Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [158]
“I’m just celebrating my survival,” says Nate.
At nightfall, the yacht veers off towing five skis, the captain taking a similar route over the Bank that brought us here, through waters between 70 and 150 feet deep. Pete Mel has stroked into several bombs and is the only one who was out on the 2001 expedition. I ask him about the difference. “Towsurfing, you’re just waiting for a wave to come and positioning yourself wherever you want,” he says. “You’re not sitting out there trying to read the lineup and the boils. Today you had a completely different mindset. It was actually way more intense.”
On the dark stern deck, Greg and Rusty high-five and relax over a couple of beers. Off the port quarter, Rusty sees a dark shadow. “What the hell is that?” he asks Greg.
A black hillock falls forward and rampages toward the boat. Long yells up to the bridge. But the captain has already seen the rogue. Everyone feels the yacht accelerate wildly. It makes a perilous downhill plunge and then seesaws back up as the wave passes beneath us.
Three of the skis have snapped off the towline. The spooked captain pulls out off the edge of the mesa while Long and Ramon Navarro grab tiny flashlights and walkie-talkies, wetsuit up, and head out. They zip back and forth between the blinking buoy and the lit-up yacht for half an hour, their flashlights twinkling, as they dodge lobster trap marker buoys. Nothing. Finally, a wave rears up and Long is carried high up a twenty-five-foot face in pitch darkness. He catches a glint off in the distance and roars off to reel in the skis. Back aboard the boat, he considers what he’s seen. “If we’d been running fifty yards farther over,” he says, “we would have yardsaled a super yacht.”
The beer flows and the conversation soon nervously, and then hilariously, resumes.
A quiver of paddle-surfing boards on the deck of a boat that would set sail for Cortes Bank, on December 26, 2009, carrying a team of the best paddle surfers on earth. The boat would later be nearly swamped by a rogue wave atop the Bank. Photo: Jason Murray.
November 1, 2010.
It would be not quite a year before I’d again see waves above the Bank. At first, the forecast looks like a repeat of January 2008, but the storm takes a more northerly track and the swell loses some of its punch between Hawaii and the mainland. Still, it’s going to be way, way bigger than it was eleven months earlier. I call Jim Houtz to ask if he’d maybe like to climb aboard the boat with a group of big wave surfers whose obsession with the Bank at least matches his own. “Are you kidding?” he says. “Sign me up.”
Bill Sharp and Jim Houtz have towed a trio of skis down to San Diego and we meet Captain Scott Meisel and the hilarious crew of a ninety-foot sportfisher called Condor. The engine throbs and Bill Sharp takes a seat alongside Houtz. “Now tell me this story,” he says, “I wanna hear about the fiasco on the Jalisco.”
Houtz thumbs open a scrapbook and is soon encircled by a small troupe of wonderstruck watermen.
A little after midnight, I retire to a tiny bunk. The swells soon reach a near carbon copy of January 2001’s 15 feet at twenty seconds. I imagine that’s why I have terrible, awful dreams of a ceaseless, rolling earthquake. When I’m finally overtaken by a world-ending tsunami, I wake with a jolt, bang my head on the bunk, and stumble out onto the dark bow for some air. On the bigger swells, Condor lunges skyward and reverberates with a giant shudder as she drops into a black hole. The hour would put us a short distance off San Clemente Island, and of course, I can’t help but think of Nathan Fletcher’s story of his uncle Flippy. But again, the sense of fear is again replaced by wonder. The ocean is a living thing and we rise and fall on her deep breaths.
There’s little comfort off Bishop Rock five hours later. Captain Scott assures us we’re in 180 feet