Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [141]
By New Year’s Day 2008, the first of three mammoth storms had wound up into a monstrous counterclockwise gyre that swallowed half the North Pacific. But unlike the early December storm, this one didn’t really become turbocharged until after it had passed east of the Hawaiian Islands.
It was the kind of storm Ross Palmer Whitemarsh or the crew of the Andrea Gail would have recognized immediately. At the steep wall separating high- and low-pressure gradients, the upper atmosphere became a two-thousand-mile-wide tornado that accelerated the jet stream to better than 240 miles an hour. The jet slithered like an out-of-control firehose preparing to lash the coast with rain and wet snow. Behind lay a tremendously unstable and far colder air mass whose thunderheads dotted the satellite map like city-size kernels of popcorn. Surface winds that ranged from category one to three in strength linked the first and second storms just as a third began to exit the Russian coast.
On Thursday, January 3, the first low roared ashore between Washington and Oregon. At the Walla Walla airport near the epicenter, sustained winds topped fifty-five miles per hour while gusts hit seventy-eight. The barometer made a remarkable drop of 9.5 millibars over the space of three hours before bottoming out at 28.93, an all-time record low pressure for the station. By Friday morning, the chaos had extended down to the San Francisco Bay Area: Howling winds uprooted ancient oaks and littered San Francisco with debris, and a record 2.1 million customers of Pacific Gas and Electric were cast into darkness. The first fatality occurred early that morning as well. At 6:10 A.M., Rosetta “Rosi” Costello was driving down a rural road near Gold Hill, Oregon, when winds blew the top of a massive pine tree onto her car, killing her instantly. Just over two hours later, a hard-core commercial diver named Todd Estrella led the rescue of the crew of a six-hundred-ton tug that had been blown off its anchorage in San Francisco’s Richardson Bay. When Estrella’s own dinghy lost its mooring, he went after it. But the tiny boat capsized in 8-foot waves. Complications from hypothermia would take Estrella’s life.
All told, the storm would claim at least fourteen souls.
Early Friday, January 4, the second low was preparing its assault on the coast. Nearshore buoys showed big, steep, and stormy waves—22 feet at fourteen seconds off Eureka—but the far stronger long-period energy—a great unknown—still lurked over the horizon. Mike Parsons and Greg Long studied the charts with a mingled sense of dread and fascination. Their initial thought was to line up Twiggy and Brad Gerlach to surf Maverick’s or maybe Ghost Tree, but they weren’t sure. The loss of the Papa buoy’s wind and swell readings meant they couldn’t be certain of the size and timing on the forerunner swells till they hit the California buoy. At that point, the swell would be a mere 350 miles west of San Francisco, less than a day away. They’d need to pull the trigger on where to go before that. As they wrestled over questions of wind and wave, they realized that losing the Papa buoy had set their forecasting abilities back a couple of decades.
Twiggy was in San Francisco, trading constant phone calls with Long in San Clemente. But conditions from Seattle to the Bay Area were going straight to hell. The storms would soon barrel in from Los Angeles clear down to Ensenada and Todos—one probably indistinguishable from the next. But then an interesting feature began to show on the wind models. It was probably a digital mirage, but still. “Get on a flight down here,” Long told Twiggy.
The moment Long hung up the phone, it rang again. Mike Parsons had one question: “Have you seen the winds?”
Long quickly phoned Rob Brown. “I want you to be on call for Cortes.”
It was at moments like this that Rob Brown wasn’t sure whether he liked owning such a bad-ass boat. It provided him with a tenuous living, sure,