Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [139]
When word of Davi’s death reached the parking lot at Maverick’s, Peter Mel, Flea, Garrett McNamara—all the guys up there—were extremely upset by the death of their friend. Flea was particularly shocked, since he’d only that day survived a wave he was certain had killed him. He would tell Pete Davi’s son Jake that he was not only certain that someone grabbed him and pulled him off the bottom, but that someone had been Jake’s dad.
A month later, Mel, Flea, and Peter Davi’s friends and family were doubly crushed when a toxicology report showed what many had quietly feared: Davi had methamphetamine in his bloodstream. Had it led him to make a decision that would kill him? No one will ever know. If any good could come out of such a tragic loss, perhaps it was the eventual redemption that would lead Flea to his own crusade to help others kick the stuff.
“That damned meth,” Mel says. “It’s just so addictive. So fucking gnarly. I mean, it caught a few of us just so off guard. When I look back, I realize how lucky I was to pull out. Because it almost destroyed everything in my life, too.”
The next morning, Greg and Rusty Long, Mark Healey, Mike Parsons, Brad Gerlach, and photographer Jason Murray reached Ensenada on their way to Todos Santos. Winds offshore would be too heavy for a session at Cortes Bank, but as the swell ran southward down the Pacific Coast, Todos Santos should be just as epic as Maverick’s and Ghost Tree. But by the time they reached the lineup at Todos, the exhausted crew was running on adrenaline fumes. Offshore, they found Evan Slater and Colin Smith, who had motored down from San Diego to paddle surf, and a few towsurfers already in the water. When Healey, Slater, Parsons, and the Longs paddled out, the verdict had been rendered: No goddamned towsurfing till the paddlers were through. “You can’t be towing through a committed crew,” said Rusty. “That’s the cardinal rule.”
Gerlach was happy to sit and watch, but though Mike paddle surfed, he wasn’t feeling it. “I was like, if I survive this, I’m good,” Parsons says. “But Greg, Rusty, and Mark—they were just in a zone.”
Greg paddled well outside. As if on cue, he managed to strong-arm onto a boiling slab that Jason Murray called 45 feet high. Then at around 11:30 A.M. , a set loomed the likes of which no one, not even Parsons, had ever seen from the deck of a paddle surfboard. Snips and Greg desperately clawed to the top of the first wave, trying to get over it, and looked back over their shoulders. They were a hair’s width away from being flea-flicked six stories straight down. “I was done after that,” Mike says. “Done.”
Parsons left the lineup, and then, Greg says, “It just got bigger and bigger. The biggest I’d seen in my life. We were paddling and I swear it was bigger than the tow wave Brad won the XXL on the year before.”
Brad agreed. This Todos swell was even bigger than the one that had produced his 68-foot XXL winner in December 2005.
Greg somehow dug into and rode a beast that was later determined to be 53 feet high. Afterward, as he returned to the lineup, another giant set loomed. Everyone went into a dead sprint, again paddling over, not into, the waves. “I was terrified,” Greg says.
Rusty actually tried to surf the second wave in the set, but he didn’t quite catch it. At approximately 65 feet, it would have been the greatest wave anyone had ever paddled into, but Jason Murray is quite sure that Rusty would have died. So is Rusty. “It would have been hideous,” he says. “I had a little guiding hand pulling