Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [160]
The paddlers will soon agree with our observation from the boat. The waves look way bigger with a person set against them. “It’s so eerie out there,” says Long. “It’s impossible to figure out. You just have to pick a spot and hope it will come to you and then hope you don’t have a 60-foot fucking white water come and take you out. It happened to Healey and me. You paddle over the top of one, and there’s another one, just breaking fifty, a hundred yards outside of you. It’s like, ‘What do you do?’ Relax, take a couple of deep breaths. Then when it hits you, it hits you hard.”
Healey is more succinct. “I was just thinking to myself, so this is what it feels like when you don’t stand a chance.”
I can’t help but recall Healey’s words four months later, when a paddle session in waves about this size at Maverick’s will widow the wife of Sion Milosky, and leave his two beautiful young daughters without a dad. Nathan Fletcher will discover his best friend’s body. A similar brush with mortality nearly widowed Shane Dorian’s wife a year earlier at Maverick’s. While trapped on the bottom, Dorian decided something had to change.
Today, when Dorian is pushed down very, very deep onto the Bishop Rock and is quite certain he doesn’t want to be down any longer, he pulls a little ripcord on his shoulder. This pierces the casing of a metal CO2 cartridge, instantly inflating an air bladder woven into his wet suit—the same principle behind an airline life vest. He rockets up through perhaps forty feet of foam and returns to the boat sporting a huge hunchback but quite alive. This simple invention might have just saved his life. As far as Mike Parsons is concerned, if he and his buddies are going to keep risking their necks out here, Shane Dorian has just defined the future.
The next morning, Long, Parsons, and I ride back up to San Clemente with Jim Houtz. Long is still decompressing from the paddle session and the throttling he and his friends have survived. When he considers all the stories—Jim Houtz and all the other people the Bank has nearly, but not quite killed—the fact that he’s been surfing over a shipwreck site—he senses a touch of the divine at work. Someone, or something, has been looking out for scores of people through the years on Bishop Rock. “When you’re paddling all alone out there, when you really look at the place and feel its immensity,” he says, “you can’t just help but feel that there’s something so much greater—so much more significant at work than you.”
Houtz agrees. “What happened to us that day in 1966—the way those waves just came out of nowhere, the fact that everyone survived—it really was hand of God stuff.”
To James Houtz and Joe Kirkwood, the Bank held the promise of a resurrected Atlantis, a Nietzschian citadel. Mel Fisher and Ilima Kalama sought the bounty of a sunken Treasure Island. For Greg Long and Mike Parsons, the Cortes Bank is a sort of supernatural Everest—an ethereal, momentary mountain that holds the promise of growing higher with each expedition. For all of us, this ghost wave pulls like Melville’s whale, an enigmatic monster that lures you out for the hunt—and nearly kills you every time.
I’ve been profoundly humbled by the Bank and deeply honored to tell its stories.
Three generations of Cortes Bank fanatics. From left: Mike Parsons (world record big wave surfer), author Chris Dixon, Jim Houtz (a former world record setting deep diver and a founding father of the nation of Abalonia), and Greg Long, back in San Clemente after a successful if not terrifying tow and paddle-surfing mission to the Cortes Bank, November 10, 2010. Photo: Chris Dixon.
ENDNOTES
I must note a great deal of editorial assistance from two people. The first is my mother, a supremely talented editor and researcher