Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [117]
He surfaced again, only to be smashed by a third wave, and Gerlach’s emotions shifted to a sense of sheer wonder that he was handling a beating of this magnitude with enough clarity to ponder his own mortality. Without a lifejacket he would already be dead. With it, Jesus, just how much could a human being endure? And where the fuck was Mike, anyway?
Again he surfaced, and a ski bore down. It was Kelly Slater. The world champ held out his arm. Brad missed, grabbing the rope instead. Kelly gunned the ski, pulling Brad away and nearly drowning him all over again, churning liters of seawater through his sinuses. But it wasn’t far enough. When another wave came, Kelly roared off. Brad was again alone. When he finally surfaced, Mike was waiting. Brad was so keyed up, his blood sparked and crackled so hard with endorphins, that everything seemed overexposed, white.
When they returned to the lineup, Laird Hamilton and Dave Kalama motored over. “Whooo, she gave you a little kick in the ass, eh?” Laird said. “She went easy on you then, eh? You’re back out here. Good.”
This afternoon at Jaws came to be called the “Day of Days.” Laird Hamilton was typically insane, bombing and side-slipping down monster waves at breathtaking speeds and catching huge air as easily as you might ollie a snowboard. Australian Ross Clark Jones drove through the biggest barrel Gerlach and Parsons had ever seen negotiated, that is, until Garrett McNamara then ducked into a collapsing mountain that would earn him $5,000 for the XXL’s Barrel of the Year. An eighteen-year-old Oahu kid named Makua Rothman was pulled onto the XXL’s Wave of the Year, a $66,000 66-footer that would, for the time being, tie Parsons’s Cortes world record. Gerlach was judged to have endured the year’s worst wipeout—his life being thus valued at a mere $5,000.
The super session demonstrated why there weren’t many places in the world like Jaws. For accessibility, only Maverick’s was equivalent, and even if it held more potential, Cortes Bank was, logistically speaking, several orders of magnitude more difficult. Yet the day also served notice that a shocking number of surfers were, not only willing to risk everything for a wave, but able to survive wipeouts that, on their face, appeared utterly fatal. If Hamilton and his Team Strapped friends had cracked open the towsurfing door in the mid-1990s, by winter 2002 it had been blown off its hinges. But the bottom line was, there were only so many giant waves to go around. Towsurfing contests, the regular dismantling of world records, and the resulting high-profile media attention were fueling an almost self-destructively successful interest in the sport. If any Surfer doubted this, they only had to attend raucous NOAA meetings where angry environmentalists were demanding bans on towsurfing from San Francisco to Santa Cruz—or they only had to wait until the winter of 2003–04, when the circus discovered and descended on the Cortes Bank, clowns and all.
Expeditions to Cortes Bank would soon start to become regular occurrences, yet one notable absentee was the break’s Christopher Columbus, Larry “Flame” Moore. In fact, after leading the charge in January 2001, Flame would never venture out to Cortes Bank again.
The years following the Bank’s revelation were tough for Flame. Most of his adult life had been defined by Surfing magazine and a Groundhog Day-like routine of surf, work, and family, but then he left Surfing in 2000 to help launch the ill-fated Web