Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [124]
As they stowed gear, Steve realized that the bilge pumps aboard Harrington’s boat had been working overtime. He lifted the hatch cover to find an engine bay half full of ocean. Rusty and Greg clambered aboard Rob’s boat. Steve and Harrington motored off into the dark to return to shore. They had life jackets and wetsuits, and they alerted the Coast Guard to their situation. Still, it was a terribly spooky journey. They reached the mainland at 2 A.M. to discover that a simple valve had been left open in the live-fish bait tank.
Rob Brown drifted southward off the Bank and eventually into the open ocean. “We all had a good dinner and just kicked it for a little bit and then fell asleep,” says Gerlach. “I love sleeping under the stars. There’s no light pollution out there, beautiful stargazing. It never felt unsafe or anything. It just felt right.”
He wondered if he would ever see a day like this again.
Rusty gazed into the deep, black abyss. Whales sang. A weird light suddenly bathed the sea off the distant Bishop Rock. A submarine? A diver? A ghost?
Rob returned to the grave of the Jalisco the next morning. They were again all alone. The waves were even bigger.
Two swells pulsed in the water—the dominant, long-period westerly and a secondary northwesterly with a shorter period. Occasionally, when the two swells reached the Bishop stair step at roughly the same time, they turned into rogues.
Rusty was in position for the first of these barn burners. It didn’t look all that big to start out, but when it slammed into the top of the shelf off Larry’s Bowl, it threw out a wondrous barrel that had the shape of an inverted horseshoe. Rusty’s 6-foot 6-inch Timmy Patterson turned squirrelly—like the speed wobbles you might get atop a skateboard. The wave clamped down ahead of him. He rocketed out into daylight.
Aboard the boat, Rob Brown reloaded his Canon with film while his buddy Jon Beachamp steadied his video camera. The Rolling Stones blared over the Worldcat’s stereo. Brad drove Mike back out to the lineup, passing the brothers as a mammoth reared up. He shouted to Greg, “Go, go, go!”
As they disappeared, Gerlach turned to Parsons and said, “Well, that was the wave of the winter.”
The brothers had switched roles. Greg plunged six stories straight down on a wave that was arguably as big as Parsons 66-foot bomb of 2001, but even steeper, more hollow. Greg had a moment to briefly contemplate boils and kelp below him. The reef, or maybe the deck of the Jalisco, was plainly visible. He felt the g-forces as he turned—the equivalent of bench pressing four hundred, maybe six hundred pounds with his thighs—and fought to hold fast to the wave’s epicenter. The wave slammed Larry’s Bowl and Greg entered a tornadic barrel, becoming utterly obscured by the spray. He was launched back into the sun.
“The wave of my life,” said Greg. “No questions asked.”
Greg Long had also just earned his first Surfer cover shot. Not bad for your first session at Cortes Bank.
Greg Long, December 17, 2003, on a wave that would land him his first Surfer magazine cover. “The wave of my life. No questions asked.” Photo: Rob Brown.
A couple of weeks later, another powerful swell lit up breaks in Hawaii, and hordes of fire breathers descended on Jaws. Greg Long’s Surfer cover wouldn’t hit the newsstands for another month, but a number of Rob Brown’s stellar photos had already been leaked by the XXL Web site. With a huge swell steaming toward California, big wave surfers were chomping at the bit. Everyone wanted a piece of the Bishop Rock.
In contrast to the silence that preceded the previous Cortes Bank mission, Sean Collins issued an alert via Surfline, and anybody who had seen the footage at Jaws knew something wicked was bearing down. The fuse was lit.
Invasion forces marshaled, and on January 12, 2004, they attacked. Maverick’s founding father Jeff Clark and Grant Washburn joined