Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [147]
Gerlach says, “I was going, yes, no, yes, no, yes…nooooooo.”
He had only ever kicked out over the top of a handful of towsurfing waves—this was going to be one of them. As he did, though, he hit a bump, flew ass over elbows, and was embedded in the wave’s lip. He paddled and kicked like Michael Phelps in a frantic effort to escape through the wave and out the back. Parsons tore in. Gerlach gasped to the surface, badly shaken.
“We’re standing on the edge of life and death out here,” he told Parsons.
Gerlach’s near miss made it clear. They should move off Larry’s Bowl and line up farther to the northeast, farther up the point—farther than they’d ever gone. They needed to straddle Bishop Rock’s mammoth head, taking a position just inside the point where the seafloor began to drop off rapidly. Triangulating based on Jim Houtz’s description and Mike’s reckoning of the buoy location, it seems they were surfing somewhere just above the point where the Whitney Olsen had first tried to position Jalisco. The waves were even bigger up there, surely 70 to 80 feet on the faces, but they were less choppy, since the waves breaking in front of them were knocking down the cross-swells.
Now it was Long and Twiggy’s turn, and they started arguing over who would surf first. This itself wasn’t unusual; they were both always so amped to surf, each wanted priority. Yet after watching Gerlach’s kick out, that argument was turned on its head.
“You’re surfing first,” said Long.
“I went first the last time, in South Africa” said Twiggy.
“No, I did,” said Long. “And I know this break.”
“You’ve never fucking surfed when it was like this,” said Twiggy. “You go first.”
“I say it’s my ski and you can get fucked,” said Long. “You’re going first.”
Twiggy took the rope and ordered Long to drop him on the shoulder of his first wave ever at the Cortes Bank—on the shoulder. Baker was fighting off nightmare visions of being lost in that abyss of foam. At first, it seemed like Greg had chosen well. He hurled Twig onto an endlessly long, slopey beast. But the refractions and the strange, Jalisco-straddled shelf atop Bishop Rock turned what seemed like a makeable wave into its opposite. After ten seconds of bliss, Twiggy was suddenly skateboarding down a 70-foot vertical rollercoaster. Senses crackled. He felt everything—the minute ripples on the water, the unbelievable speed, the jet of wind in his ears, and the deafening roar at his heels. The present stretched out forever, then in an instant it was over. He kicked out after a half mile, gliding up and over the shoulder of the wave to gently come to a stop on its back. A minute or so later, he suddenly couldn’t catch his breath, and he started dry heaving. What the hell is going on? he thought.
“It’s basically an adrenaline overdose,” Long explains. “Twiggy had heard it could happen, and I went back and read up on it. Heavy drug users have the same thing.”
“Every wave I had the dry heaves,” Twiggy adds. “Every fucking wave.”
The water was indeed smoother at the top of the point. Parsons and Long slowly round-robined their friends into a few more, playing it as safe as they could. Gerlach tried a carve or two, but man, that was scary. Better to just point it and run like hell for the exit at fifty-five miles an hour.
“It really feels a lot like flying,” says Gerlach. “But then it’s like riding a motorcycle over some big fucking bumps and then down a gnarly hill and then going off a big jump—but there’s a monster chasing you, too. So it’s not like you can do the jump and then just pull over and pop a beer. And it burns your fucking legs man. At the end of one of those waves, your legs were just burning.”
Twiggy compares it to snowboarding, but “snowboarding, you can stop and say, ‘There’s a rock there and there. I’m gonna have to right, then left, then shoot straight down.’ Surfing