Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [159]
The waves are just fricking massive. Bigger by an order of magnitude than anything I’ve ever seen—ever imagined. And yet they’re only 50, maybe rarely 60 feet high. Way, way off in the distance a monstrous and completely unexplored lefthander tears along Bishop Rock’s eastern edge. Spinning like a fifty-foot-tall Tasmanian devil, we reckon it must be a mile long. The surfers stuff flotation pads beneath their wet suits that make them look like bulging action figures (which, of course, they are), and four skis peel away looking for all the world like X-wing fighters attacking the Death Star. Sharp and I jump onto Rob Brown’s boat. He brings us in close to Larry’s Bowl and orders us to keep an eye on our port flank for rogues. The waves are much steeper here than out by the Condor. They loom far above us, threatening to break. Rising to the top of a swell, I recall Matt Wybenga’s description of the boiling zone of damnation inside the broken waves. It looks like death. I’m sickened, but there’s a part of me that really, really wants Rob to pull in even closer.
From a position that Brown calls “relatively safe,” but feels anything but, I make a few new observations. One: When it’s massive out here, the cacophony produced by a steady progression of 40- to 60- foot waves is not only that of the thunder, but of the gales they create as the air struggles to get out of their way. The waves don’t just roar, they howl. Two: When Greg Long yanks Snips onto a giant, he barrels down the line making these beautiful turns. Suddenly, though, the water explodes 150 feet into the air behind him like a depth charge—a roiling cumulonimbus cloud sprinkled with rainbow dust that Parsons’s completely unaware of. A wonderstruck Jim Houtz reckons maybe the wave bashed some part of his ship. Three: When I later replay the shaky footage from my video recorder, a quick, blurry pan reveals something black and immovable way out there in the white water—right where MacRae’s pinnacle should be—right where the Jalisco met her doom. I show it to Sean Collins and Bill Sharp. Both think it’s just the face of a wave. Yet Rob Brown disagrees: “I see a big rock,” he says.
A line of fog looms on the northern horizon. Minutes later, it buries us like a sandstorm. Motoring back to the mother ship, Sharp muses, “How would you like to be cruising along out here in your clipper ship in the eighteen hundreds, and you’re in a fog bank like this. Suddenly you come upon this place and you say, ‘Hmmm, what’s that? Sounds like cannon fire.’ Oops.”
A couple of hours of laughter and incredible fishing pass back aboard the Condor. Then as suddenly as the fog appears, it’s gone. “Towsurfing’s too easy,” says Healey, after reeling in his second yellowtail. “Let’s paddle.”
I didn’t expect they’d actually paddle today. I mean, the swell has dropped a bit, but the breeze has risen and the waves are still damn big. Long, Healey, Ian Walsh, and Shane Dorian are not even sure if it’s possible to paddle in out here at this size, but they reckon that the westerly wind at their backs and the resulting chop might allow them to sort of “chipshot” into a few waves. Still, the playing field is so vast—bigger than any other big wave spot. There’s a sort of resigned understanding that they’re going to be absolutely annihilated, but they still man their harpoons.
Greg Long paddles into a cerulean monster and defines