Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [133]
Everyone was towsurfing. Gerlach and Parsons traded big, open-faced turns while Greg pulled Rusty onto a horrendous barreling thing that sucked Rusty over the falls and drove him down painfully deep. Rusty called it quits.
A crew of documentary filmmakers hired by Red Bull convinced Jamie Sterling to don a helmet cam. (The forecasts might have been private, but the results of Cortes missions were still invaluable editorial property.) The goofyfoot struggled to hold a terrifically difficult backside line through the chop. His reward was a forty-five-knot face-plant and a trip through the meat grinder. The camera was gone.
Parsons idled over on a Jet Ski and ordered Mauro to take the tow rope. Chris was terror-stricken. He’d only come to watch and report for the magazine. He’d never seen Cortes Bank or even towsurfed before.
Parsons wasn’t trying to terrify Mauro. He simply, sincerely wanted his old friend to experience the grand magic up close. That didn’t stop Mauro from experiencing a frightful déjà vu he’d not felt since Mike ordered him out into huge, predawn Sunset Beach as a kid. After Mauro strapped in, Parsons first tried to set him up for a tough, slingshot whip from behind the ski. Mauro instead dropped the rope and saluted his old mentor with two raised middle fingers. With feet still strapped to the board, he slowly sank to his chest. “I’m out here alone at Cortes, flipping off Mike, and sinking in the middle of a fricking set,” he says.
Snips gave Mauro just enough time to stare death in the eye before hauling him out and tracking down a somewhat smaller wave. He would ease Mauro in from behind onto what was still the biggest wave of his life. When “Sis” let go of the rope, he thought he was fine—for a moment—then the wave stacked to vertical on Larry’s Bowl and launched Mauro into space. He hit the water like a slab of steak chucked onto a sidewalk before being buried alive. Chris was no longer a full-time surfer. He was a desk jockey. An editor. He had a little baby. As he tumbled and rolled, he thought, What the hell am I doing?
Mauro laughs. “After twenty years, I had just paid for all Mike’s pent up frustrations with me.”
Sharp, Walker, and Mauro motored back that night in a light fog. They watched in awe as small spinner dolphins played off their bow wake—bioluminescent organisms turning them into sparkling purple torpedoes. “Then we just went into this area that was an electromagnetic freak show,” says Sharp. “The compass started spinning and all the electronics just went zonko.”
Walker piloted dead ahead into the emptiness and promptly freaked out several minutes later when Fried Neck Bones crossed the lingering phosphorescence of her previous bow wake. They were in a Pacific Ocean Bermuda triangle. “Then a few minutes later we just sailed out of it,” Sharp says. “You always hear stories about places with these magnetic anomalies, but you never actually expect to see one. It was terrifying. Like something out of Poltergeist.”
By fall 2005, it was clear that Larry Moore was losing his battle. Right from the moment of his December 2002 diagnosis, Flame fought his brain tumor with the same relentlessly sunny intensity he put into battling fellow photographers. He egged his doctors on, demanding more radiation, deeper doses of chemo, and risky surgery. After better than two years of this hell, he was still choosing photos—now alongside editor Evan Slater—from his old perch at Surfing. One day when George Hulse stopped in, Flame excitedly described the incredibly precise and noninvasive “gamma knife” that would be used for his next brain surgery.
Flame kept working longer than he probably should have. He started to fall frequently and wrecked his car more times than his wife, Candace, could count. Eventually, a reaction to an overdose of chemo nearly killed him. When he came home for good, Hulse became a regular confidant.