Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [140]
Unfortunately, as Greg feared, not everyone made it over, and Healey and Evan Slater were among a group that took a watery skyscraper directly on the head. Murray roared in on a Jet Ski to find a shipwreck zone of broken boards and half-drowned bodies.
“Everybody was sitting out the back, after that, really spooked,” says Greg, musing on this three-day run between Waimea, Ghost Tree, and Todos. “We packed it up. I went in, had a margarita, and thought about the wildest three-day swell chase of my life.”
The session was a bellwether—arguably the biggest paddle session in history—and a few things were becoming evident to Greg, Twiggy, Rusty, Healey, and the core group of hellmen who were their friends. “The idea kind of came to us—that there was something kind of missing,” says Greg. “That we really hadn’t explored paddle surfing as thoroughly as we could.”
After all, dedicating yourself to towsurfing was damned expensive, and it just didn’t get really, truly towsurfing big terribly often. If you trained yourself to hold your breath for four, five minutes, until you found the point where you blacked out; if you practiced hard-core yoga to prepare for twistoflex hold-downs; if you had a couple of towsurfing skis to run rescue—then perhaps you could both ride and survive waves now considered only even possible from behind a Jet Ski. It was, as they say, a wake-up call.
And the session really got Greg in particular to wondering: Had Evan Slater and John Walla been dinosaurs or were they actually ahead of their time? Could you paddle in at the Cortes Bank when it got big? A few weeks later, a Pacific storm forecast seemed to promise the chance he hoped for. Yet it soon became evident that maybe he shouldn’t mothball his tow surfboards just yet. Looming well out over the horizon was the greatest storm Greg Long, Mike Parsons, and indeed the whole West Coast had ever seen.
To this point, the 2007–08 winter season had produced a historic run, even if it had been marred by a death and several near-tragedies. Yet for some it wasn’t enough.
“I’m fiending—completely fiending to go out to Cortes,” Mike Parsons told me one afternoon that December. “I’m constantly looking at the sun and the conditions. I’m obsessed with it. When is it going to happen? I think Greg’s probably the most like me. We’re just wondering, why can’t the swell be today? But then you have to remind yourself, that’s exactly why it’s the coolest place in the world.”
Every day after the mist settled following that early December storm, Mike Parsons and Greg Long checked the weather models with an eye on Cortes. Then, a few days after Christmas, Sean Collins sent out the word: The models were showing that a bomb was about to explode off California in about a week.
This bomb would come to be known as the January Fourth Storm, and it developed into a once-in-a-century weather event. To this day, no one has completely hindcasted the storm to pinpoint how it originated. The variables that spawn legitimately extreme weather events are staggeringly complex and are thus almost impossible to predict more than a week out. That’s why eight or ten days before a major weather event, supercomputers owned by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, the U.S. Navy, and NOAA often spawn wildly divergent models. Yet from the moment that the first in a line of powerful disturbances began dumping copious snow on Mongolia, all three major models came into unexpected agreement: something resembling an ocean-size hurricane was loading up and aiming for the entire U.S. West Coast.
While most of the western seaboard prepared to batten down the hatches, Sean Collins found this storm tricky to forecast for the handful of surfers driven wild with excitement at the possibilities it augured. If the storm played out according to models, its massive swell seemed poised to arrive at roughly the same time as the raging weather. There might be giants, but from Maverick’s to Cortes to Todos, a thousand-mile-wide blast of fearsome winds would probably tear the waves