Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [108]
Parsons angled toward the right and his board began to chatter with the speed. The wave kissed the sky.
Rob Brown was transfixed in horror and fascination. With only thirty-six shots on his camera, he had to consciously remind himself not to blow through his whole roll of film. “I didn’t have a comparison for the wave because it was so much bigger—I mean, I couldn’t even compare it to anything else,” Brown says. “The size and the sound—it was just such a leap over anything I’d ever seen. I was sitting there going click, click, click, watching the counter go down frame by frame, telling myself, ‘Relax. Mike is gonna die right here, and right now, but you’re gonna do your job.’”
Aaron Chang and Randy Laine were directly inside of Parsons and gaped in wonder. In all their years on the water they’d never been granted a view quite like this.
The wave threw forward an enormous lip. The concussion rattled Parsons’s brain. He was inches from death. He tried to focus on the boils in his path and concentrate on where the nose of his humming, skittering surfboard was taking him. If the wave, somewhat slowed by the Bishop Rock, was marching over the reef at forty to fifty miles per hour, Parsons was probably doing sixty-plus down its endless face, a moving slope of ocean nearly a football field in length. Maybe Parsons was going to drop forever.
Parsons says, “I was thinking to myself, get in the right spot. Then I was just locked in. I mean I knew I was riding the biggest wave of my life, but I was just focused on make it, make it, make it. No mistake.”
He blasted past a cheering Mel and Skindog, and then Slater and Walla—who sat in reverent awe a stone’s throw away on the shoulder. Had they still been trying to paddle in, they would have been in the bull’s-eye of a wave perhaps 70 feet high, and they would have probably died. “I think he got weeded,” Walla yelled through the torrent of spray.
But Parsons stayed planted. To Flame and Sharp in Vince Natali’s plane, he appeared positively Lilliputian. Cheers drowned out the propeller.
Parsons kicked off a hundred yards inside of Slater and Walla and the small gallery erupted.
“I’ve watched and photographed Parsons since he was fourteen,” Brown says. “That was the pinnacle of his long surfing career.”
Gerlach picked up Parsons, and they throttled back out to Rob Brown on his catamaran. “Guys, that’s the pinnacle,” Rob said. “We’ve done it. Stop while you’re ahead. Let’s go before someone dies.”
But no way, no way, was Parsons leaving. The next set held another wave—nearly as tall. The skinny kid from San Clemente careened down the spine of another dragon. “I remember going, Wow, this is a huge one, too,” Parsons says. “Coming off the bottom, I just felt it breathing down my neck.”
This time the dragon’s breath burned. Once the wave broke, “it just swatted me,” Parsons says. “Blew me forward out of my foot straps, straight down. I remember going, Oh my God, you’re so deep.”
Another view of Parsons’s epic ride. “The size and the sound—it was just such a leap over anything I’d ever seen,” said Rob Brown. “I was sitting there going click, click, click, watching the counter go down frame by frame, telling myself, ‘Relax. Mike is gonna die right here and right now, but you’re gonna do your job.’” Photo: Rob Brown.
Parsons followed Evan Slater over the Jalisco’s final runway, his eardrums ballooning inward. He had been much farther out than Slater, though, and his hold-down was much longer. Yet unlike