Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [125]
Another seventy-five-foot boat out of Oceanside called Electra held an MTV film crew, along with Garrett McNamara and his tow partner Carlos Burle—a mad Brazilian who had eclipsed Mike Parsons’s 66-foot 2001 Cortes wave with a wild 68-footer at Maverick’s in 2002. Skindog climbed aboard the Electra with his old friend and new towsurfing partner Josh Loya. Flea and Barney joined the party. A small crew of professional freestyle Jet Skiers decided to head out, too.
Yet this swell lost much of its vigor on the passage between Hawaii and the mainland, and the best the Tanner Bank buoy could muster was 9 feet at twenty-second intervals—still good for perhaps triple overhead waves, or about 35 to 40 feet high, but half of what was expected. It was as if Bishop Rock could only muster a relatively meager line of defense against a massive array of firepower.
Overhead, the churning of rotors—a twin-engined airplane, followed by Sharp’s helicopter. Sharp was sure he imagined the music of “Flight of the Valkyries” from Apocalypse Now playing in the background. The Odysseans leapt from the whirlybird and were chauffeured over to their tiny attack craft. The battle for Waterworld began.
“It was an absolute circus,” says Steve Long.
Initial salvos were launched not by surfers but stand-up Jet Skiers, who attempted an attack equal parts Supercross and swamp buggy. They circled the lineup like Apaches attacking a wagon train, laying confused creases and chops in the faces of the waves. Parsons and Gerlach were approached by an overweight man in sweatpants and an Indiana Hoosiers jacket who rode atop what Brad called “an inner tube with a steering wheel.” “This is my first time here,” he told Brad pointing at his rescue sled. “What is that, you have some kind of pad on the back of your ski there?”
The Hoosiers fan was soon towed straight through the lineup on his knees atop a standard-issue paddle surfboard. “If I see that guy on that inner tube coming down the face,” Gerlach told Parsons. “I’m cutting him off.”
Towsurfers retook the lineup from the solo Jet Skiers, but the scene remained distressingly chaotic. Greg and Rusty Long watched in disbelief as Jet Skis ran over the heads of wiped-out surfers.
The captain of the Condor Express took up a position barely off Larry’s Bowl, a spot that had yet to show its fearsome wave, but was surely capable of doing so at any minute. When Sean Collins radioed him and said, “You’re putting your passengers at great risk,” he was ignored. A couple of wide sets thus nearly rolled the giant whale watcher. Then, during a longer lull, the Electra, a boat whose expeditionary force had been funded by Red Bull energy drinks, drifted into the impact zone. Before anyone realized it, she lay broadside in the residual white water of a broken wave.
Steve Long hailed the captain. “What the shit’s going on?”
The boat had lost power.
Long wrapped a line around a cleat and threw it to one of Electra’s deckhands. The cleat tore right off. The panicking deckhand then threw Long a line. With a set looming, Harrington feathered his throttle while Long pulled a seventy-five-foot-long boat to safety with his bare hands.
The towsurfing teams laughed and berated one another in equal measure. They were all friends, more or less, and the peaks were perfectly shaped and utterly rippable. Garrett McNamara was one part poet and one part hellman in describing the Bank to journalist Michael Kew, who was on his boat. “The kelp looked like a woman’s hair, and the submerged reef was her body,” he said. “It looked very inviting. Cortes is the place to catch a 120-foot wave