Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [137]
Skindog and Peter Mel had been first to tow Ghost Tree back in 2002. For better than two years, everyone had managed to keep the wave under wraps—a feat on par with hiding King Kong behind a line of ornamental shrubbery. The wave promised to be every inch the equal of Maverick’s, and its discovery augured well for future finds along the California coast. On December 4, 2008, Parsons sent word to Long that conditions off Pescadero Point were sunny, perfect, unbelievable—and crowded as hell.
Long and Healey bombed south to catch up with Parsons at Ghost Tree, while Pete Mel and his friend Ryan Augustein tentatively motored out in the fog to Maverick’s. It was as mean as they had ever seen. Grant “Twiggy” Baker and Grant Washburn were also towsurfing together at Maverick’s, and they were alternating between amped up bliss and mortal terror. At one point, everyone watched in horror as Darryl “Flea” Virostko was launched by a wave that seemed to have been forged by Neptune himself. Yet everyone was astonished when Flea emerged from his wipeout not only conscious but ready to go again. He would later state with certainty that someone had grabbed him and brought him to the surface. Mel was clean and sober by this point. Flea was not. Had he not been sizzling on meth, the outcome of the wipeout might have been different. Of course, had he been thinking straight, he might not have gone in the first place. “I basically ate shit,” Flea would tell a stunned anchor Julie Chen the next day on CBS’s nationwide Early Show broadcast.Augustein soon dragged Mel onto an equally deadly wall that offered a hellish beat down. “I thought it was going to rip my limbs off,” Mel says.
At around 12:30 P.M., a rescue boat motored by in the fog, asking Mel and the other surfers if they’d seen a vessel in distress. A crab boat called Good Guys had gone down, and her two crewmen were lost to the waves.
Meanwhile, at Ghost Tree, everyone was towsurfing except for two surfers, a Monterey local named Peter Davi and a buddy of his named Anthony “Tazzy” Tashnick. Davi was one of the only surfers to ever dare paddle at Ghost Tree, and he generally took a dim view of towsurfing. He and Tashnick were straddling traditional big wave guns among the watercraft-bound mob, and Davi was not giving an inch. He was big and rugged—a Laird Hamilton–size commercial fisherman whose deep Italian roots extended from Sicily to the North Shore of Oahu to the old wharves of Cannery Row.
Pete Mel called Pete Davi the kind of guy you didn’t want to cross, but if you became his friend, his generosity was literally without limit. He’d find so much jade along the Big Sur coastline that he was just constantly giving it away—even to people he barely knew. Davi had been something of a mentor to Mel, Flea, and many of the other Santa Cruz boys, paving their way onto the North Shore of Oahu. “We called him Pipeline Pete,” Mel says. “He brought me in and introduced me to all the North Shore guys you feared most in my early days out there. That was just an incredible benefit to me.”
Both Parsons and Gerlach knew Davi from the North Shore. Mike had always been particularly impressed with his charges through seemingly impossible Pipeline barrels on a bright green board. “Pete got big ones,” Mike said. “He charged. Charged.”
The morning