Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [113]
In early January 2002, several Odysseans descended on Maui. Rumor was that the Tow-In World Cup Competition might run at Jaws, and they wanted to be there. While this was officially a “first annual” event, the very first tow-in contest at Jaws happened on December 26, 2000. It was a quickly organized ad-hoc event called the “Peahi Superbowl,” and first prize for winners, and Maui locals, Luke Hargreaves and Sierra Emory was pizza and beer. Laird Hamilton told Evan Slater that he and his buddies sat the event out because there was no prize money, and the event wasn’t terribly well thought out. “You can’t throw any hint of an ASP format toward a tow-in event,” Hamilton said. “Everything needs to be considered: wave selection, how you tow your partner in, how you follow him, and the line you take to pick him up. To simply judge the wave would do the sport an injustice and allow the teams to be totally unaccountable for their methods. On top of that, it’s just dangerous.”
Then the following year, a Brazilian documentary film company, Estudios Mega, put up a whopping $168,000 to sponsor what became the Tow-In World Cup.The sponsors gave little consideration to Hamilton’s ideas, so Hamilton and most of “Team Strapped”—as his fellow cabal of towsurfers called themselves—decided to sit out the 2002 event as well. The snub did not go unnoticed. Not only were Laird and Kalama towsurfing originators, this was their home turf.
“We basically didn’t support the fact that they were putting all the money on something that wasn’t quite ready for it yet,” Team Strapped crewman Rush Randle told me in an interview shortly after the contest. “We started the sport to have fun…There were people looking to say, ‘I’m the best big wave Surfer in the world. I don’t even know how to surf, but I can get towed onto a big wave.’”
Dave Kalama explained to me: “Say you and I go on a surf trip to Indonesia to find the new, greatest place, and we say, ‘Come one and come all, it’s attainable to everybody.’ I don’t think we’re putting everyone at unnecessary risk to come and surf a perfect 3- to 6-foot wave. But if we find a 60-, 70-foot wave, and we put it in the magazines, then besides, we go, ‘Let’s have a contest, and we’ll put up a hundred grand and just bring everyone down here—people who’ve never surfed the place.’…I mean, if Jeff Clark had been surfing Maverick’s for twenty years, and we say, ‘We’re gonna have a contest, invite fifty guys you don’t even know.’ I think he’d say, ‘That’s not too cool to me.’ It wouldn’t be responsible. It would be dangerous.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, even though neither Sharp nor The Odyssey were connected to the contest, Team Strapped refused to even be interviewed for Sharp’s documentary (with the notable exception of Randle). Sharp would describe the history of towsurfing in his film without a peep from Laird and Dave Kalama.
Based on Sean Collins’s World Cup forecast of big but not apocalyptic waves, Gerlach and Parsons opted not to bring the bigger boards they would have used out at Cortes Bank. But as occasionally happens, Sean’s forecast changed. It would be nuking. Despite their woefully inadequate equipment, the siren song of a long-period swell crashing over the reef at Peahi was utterly irresistible.
The pair reached Maliko Gulch, a little nook off the Hana Highway where surfers launch their Jet Skis, to find a full battle zone. Waves were washing clear up into the river, setting ski-towing trucks