Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [132]
The surfers who did venture out were, and largely are, part of Sean Collins’s inner circle: Gerlach and Parsons, the Long brothers, and a small smattering of Hawaiians. Collins continued to make less-obvious forecasts for Jaws, and the break eventually became somewhat less crowded. Even without surf alerts, Jaws remained a whole lot easier to access, while the Bank became a sort of private terrordome.
In fall 2004, nine or so months after January’s Cortes Wank, the first secret Bank mission was launched, and it included Steve Long, Bob Harrington, Greg and Rusty Long, Mike Parsons, Brad Gerlach, and Rob Brown. The swell was enormous and the weather perfect as their two boats rounded Catalina. But just off San Clemente, the teams disappeared into a thousand-mile-wide bowl of pea soup fog. The journey became a chilling trip into inner space. Steve Long and Harrington tried to give the entire Bank a wide berth, but huge swells do strange things when they interact with a fourteen-mile-long mountain. All around Bishop Rock, there was foam from broken waves scattered across the sea surface, and deep thunderclaps from unseen breakers. Steve had nightmarish visions of rogues rampaging over the boat from deep in the mist. “It was just giant,” he says. “We were scared shitless. We got separated from Rob and his boat and never found them again.”
Steve Long and Bob Harrington turned back.
Meanwhile, Rob Brown’s hunting party—Mike, Brad, Rusty, and Greg—motored in close to Larry’s Bowl. The waves were so big and their detonations churned so much air that they created a small circle of clear weather above the impact zone—something like the effect of a cold downdraft at the base of a foggy glacier. Once on a wave, you’d be able to see, but it was too foggy to track the sets as they approached or estimate how big they really were. You might be sitting way out there, with Phantom of the Opera pipe organs playing in the background, when a 60- or 70-footer stormed in before you even had a chance to react. Caught inside, you’d be pushed into the foam and then disappear into the fog—where you might simply never be found.
As Bob Parsons might have said, Mike and his friends were brave, but they weren’t foolish. No one left the boat.
In late February 2005, a tightly wound fifty- to sixty-knot storm swept across the Pacific. A small cluster of larger boats reached Bishop Rock carry- ing Rob Brown, Sean Collins, Mike Parsons, Brad Gerlach, Greg and Rusty Long, Brazilian fiend Carlos Burle, and a young Hawaiian named Jamie Sterling. Cortes was in a foul mood. A stiff, frigid breeze blew from the northwest, turning the ocean gloomy, lumpy, and mean.
Bill Sharp was also there, having hitched a ride with an audacious good ol’ boy surf photographer named Les Walker aboard a tiny twenty-one-foot bass boat that Walker had christened Fried Neck Bones. The boat was a dinghy compared to Rob Brown’s bomb chaser and far, far too small to safely make such a journey, but she held ample gasoline and beer. In addition, Surfer magazine’s newly minted editor, and Parsons’s boyhood chum Chris Mauro, had begged for, and was given, a spot on board.
The first twenty-second waves staggered across Bishop Rock at around 10 A.M. The winds