Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [114]
They sheepishly asked around in the predawn darkness if they might borrow someone’s watercraft. A local fireman named Jay Sniffen offered a tiny, tippy two-seater, half the size and power of the ski they used back home. Chasing down a big wave with it would be damned difficult. “We called it the Hamster,” says Gerlach. “We’re feeding it carrots and its exercise wheel is our motor.”
After Parsons threaded the Hamster through a terrifyingly small hole in the surge and out into the open ocean, they puttered north for twenty minutes, arguing over where, exactly, they were heading. They finally found a small fleet of boats and skis bobbing alongside enormous rooster tails of spray. The contest had yet to officially begin, and so noncontestants, like Kalama and Hamilton, were still catching waves.
“We pulled right up,” says Gerlach. “I’ll never forget this image of Laird powering down the face—boom!—getting air. Then skipping down the face and—boom!—getting air. He looked like he was just saying, ‘Fuuuck you guys. This is myyyy spot.’ You think about your own home break and how you have it wired. That was Laird. He didn’t have a bad attitude, but his confidence and presence was heavy. It was just like, ‘There he is. There’s the King of Jaws.’”
Then they watched another Surfer skipping and tumbling down the face of a 50-plus-footer as if atop the horns of a bull. Pure carnage.
The winds were howling straight offshore, streaking and folding small creases into the silvery gray wave faces. The roar was deafening. Gerlach thought they possessed a true monster quality. He nervously contemplated riding one, thinking to himself, “No wonder they call it Jaws.”
Later, I asked Hamilton about opting out of the contest. “We rode the waves we wanted and then went in and watched the experts,” he said, laughing with sarcasm. “We just wanted to watch—to see what all the professionals were going to do out at Jaws. I just think anytime you come down someplace, and you have no experience there, you’re not just going to step in and show people who have been doing it at that place anything tricky. Now if you have been there, learned, practiced, had the experience, put in the time, then yeah, okay, that’s a different story. Then you’d be one of the people who understand the spot—and you probably wouldn’t have participated in the circus, anyway.”
When the horn sounded, Hamilton and his buddies left the water and posted up on the cliff overlooking Jaws, unwittingly removing themselves from a monent that would become among the most iconic in the history of big wave surfing.
Parsons and Gerlach were in the third heat against Team Strapped members Buzzy Kerbox and Michel Larronde. Parsons didn’t want a warm-up wave. One wipeout might kill him, so it would be best to get it over with. “You have the pressure of everyone watching,” says Gerlach. “Then there’s the pressure of—you don’t want to kill your best friend. Plus, we had just scored at Cortes, so people are like, ‘Let’s see if these guys are the real deal.’ Eventually, I just said to myself, ‘Okay, I’ve been surfing for almost thirty years. I know how waves work. We’re gonna go out here—we’re gonna pick one and go.’”
Prior to the contest, they had studied videos of Laird and Kalama intensely. In the water, they dissected Kerbox and Larronde. Where did they line up? How did they track a swell? When did they drop the rope? Heads were lowered while Gerlach said a little prayer. “God, help us out today.”
The first wave of a new set loomed. Kerbox and Larronde throttled up and were gone. The wave was big. But Parsons had a feeling, just a weird twitch borne of a lifetime of instinct, that lurking behind was something