Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [153]
“I’d forgotten it was this wild out there,” said Snips.
As Mike, Brad, Greg, Twiggy, and Rob reminisced, the emotions and excitement of the day returned. You could see the jones in their eyes, the longing for the hunt. “You know,” Long said. “I hate to flip-flop on what I said about big wave surfing not being about the adrenaline. But we do put ourselves into a circumstance that you have just such a heightened state of awareness. You just have so much energy pouring through you. It’s like no other experience. I don’t want to admit I’m an adrenaline junkie. But maybe I am.”
They had no doubt that they had witnessed 100-foot waves that day. The obvious question was, when would one finally be ridden?
“Everybody always asks, ‘Can you ride a 100-foot wave?’” said Long. “Well, if you found one that had a user-friendly slope, you could ride one 200 feet. I still think we’re so far from realizing what we’re capable of when it comes to riding big waves.”
“We’ll need heavier boards,” said Gerlach.
“The equipment has to evolve more,” said Parsons, referring to his terrifying cavitation episodes. “We’re bumping against the ceiling.”
Everyone said the reality and, frankly, the stupidity of the mission had sunk in. Gerlach feels this is particularly true when you consider the fact that Brett Lickle nearly bled to death a month before their Cortes mission when he was slashed by an aluminum fin only a few miles off the Maui shoreline. The event left Lickle physically and emotionally scarred for life. “Those fins, they’re just knives,” Gerlach said.
Reminded that he had no walkie-talkie or EPIRB, Parsons said simply, “We were just idiots.”
“If you talk to any accomplished captain of any vessel that’s ever been out to Cortes,” explained Long, “and you tell them you wanna go out there into the middle of the worst storm ever when the seas are in excess of 20 feet? They’ll tell you, ‘You guys are out of your fucking minds.’ Which, essentially, we were. That trip could have gone either way real quick in a matter of seconds. We made headlines because we made it happen, but we could have just as easily been on every single news channel, and everybody across the world would have been saying, ‘Look at these fuckin’ idiots.’ I still think about that regularly.
“But I mean, with everything combined that goes into surfing out there—the wave, the location, the accessibility—it really is the Everest of big wave surfing. That year, 2008, was the opportunity to reach the summit.”
The one regret I heard came from Gerlach, who is still gnawed by the memory of how he backed off the first wave of the day, or what would have been the biggest wave of his life. “I totally regret not going on the wave,” he said. “Other guys more fearless than me would’ve just gone.”
Greg Long interjected: “I watched the whole thing like it was slow motion. If he’d gone down, he would have had his ass handed to him. If he didn’t die, it would have set a different tone for the entire session. That’s the amazing thing about surfing. It’s so instinctual and in the moment. You can always sit there and ask, ‘What if? Should I have?’ But if you’re not feeling it, if that’s your natural instinct and reaction, there’s a reason for it.”
Gerlach considered this and nodded. “What’s hard about not going is that you regret it. But I’m sitting here today. That’s good, too.”
Parsons reiterated this. Being a dad has definitely changed his perspective on surfing big waves. He wants to be there to watch his son, Grant, ride his own waves, and his budding little daredevil is already giving him a newfound appreciation of how Parsons’s own mom and dad have felt for the last generation of their lives—watching their son lay his life on the line. And yet, while justifying the risk of Cortes Bank is more difficult, it’s still not impossible. “I just can’t imagine not doing it,” Parsons said. “That terrifies me even more than doing it. If I missed a huge, glassy, perfect day