Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [116]
As Parsons slowed and was pulled toward the maw, the boiling suddenly abated and he began to drift up the wave’s face and accelerate again—very, very rapidly. He was now aimed down the line at a perfect right angle.
“I remember pulling up there and thinking, Oh my God, what are you doing? You’re pulling into the barrel at Jaws.”
The wave folded over Parsons, enshrining him in a tube about as big around as a Boeing 727. Very few humans have ever stood amid such force and survived. The eruption of mist and spray became so violent that he couldn’t see. The blast of air pressure popped his ears. A tremendous shockwave exploded toward the only opening and Parsons was lifted clear off the surface of the water. “I just said to myself, Hang on, hang on. I pointed it and just came flying out.’”
Parsons scored the only perfect ten of the competition. He and Gerlach were in first place. Despite a number of stellar rides, even by a terrified Gerlach, the pair would take second overall, ceding $70,000 to Garrett McNamara and his teammate Rodrigo Resende. Thus, it was the second wave Mike Parsons had ever ridden at Jaws, not the contest result, that came to define the day. Don Shearer has ferried cameramen above countless Jaws waves, but never before or since has a ride been captured in quite such an awe-inspring manner. Bill Sharp wasn’t at the contest, but when he saw the film, he was spellbound. “I knew instantly it was the best bit of film ever shot of surfing,” he said.
Parsons’s now iconic wave became the stupefying opener to the film Billabong Odyssey, as well as the most downloaded surfing video in the history of YouTube—with 30-plus million downloads (among the many YouTube iterations, that number is probably quite a bit higher). In fact, the clip, improperly titled “Struck in Tsunami,” is among the most highly downloaded video clips from any sport on the entire site, or it would be if it were properly labeled as a sports video. Of the clip’s more than ten thousand comments, the most common are assertions that the footage is fake and that the Surfer must be Laird Hamilton. Of course, it is neither.
Mike Parsons’s second ever wave at Jaws, January 7, 2002. A still photo of the most downloaded surf clip on YouTube and the poster shot for the film Billabong Odyssey. Helicopter pilot Don Shearer and motion picture cameraman Peter Fuszard look on from the bird’s eye position. Photo: David Pu’u.
Ten months later, on Halloween 2002, conditions looked good for an Odyssey return to the Cortes Bank. Parsons, Gerlach, and Skindog climbed aboard Pacific Quest with a small team of newcomers that included World Champ Kelly Slater and a budding Hawaiian hellman named Shane Dorian.
However, the Halloween mission to Cortes was a bit of a disappointment. The surfers found some solid 30- to 40-footers, but it had been nearly twice as big the year before. Still, it was a good warm-up for what would become another epic big wave event.
On November 26, 2002, Mike Parsons and Brad Gerlach were lured back to giant Jaws. It was the first time they’d ever seen a real crowd of towsurfers. Clearly, the increased profile of the sport was having an effect. The amped, hustling ski jockeys were yelling and cutting one another off. The surging water hummed with smoky machines and the type of competition for waves that you expected in 6-foot Lower Trestles.
Parsons thinks this is the reason they eventually chose a macker that Brad had no real chance of making. It was the first of what would seem an endless set, and Gerlach could do nothing but brace for impact. “I started deep breathing,” he says, doing a hilarious imitation of his rapid breaths. “All the people up there safe on the cliff are like, ‘Holy shit, I don’t wanna be that person.’ I don’t wanna be me right now either.”
Gerlach was jackhammered. Despite the long hold down, the