Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [143]
The rejections left Greg rattled. Two of the world’s best heavy watermen, his family, had just turned him down flat. So what the hell was he doing? He drove to West Marine in Dana Point and updated every item in a too-meager survival kit. Flares, batteries, first-aid gear, and for the first time, he laid down the money for an EPIRB—a satellite emergency transponder beacon. He studied the instructions for this electronic measure of last resort back at his dad’s house.
“I’m glad to see you at least got that,” Steve said.
At Mike Parsons’s tidy San Clemente home, his wife, Tara, then eight months pregnant, overheard frantic speakerphone conversations all day. Mike was flustered, and she was scared. The wind was howling, and the rain was scouring their neighborhood. Normally, you didn’t see the raw, ragged source of a monster swell in these placid southern latitudes, which always tended to make things seem safer than perhaps they really were.
There was no hiding from the potential danger this time. Ten feet of snow was falling in the Sierra Nevadas, and 165 miles per hour wind gusts at Lake Tahoe were creating scouring sandstorms of snow. Mountain rivers were overrunning their banks; normally bone-dry Southern California creeks were erupting into raging torrents and drowning stranded motorists. A levy broke near Reno, Nevada, sending icy water flooding through four hundred suburban homes.
Mike didn’t mean to ignore Tara, but she knew the drill. She had first seen this behavior in 2004 while they were planning their wedding. She needed help with invitations, but Mike was planning a mission to Cortes. Mentally, he was just gone. So this is what it’s going to be like, she thought.
Tara made a conscious decision that day. This was who she was marrying, and she wouldn’t try to change him. She says, “When he really knows a swell’s coming, that’s the only thing he focuses on. Nothing else. Nothing. The dog won’t eat. Things around him will just be…chaos. But that’s how he gets into his mode. He blocks out any fear. I have the opposite reaction. I fixate on something, and it gets worse and worse and worse in my head, and then I get panicky.”
Weather models were changing hourly. Collins was already away from his computer, chasing waves down in Mexico and coaching Parsons on the different wind forecasts by cell phone. One model showed the calm Snips was hoping for, while another—and coincidentally the one Collins typically trusted more—did not. Parsons had everything he’d need, but ominously, he carried neither an EPIRB or even walkie-talkies. Laid out instead was his own measure of last resort—a bright orange U.S. Coast Guard drysuit. It was the same head-to-toe garment worn by Alaskan fishermen, if they are granted the time to climb into survival gear before their boat sinks.
At around 5 A.M. on Saturday, January 5, 2008, Parsons gave Tara a long kiss, told her he loved her, promised he’d be careful, and drove toward Dana Point Harbor.
As the team converged on the harbor, they inventoried their surf paraphernalia. With the wind still howling, Brown realized it would be way too rough to carry both heavy Jet Skis aboard his boat. One would have to be driven. This had been done before, on the oily smooth mission of 2003, but even in the best of conditions, piloting a personal watercraft this kind of distance was exhausting. They had no idea if this was even possible. The surfers agreed to take hour and a half turns driving the Jet Ski behind the boat while cocooned in Parsons’s Coast Guard survival suit. Greg Long drew the short straw and agreed to go first.
Then, once Brown’s boat was in the water, one of her two engines wouldn’t start. As Rob sat there cursing, a weathered old man came forth out of the pissing rain. He jiggled some wires, literally