Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [109]
Brad saved Mike, but there was still one casualty. Parsons’s favorite towboard was simply gone. They searched up and down the reef on the ski. Natali, Flame, and Sharp tried to find it from the air. Perhaps it had been stuffed into the hull of the Jalisco. Perhaps it was swirling in the vast patch of foam. They would never know, though it was seen again.
“A friend of mine who lives here in Santa Cruz named Sam Samson was on a sailboat race to Cabo,” says Pete Mel. “He saw Parsons’s board out in the middle of the ocean. The first time he’d ever seen a towboard. He goes ‘What the hell is that?’ Got a good visual of it—yellow logos and yellow rails. He was in a race, though. He couldn’t turn around. So he left it.”
When it came time for lunch, the surfers and lensmen motored back to Pacific Quest. Randy Laine told Chang he wanted to have a look at the top peak. The swell actually seemed to be growing a bit larger, and he wanted to see just what his ski could do. He left everyone and motored a lonely mile up the reef. “I was tripping,” Laine says. “And I’m not slamming any of the guys surfing, but the biggest sets of the day actually went unridden. I’d ridden big Avalanches and Todos well over 50 feet, but this was just significantly bigger. There were some rogue frigging sets—I mean, I looked at some, and there were ones I wanted to call 90 feet on the face but you couldn’t get a perspective because no one was on them.”
When a true monster set came through, Laine lined himself up for the second wave, gunned it, and was soon roaring along on his WaveRunner at better than fifty-five miles an hour, trying to stay ahead of it. “I didn’t realize how fast the waves really were,” he says. “I had thought previous to this trip that the third reefs in Hawaii had all the speed—because I’d ridden all of those—all of ‘em. This moved even faster.”
The wave swallowed Laine whole. He braced himself and held the handlebars in a death grip and was bounced around like a piece of popcorn. He had time to think clearly that if he came off the ski, no one would see him and he would simply drown. Eventually, he was somehow blasted out. “It’s just a miracle I survived it,” he said. “It was a terrifying thing to realize—that even with the fastest ski, you could just not survive.”
Parsons and Laine’s waves seemed to have broken at the absolute apex of the swell, which afterward gently subsided. The day was gorgeous and the wave faces became increasingly inviting. Skindog kept offering to tow Evan Slater into a few, and eventually the dedicated paddle Surfer relented. “It took me a while to get up,” says Slater. “But I got a couple of in-betweeners. The speed of the waves was 25, 30 percent faster than anything I’d ever seen. After fifteen minutes Skinny was over it and kicked me off.”
“The surfing Pete and Skinny were doing, it was so ridiculous,” says James Thompson. “It was also really interesting to see their skill levels. Gerlach and Parsons were a little more conservative, sitting out the back and towing into the bombs. Skinny and Pete, though, they were going straight at 50-footers, flipping the ski around, and whipping the guy into the pocket so he had extra speed. Pete would do a carve up the face and come back into it with another carve.”
“These swells were moving, you know?” says Pete. “Even the slopey ones, when you’re on the face, the g-forces are just kicking when you’re doing your turns. It was pristine and blue and kind of inviting. It felt so cool. Like no other. It was incredible.”
Mel towed Skindog into a 25-footer,