Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [126]
Most didn’t know it, but Garrett McNamara had actually organized a loose contest for the day. It was a sort of skins game he called “If It Can’t Kill You It Ain’t Extreme.” Each participant—McNamara, his tow partner Ikaika Kalama, Burle, Skindog, Flea, Barron, and Loya—threw a thousand dollars into a pot, and then the boys would dissect the footage later over beers to decide who won. Thus was launched a crazed aerial assault, with surfers sometimes towing at the smaller waves just to see how high they could go.
Gerlach eventually towed Parsons into a barreling beauty—the wave of the day, but really, they were embarrassed. Greg and Rusty didn’t even surf.
“You know what it is?” Brad Gerlach says. “You bought this house out in the country and you’re like, yeah. I finally found some peace and quiet. Then two years down the track they’re like, ‘We’re going to put an eight-lane freeway through your front yard.”
Bill Sharp was more succinct. “I came to call it the Cortes Wank.”
At the end of the day, on the ride back with Rob Brown, Sean Collins sat under a black sky, in a dark mood, watching as Shane Dorian powered a Jet Ski back to land in their wake. Collins thought about how easily someone could have died out there, and he made a decision. He would issue no more public alerts of Cortes Bank swells. He would do the same with Jaws. If you understood the basics of forecasting, and knew where to look, you could probably make an informed forecast by yourself, but Collins wasn’t going to spray paint the data across Surfline’s home page anymore. Some places were just a little too sacred and too damned dangerous to bring a circus.
After Cortes in 2004, big wave surfing seemed to hit a crossroads. Towsurfing was blowing up, and every month it seemed there was a new big wave discovery. A nascent group called the Professional Towsurfing Association planned to launch a World Tour. Garrett McNamara foresaw a day when the sport would be as big as Nascar and surfers would boast sponsorships from Tide and Budweiser. In 2002, Dana Brown’s Step into Liquid landed Jaws and Cortes Bank on the big screen. In 2003, Bill Sharp’s Billabong Odyssey brought Mike Parsons’s Jaws and Cortes monsters to life in sickening detail, while in 2004, Stacey Peralta and Sam George’s Sundance darling Riding Giants chronicled the history of big waves through the lives of Greg Noll, Jeff Clark, and Laird Hamilton.
On the same swell that had spawned the Cortes Wank, forty-two-year-old Team Strapped founding father Pete Cabrinha would set a new world record at Jaws, riding a wave deemed 70 feet high. When Cabrinha won, he hugged his wife for an eternity, held the oversize check over his head, and shouted, “I don’t care what anybody says: This is a big deal. And it’s a big deal to me.”
And it was a big deal. Big wave surfers were garnering unprecedented coverage in the mainstream media, including the New York Times, NPR, Vanity Fair, Outside, ESPN, 60 Minutes, and Dateline NBC—to name a very few.
The only trouble was, all the attention and notoriety wasn’t unalloyed good news. As the January swell made clear, one thing it resulted in was more crowded lineups, and in towsurfing, this was an exponentially more noisy and dangerous situation. How long before a novice towsurfer died, or before a novice ski driver decapitated a pro? Or, for that matter, before a pro decapitated a pro? Through the mid-2000s, the question increasingly turned to asking: Who was to blame? Was it Sean Collins and his forecasts? Bill Sharp and his big money contests? Laird Hamilton and his Team Strapped towsurfers? Was it simply the magnetic attraction of the superhuman feats of Mike Parsons, Brad Gerlach, and Greg Long?
A week after the film Riding Giants was released, Time magazine published