Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [150]
As he describes it later, Gerlach contorts his face, mimicking his concentration and the blistering pain in his palms: “Mike’s just pinning it, pinning it. There’s no, ‘Mike, you gotta slow down.’ There’s no ‘Oh, I don’t know what I’m gonna do.’ I was like, ‘Fuck I’m gonna ace this shit.’ I gotta—nail—these—jumps—right—now. Here comes the first one—knees to the chest, flying, Yeahhhh! Here’s another one, whooooh, uhhhh. I almost fell.”
They covered several hundred yards before the wave chased them down and devoured Gerlach. Parsons made it a little farther, but he too was soon swallowed whole, despite traveling at the ski’s absolute top speed—sixty-five miles an hour.
Gerlach was hurled down deep. It was black and cold, and he was down for a long time. Despite a hefty life vest, he didn’t pop up. His lungs began to burn, and then he was suddenly carried back to the surface as if rolling in a column of snow. He managed a gulp of air, which saved his life, before again disappearing.
“The explosion just shot-putted me like a torpedo,” Gerlach says. “I felt like a reporter in a wind-tunnel. I’m just going so fast underwater. It was roaring down there. I came up again, but I couldn’t get a breath. Then it nailed me again. Just hit me so damn hard.”
Gerlach probably spent two of the longest minutes of his life underwater.
Parsons was farther inside when he was obliterated, which was his saving grace. His life jacket and the emergency cutoff switch attached to his wrist worked. He sputtered to the surface after a half minute of violent flogging, amazed to find the ski right next to him and simply astonished that neither it nor Gerlach’s lead-weighted surfboard had bashed him in the skull or slit his jugular. Then he saw Gerlach, not fifty yards away and waving. Parsons prayed as he mounted the ski, which fired up with a heavenly roar. Knowing he had only seconds, Parsons yanked his friend out before the next wave plowed through.
The surfers all retreated to a safer area, outside the impact zone, as perhaps ten more waves in the set raged past. It sank in with all of them that if Parsons hadn’t reached Gerlach when he did, and if Gerlach hadn’t managed to outrun the wave for a considerable distance, Twiggy’s nightmare would have come true. Gerlach would have drowned in that watery caldera and been rolled so far they’d never have found him.
Naturally, the question of quitting didn’t come up. Instead, they firmed up the chain of command. Whoever was driving the Jet Ski was in charge, and whoever was on the surfboard was to follow orders without hesitation. The driver was Captain Ahab.
“No more debate,” Parsons added pointedly. “I say get on the sled, you get on the frickin’ sled.”
The weather held. By three in the afternoon, the tide began its slow rise and the swell lurched up another notch. Greg Long wanted his own Moby Dick—a wave bigger even than Parsons’s and Twiggy’s. Twiggy drove far up the point, and Long harpooned one right at the apex that wasn’t as big, it was bigger, and neither Rob Brown nor Matt Wybenga could see a damn thing. They didn’t get a shot.
“I let go of the rope and all I could do was go straight,” Long says. “But you couldn’t go fast enough. I just couldn’t believe it. I’m going as fast as I’ve ever been on a surfboard, and it still felt like I was just going backward.”
Which, in fact, he was, just as Parsons had earlier, traveling up the wave, not down it. Parsons and Gerlach gaped as Long completely disappeared into the white water as the lip chandeliered above him.
I’m not going to make it, Long told himself. I’m going to get annihilated.
Countless tons of water blasted onto his back, and he was completely blinded for what everyone figures was better than three full seconds—the longest of his life. He crouched as low as he could. “Sometimes, if it hits you like that, it’ll blast you right out into the clear if you can just keep your feet in your straps,” Long says.
And that