Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [135]
Gerlach’s trepidation was validated when a 50-foot set cleared the lineup. Skis were thus fired, and Todos grew and grew, until it was performing the best impression of Cortes Bank anyone had ever seen (though Sean Collins estimated that the waves at Cortes would have been around 30 percent bigger). At around 3 p.m., Parsons towed Gerlach onto a wave that made him look like an ant on a halfpipe. The following spring, Gerlach would take home his first Wave of the Year XXL Award and a check for $68,000. He missed breaking Pete Cabrinha’s world record by two feet.
A couple of months after Brad’s ride, in early 2006, very long-period ripples borne of a distant Alaska-bound low again pulsed toward Cortes Bank. Parsons, Gerlach, and Brown found empty waves perhaps 15 to 20 feet on the face. They were all alone. “I was just putting my board on a rail at a thousand miles an hour,” says Gerlach. “It was big, it was slopey, sometimes it was hollow on Larry’s Bowl. Dream surfing. Just us, out by ourselves at our favorite spot in the world.”
They said a prayer for Flame, hoisted beers in his honor, and motored home.
Perhaps in deference to Flame, the swell window at Cortes would not reopen for almost two more years. The 2006–07 season passed without incident at the Bank, but the winter of 2007–08 opened promisingly. By late November, Hawaii had been pumping and Maverick’s had already awoken three times. Sean Collins attributed this to an intensifying cold La Niña episode. While the literal polar opposite of a warm El Niño, extreme sea-level temperature contrasts found during a La Niña can still trigger massive, violent wobbles in the jet stream. The same could be summarily said for big wave surfing that winter, which became a watershed season that careened between unprecedented highs and sobering lows.
During the last week of November, the season’s first truly great frigid blast tumbled off Siberia and was pumped up with the warm steroids of a dying cyclone in the lower latitudes. The storm wouldn’t actually begin to peak until it was due north of Hawaii. Thus, when Maui was blitzed on December 3, the swell angle was too north for Jaws. Laird Hamilton and his friend Brett Lickle instead made a stand a few miles off the coast at a pyramid-shaped wave they call “Egypt.” After Lickle hurled Laird onto a wave that he told me was surely better than ten stories tall and the biggest thing he had ever surfed, the duo was overtaken by another wave, despite motoring flat out at fifty-five miles an hour. They were obliterated. The aluminum fin on Hamilton’s free-flying, twenty-pound board then flayed Lickle open from his Achilles tendon to the back of his knee. Despite surfacing amid three vertical feet of choking foam that had been painted pink with Lickle’s blood, Hamilton coolly and heroically ripped off his wetsuit, then fashioned a tourniquet, swam a lonely, naked half mile for the Jet Ski, and raced back to shore ferrying Lickle before the life completely bled out of him. It was not only the heaviest session of their lives, but also a validation of the core gospel Laird had been preaching from the temple of Jaws for a decade: Big wave surfing is not a game or a contest or a lark. And it doesn’t matter what technology you have or how skilled you are, any wave could be your last.
The mammoth storm continued to develop unusual characteristics—particularly an incredibly broad wind spread that led computer swell models to paint the eastern half of the North Pacific in a great violet orb. “We had a complicated forecast for that storm,” Scripps researcher Bill O’Reilly told me a week after the storm. “You’d usually see something like that in an El Niño year, but we’re seeing a strong La Niña. I think some are still scratching their heads over how and why it developed like it did.”
A couple of days later, the storm’s swells destroyed the Southeast Papa buoy eight hundred miles northwest of San Francisco. Before Papa blinked out, he was rolling above seas with significant heights of better than