, it’s blind luck. It’s surfing by Braille.”
Gerlach rocketed out, so amped that he thought his head would explode. Mike Parsons had yet to get a chance at the rope. He was twitching like a junkie and about to crawl out of his skin. What if the wind comes up? he asked himself. What if I don’t get a chance to surf?
“Brad, I gotta get a wave!” Parsons shouted.
Not fifteen seconds after exchanging places—Brad on the ski, Mike in the water—both surfers noticed that in the distance, well off Larry’s Bowl, a big wave, a huge wave, was coming. What made it so much taller than the others is not something that could ever be definitively answered, but it’s probable that a couple of swells merged as they reached Bishop Rock at the same time. Mike Parsons was looking at a rogue. John Walla and Evan Slater saw it, too. They paddled like hell for very deep water.
“When I saw it, before we even got on it, it was like one of those things,” says Gerlach. “I looked over it and I’m like…I didn’t even say any words. I just nodded my head like, ‘You want this thing, don’t you? Even though you haven’t had a wave yet for the day, you’re not gonna wave me off. I know you better than that. I just wanted to double-check, right?’ He gave me the same look back like, ‘Yeah, yeah. Put me on it.’ So I was like, okay. I just made sure I was real…you really have to finesse the whole getting off the ski, getting on, grabbing the rope. If you miss the rope, you miss the timing by two seconds, you have to swim to grab it back and it gets really tough. So I just made sure I finessed it.”
Gerlach smoothly juiced the throttle to bring Parsons up out of the water and onto his surfboard and mentally calculated his angle of approach. He says, “I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m putting him on this thing.’ And it was sticking way, way up and I said, ‘Oh, yeah! The swell’s gonna kick in now.’”
Gerlach was stoked for Parsons, but he was also covetous. A historic wave like this only comes along once, and then only if you’re lucky, in any surfer’s life. This is how you do it, Snips, Gerlach said to himself. You fucking little bastard.
Parsons let go of the rope, and Gerlach veered off like a fighter pilot. Parsons faded left, quickly losing sight of his old rival. The sound of the ski faded into the distance, and in a few seconds all Parsons