Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [144]
The engine fired.
Long’s cell phone rang. It was Grant Washburn. He’d kept detailed swell records for all his surfing life. There had never been a bigger swell. “You’re gonna have a hundred feet at the Bank,” he said. “A hundred feet for sure.”
Parsons told Long to prepare to suffer. It was time to leave, now and under full throttle, or “we’re not gonna get there in time to surf.”
The phone rang in the Parsons home. Tara listened as Sean Collins’s voice came in over the answering machine. The winds were not backing down and long-period energy had finally stormed the buoys. Monterey Bay had hit 33 feet at nineteen seconds. When the swell raked the Tanner buoy, it would be 23 feet at nineteen seconds—two new records. “Mike, don’t go,” said Collins on the machine. “It’s not looking good. It’s going to be crazy. Gnarly. Madness out there.”
But he was too late. Six men had set out into the teeth of a mighty gale. They were tiny specks on a vast and angry ocean.
On the Jet Ski, Long did his best to stay in the lee of the Ocean Cat, but there was no shelter. He navigated as if he was Travis Pastrana on a moving motocross course, linking lumps and bumps in the air and occasionally driving straight into the water, his face smashing into the handlebars when a wave loomed higher than the ski would jump.
An hour went by. Long was due to change at twenty-five miles. An Olympic- level athlete waved down the boat. “I can’t take it anymore,” he panted.
“We’ve only gone fifteen miles,” said Parsons. “We were going to tell you to go faster.”
Long kept going, but he was delirious by the time they reached Catalina. “We’re never gonna make it,” a frightened Brown told Parsons. “It ain’t gonna work.”
Parsons switched spots with Long and straddled the ski. “I don’t wanna hear it RB. We’re going.”
Parsons suffered mightily for around fifteen miles, but as they neared San Clemente Island, the sea calmed a bit. A few miles farther, a peek or two of sun. Soon whitecaps slithered back into the sea, and the Jet Ski’s leaps into the air became infrequent. Then as they rounded San Clemente, the groundswell became a thing of wonder. Boat and ski disappeared into vast, twenty-second-long valleys. At the tops of the swells, a strange, snowy chink appeared on the horizon perhaps thirty miles distant. The white whale was breaching.
Matt Wybenga and Gerlach had both taken Dramamine, but when the boat began to plow through the long-period waves, both started battling seasickness. It was a fight Wybenga would lose.
An hour and a half later, they approached the southern edge of the Cortes Bank and were astonished. Waves were rearing up in a hundred feet of water along the entire Bank—across fifteen miles of empty ocean. They had never seen anything like this. No one had. Brown gave the ancient shoreline below the surface a wide berth.
Billowing explosions filled the air to their northeast above the Bishop Rock. The clanging buoy, normally well clear of the waves, was being buried—just as it had in Flame’s famous photographs of the 1990 Eddie Aikau swell. Everyone was thunderstruck. Inside the broken waves stretched a murderous caldera of suffocating foam. “As far as the eye could see, it was just a huge square of white water,” says Twiggy. “If you lost your guy in there, he was just gone. He would have been lost in that expanse, and you’d never find him. It was just so scary.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” says Wybenga. “I’ve shot waves all over the world. You could count the seconds from when you saw one throw out as it fell. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four—till it detonated. It was so loud. Then inside, this bubbling cauldron of white water. Waves were hitting and smashing into each other. It looked like death.”
“But the wind was so perfect,” says Gerlach. “It was just blowing offshore into these giant mountains and creating these giant, giant tubes. You’d look at it and you’re like, maybe I could ride that. Then it would clamshell and