Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [115]
Gerlach curves and closes his fingers one by one, mimicking the curl of a breaking wave, and sweeps his hand in a horizontal line. “The wave goes like this,” he says. “It moves with the bottom—follows the shallows. When you’re driving in, the focus is intense. Don’t put him all the way over on the shoulder, but don’t put him in too deep so he can’t escape. Eventually, I put him in what I thought was the right spot and let him off.”
Suddenly the wave lunged upward and Parsons was hauling ass—as fast as he had gone at Cortes, maybe faster. But because the wave was sucking water backward across the reef, it gave the strange sensation of running down an up escalator. Parsons bent his knees to absorb the bumps and simply rocketed straight on, a herd of angry water buffalo nipping at his heels. He narrowly kicked out on the shoulder. Gerlach, unable to keep up, had seen nothing but the back of the wave.
“Dude, I barely survived that one,” a hyperventilating Parsons told Gerlach. “Put me on the shoulder. I’m not kidding, on the shoulder.”
Catching the wave on its less-steep shoulder might make the ride a little less critical, but at least Parsons would be closer to the exit. He cared less about winning and more about surviving. Overhead, helicopter pilot Don Shearer saw Parsons and Gerlach gunning it for another huge wave, a tsunami. He swung into a near sea-level position while cameraman Peter Fuszard, filming for the contest, zoomed in close enough to see the whites of their eyes.
Gerlach would try the same technique. He had just enough of an angle to get the Hamster over the speeding wave’s hump so he could whip Mike in. “I was just like, okay, this is a big, big, big wave, don’t put him in too deep,” says Gerlach. “I look back to see if he’s back there and he’s already let go. There was no way, no way he should have already let go. I said, ‘dude, what are you fucking doing man? Fuck. Oh, you fucked up.’ Then I just look back at him one more time and go, ‘well, fucking good luck, man. Dig deep on that talent, buddy, and make it happen.’”
Parsons made a few tight S-turns and bent his knees deep to absorb the bumps, his board blipping a dotted line of wake as he aired over small pieces of chop. He began a brief fade back toward the left, mirroring his actions at Cortes, but realized this was not the place to fade and corrected with a quick jog back to the right.
As the wave began to stand toward vertical, swirling boils of sand were swept up into its face. The wave itself was moving at forty to fifty miles an hour and pushing directly into an offshore wind of ten to fifteen miles an hour. This whipped up an instantaneous gale that pushed against Parsons like a big hand and ratcheted up the chop. “I’m thinking, Everything’s wrong here. This is fucking it,” Parsons says. “Get to the bottom—just get down as far as you can. Then when I saw it bend at me up ahead, I just figured, Well, you’re really done. You’ve just got to go as far as you can go.”
A lifetime in heavy water and hours studying Laird and Kalama told Parsons that his only hope was to set his edge and force a high, fast line. He would attain maximum escape velocity from a critical position right at the bleeding edge where the wave transitioned to vertical. But the bumps and chatter were so fierce that he couldn’t change course. His feet were slipping and shifting. He drifted downward. Then at the wave’s base, he made a quick, conscious decision. Turn, hard. He leaned low, laying every bit of strength his 160 pounds could muster into fins and rail.
He began to turn, but at the same moment, his board unexpectedly slowed as if a hand brake had been yanked. Water had literally begun to boil in the low-pressure lee of his aluminum fins—a strange condition called cavitation. This instantaneous liquid-to-gas transition causes a sound-barrier-like shockwave along a fin’s trailing edge that in turn