Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [120]
Greg recalls how he and Rusty would skateboard across the I-5 to the San Onofre Surf Shop to listen wide eyed as Joe McNulty spun yarns on hairball trips out to confront Todos Santos with Mike Parsons, Evan Slater, and John Walla. Then, on a chilly winter’s afternoon in 1999, fifteen-year-old Greg rang up Walla. “Ummm, hi, Johnny,” he said. “There’s a good northwest swell in the forecast. I was hoping you’d maybe take us down to Todos and show us the ropes.”
John Walla had known the Longs for years, and he was even dating Greg’s sister, Heather, at the time. Walla well remembers the early winter morning that he left with the Long clan—Steve, Heather, Rusty, and Greg—for Todos Santos. They hired a panga out of Ensenada and reached the lineup by Southern California’s rush hour. Heather’s presence amazed the panga captains. They’d never seen a girl out there.
The swell was delivering waves up to 20 feet on the face—lumpy and irregular with the high tide—but still more powerful than West Reef, Sunset, or anything they had ever surfed. “I was amazed at how much water was moving,” says Greg. “You can actually hear the boulders clicking and crackling underneath you when you’re duckdiving through a wave. I sat next to the rocks watching where John and the other guys were sitting, but I couldn’t figure out how to catch a wave. When you’d think it was going to stand up and break, it wouldn’t. It would move way past you. You’d have to sit waaayyy deeper, basically sitting underneath it and then paddle as hard as you ever have to catch it.”
Eventually, Walla helped coax Heather into a solid wave. Greg started to get a flow and then lined up for a big one. “It was right when Kelly Slater had started doing these carving 360s,” Walla says. “Greg drops in on a 20-footer and does a carving 360 off the top. I’m like, ‘My God, what’s going on out here?’”
Walla knew Greg was a solid surfer, but even good big wave surfers don’t pull small wave maneuvers at 20-foot Todos. In fact, it’s unheard of.
Late in the day, the biggest wave the Longs had ever seen in person tripped over the reef. “My brother got caught, but me and my dad took the thing directly on the head,” Greg says. “Just got blasted, came up, and there was another one after that.”
The pummeling tore Steve’s rotator cuff. “We eventually come up, and he goes, ‘You all right?’” says Greg. “I’m fine. I was winded and a little freaked out but I was psyched. When you get blasted, in a twisted way, you get this self-gratification and a sense of accomplishment in getting your ass handed to you and walking away from it. It’s bizarre. People are like, ‘Oh my gosh. If that happened to me once, I’d quit.’ But it happens, you survive, and it’s like, Let’s do that again. All I could think about was going back and surfing it—again and again and again.”
The brothers became addicted to the rush, yet few were earning a living among big waves. Rusty wasn’t interested in competing, and so he set his sights on college. Greg figured that making a hard run at becoming a pro would open the doors to a surf-based livelihood. He trained relentlessly and won the Men’s Open Division at the 2001 NSSA Nationals at Lowers—the equivalent of moving from the minor to the major leagues in a day. Dick Baker, the president of Ocean Pacific, offered Greg a sponsorship straight out of high school. The natural expectation would have been that Greg would follow in the footsteps of Mike Parsons, Brad Gerlach, and Kelly Slater—and make his own run at the ASP World Title. But that wasn’t where his heart lay. He told Baker, “I really love the adventure side of surfing. I want to go on trips to obscure locations where people haven’t surfed before—spend