Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [149]
Snips bent his knees deeply to absorb the bumps and plummeted down the wave and deep into the trough. Inside swells obscured him from everyone, including a flummoxed and cursing Rob Brown. Parsons was navigating dimensions of forward, downward, and side-to-side motion like an aviator. He was also traveling faster than he ever had on a surfboard. The wave itself was surely traveling at better than fifty-five miles an hour, which meant Parsons was going ten to fifteen miles per hour faster than that. Then, quite without warning, his acceleration suddenly ceased.
“You’re going as fast as you’ve ever gone and it feels like someone’s pulling an emergency brake,” he says. “It’s happened on the three biggest waves of my life, and it’s a crazy feeling.”
It had happened on his giant wave at Jaws in 2002. Just beneath the rear of his surfboard, a shockwave had built up as the water began to boil behind his cavitating fins. Parsons crouched deeper and pointed the board straight down, expecting the cavitation to quickly abate as he slowed—like it had at Jaws. But it didn’t. The rampaging wave kept moving faster than Parsons, and it began to reel him in like a fish on a line.
“He starts going backward up the face of the wave,” says Long. “That’s the only reason we could see him. The only reason he came into the frame on Rob’s camera is because he was being sucked back up. I’d never seen anything like it—never seen anything so big in my life.”
Brown clicked the shutter on his camera as the wave roared and tumbled down the point, creating another explosion of white water 150 feet high. To the edge of this maelstrom, Parsons was being sucked farther and farther up, his angle of descent climbing through sixty, seventy degrees. By the time he was pointed nearly straight down, the wave was beginning to cascade above him. Parsons began talking to himself. “It’s gonna hit you, but you gotta make this. Point it. Just stay on. You can’t fall. You can’t die.”
Then, finally, as the world was crumbling, the water resumed its normal flow around Parsons’s fins. The effect was something akin to flooring a Porsche. Parsons rocketed forward and angled off toward an exit onto the wave’s shoulder, still a full half mile in the distance.
Clouds burned off, and the wind died, leaving mild, bluebird conditions. Individual moments were subsumed in a deluge of adrenaline, and the session became a supercharged blur as wave after wave was hunted and slain. Gerlach found his groove and tore across several 60-footers. Eventually, though, he caught one he didn’t like. It was too bumpy, and the board didn’t feel right. He kicked out early and waved for Parsons. Twiggy had slung Long onto the very next wave. It seemed Long’s wave would swing wide enough that Gerlach would be able to simply float over its shoulder.
Parsons circled around for a pickup, but Gerlach was fairly mesmerized watching Long. The wave was surely 75 feet tall. It was like something from another world. Parsons screamed at Gerlach to grab the rescue sled. “I’m in the straps,” Gerlach said distractedly, meaning that his feet were still firmly fastened on the board. “I’ll just grab the rope.”
Rather than grabbing the tow handle, Gerlach clutched the rope itself, near the ski, figuring they’d make an easy low-speed cruise away from the wave, which would sweep unbroken underneath them. This way, they’d have a ringside seat to Long’s behemoth. Then Gerlach took a hard look. He had badly misjudged. Long’s wave was going to crush them.
Parsons pulled Gerlach up with his 165-horsepower ski. But the foam was thick, and the ski’s impellor struggled to get a grip. Gerlach steadily worked his way back along the rope while holding it in a painful death grip. He wasn’t going to reach the handle. The ski dug in and they rapidly accelerated.
“I looked back,” he says. “The wave just looked 1,200 feet high.”
Ahead of them, the ripping current and refraction waves had morphed the inside impact zone into a class five rapid filled with motocross berms. Parsons would have