Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [146]
Parsons told a moaning Matt Wybenga. “Look, I know you’re sick. I know this sucks. But just shoot everything. Because it’s gonna happen right now.”
The surfers huddled for a brief conference: Mike would man the ski, while Brad would ride the harpoon, then Greg and Twiggy would take up the hunt next. Without radios, no one would know if anyone—even Rob and Matt in the catamaran—were in trouble. “If you don’t see each other for a while, pack it up and come looking,” Mike ordered. “We’re all we have.”
As the surfers motored off, Rob Brown had a sickening realization. He would have to edge in considerably closer to have any hope of capturing a ride. But so much energy was wrapping onto the Bishop Rock that a great dome of water had literally been piled atop its shallow plateau—it was almost like a mesa of seawater, or the convex bulge when the ocean’s surface is sucked upward in the low-pressure vortex of a hurricane. The sea level simply was higher up ahead, and the ocean poured off the deep sides of the Bishop Rock as a wide, roiling waterfall. It seemed a bizarre contradiction of the laws of gravity and physics; Brown and Wybenga had never seen anything even remotely like it. “I was in thirty, forty feet of water,” Brown says. “And it was just flooding off the edge like Niagara Falls.”
“It’s so hard to explain what we were seeing,” says Wybenga. “It was just baffling. It seriously did look like The Perfect Storm. Just all this energy from the refraction building up on the rocks. It wasn’t just waves coming straight at you, but from side to side.”
Brown told a frightened Wybenga to hang on before plowing straight up onto the bizarre mesa like a jetboat pilot on the Colorado River. They were close in now. Maybe too close. Concentrating on the boat, Brown could pay no attention to the sick Wybenga, who was alternating between feverishly hot and bone cold. Occasionally, during the middle of a dry heave, he would be swept by a wave like a crewman on an Alaskan crab boat. Throughout, he was to yell up to Brown, both to alert him to threatening waves and so Brown would know he hadn’t yet been washed overboard. High atop the swells, perfect waves were crashing down in fifty-four feet of water atop the distant Tanner Banks.
“It was so radical looking when you were up there on top of a really big wave,” says Brown. “I don’t know if the guys surfing really see it because they’re concentrating so hard. But you were looking around at the entire ocean from the top of a big cliff.”
In the water, Gerlach held the tow rope, floating around nervously as Parsons idled the ski, studying the waves. Like a Pequod crewman, Gerlach had the curious sense of being both hunter and hunted. Parsons was trying to calculate where on the reef to put Gerlach—and when. He was like a skilled trapper in the forest—using every sense and a lifetime of physical memory to spot tiny tracks, snapped twigs, a footprint in the leaves that might indicate the movement of prey. In these waves, such swirling, subtle nuances might mean life or death.
Between the lumps and the bumps, Parsons saw a wave far outside bending onto the reef. He yanked Gerlach to his feet and tracked it down. Gerlach’s front foot, his left one without the booty, was sliding around as he tried to negotiate the bumps. When he let go, Gerlach knew this was the biggest wave he had ever hunted. Long and Twiggy watched in utter amazement. “Here’s one of the best pro surfers I’ve ever seen,” says Long. “Usually it’s like he’s snowboarding—superlow and big carves. But he was barely hanging on.”
The chop was making Brad’s board chatter like the skis of a Super G racer. From seven stories up, he had an instant to weigh his options. This might be the ride of his life, but the looming route to freedom was threatening to thunder closed. Were he, say, 220 pounds, the size of Laird Hamilton, he might generate enough speed to outrun it, but Gerlach barely weighed