Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [148]
In the ensuing hour, the tide drained off a bit, the wind-chop waned, and the huge refraction waves became less pronounced. The waves also began to break in a somewhat more predictable fashion. Everyone watched awestruck as a single, butter-smooth rogue peak detonated even farther outside. It was terrible and wondrous, easily better than 100 feet high. It hurled forth an arcing, almond-shaped cerulean barrel—utterly symmetrical and with perhaps six stories of hanger space inside. As it roared down the reef like a Saturn V rocket, the spray was surely 150, 175 feet high. “Oh my God,” recalled Parsons. “It was just the biggest, the best wave I ever saw.”
The swell was still building when Gerlach dropped Parsons onto a mere 65-footer. It was Mike’s first ride, and it lasted nearly a minute. His second one, too. Some of the longer ones—they traveled better than a mile from start to finish and actually seemed like they would simply unfold and roll along the entire Bank without ever offering an opportunity to escape. It was hell and heaven all rolled into one.
After another half hour of working out the jitters, the surfers began to recognize the patterns in the sets: how often they arrived, where to line up with the boils and the occasionally visible buoy. Some waves were certainly hitting something—on the inside. As a wave rolled in, boom, a massive, spitting geyser would explode straight up into the air. The fear of being shoved into that violent explosion was at least somewhat subsumed by the delicious harpooner’s cocktail they were now experiencing—that longed-for rush of adrenaline, dopamine, and epinephrine. They began to surf more unconsciously, intuitively.
Still, Long says, “I was just shaking. It was so far beyond anything I’ve ever surfed in my entire life.”
The surfers moved so far up the point and became so obscured by the spray and swells that Rob Brown occasionally wondered if they hadn’t simply disappeared. When either team went for a wave, it was three or four lonely, mysterious minutes before they were seen again.
This left Brown essentially on his own in the most frightful shooting and driving conditions he had ever imagined. It was a terrific struggle—keeping one eye in the viewfinder and one eye out for rogues, while pressing the shutter, changing lenses, steering, and throttling up to keep the Ocean Cat from being buried by wide-breaking waves. He thought longingly of the first time he had ever photographed Parsons at Cortes; then he had only nearly died once.
Wybenga, meanwhile, was so deliriously seasick he could hardly hold the video camera. He had tried climbing up onto the tower with Brown, clutching the outside rail like a sailor on a mast, and managed a few one-handed shots, but that only made the seasickness worse. They were so far away from the surfers that getting a good video shot was nearly impossible. Rob would call an alert to him, he’d hit record, then the Surfer would disappear behind an 80-foot wave in the foreground. Then he’d throw up and flop back down on the deck, wanly wiping vomit from his chin.
From a temporary perch atop a swell, both men watched Twiggy take an endless drop down another wave, a cascading beast that through Brown’s 300mm viewfinder brought a frightfully close-up look at Twiggy’s desperate charge for the exit. On any other day, it would have been the biggest thing ever ridden. Yet the ride was about to be topped in the next moment. Brown saw a tiny speck racing far outside.
A monolith was lumbering up the final stair steps and standing straight up. It eclipsed anything in Parsons’s experience. His ski is capable of better than sixty miles an hour, and yet Gerlach was only able to get him in by intersecting the wave at an angle. Parsons just made it through the shower of offshore spray and then over the huge hillock of the wave’s backside. He looked over his left shoulder as he dropped the rope. “I just remember concentrating so hard and thinking, ‘Oh shit, this is a bomb. Don