Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [161]
CHAPTER 1
1. Recollections came through a few years of in-person conversations with Bill Sharp and Sam George, and telephone interviews with Bill, Sam, and George Hulse in 2010.
2. Background on Larry “Flame” Moore came from Sharp, Sam George, Mike Parsons, and Sean Collins; from interviews with his wife Candace during October 2009; and a lengthy but unpublished interview Sharp conducted with Flame shortly after the 2001 mission to Cortes Bank. I had only one occasion to meet Flame, when I went to the Surfing offices to pick up a photograph for use on Surfermag.com in 1998. He was friendly, energetic, and very explicit over the photo’s care and feeding.
3. I interviewed Philip “Flippy” Hoffman by telephone in August 2009. I had hoped to talk in person about the rogue wave described by Flippy’s great-nephew Nathan Fletcher, but unfortunately, Flippy passed away at the age of eighty, on November 15, 2010. I have been unable to confirm his recollection that the navy once blew the top off Bishop Rock.
4. The collision of the USS Enterprise was briefly described in “Nuclear Carrier Enterprise Hits Reef Off San Diego,” Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1985.
5. Nick Carroll, ed., 30 Years of Flame—California’s Legendary Surf Photographer (San Clemente, California: Surfing Magazine, 2005). Carroll’s excellent book was immeasurably helpful in painting a picture of Flame’s life.
CHAPTER 2
1. The spark for this chapter was lit by intriguing interviews with Dr. Rikk Kvitek, director of the Seafloor Mapping Division at California State University, Monterey Bay, and his colleague Dr. Gary Greene. I should also note the assistance of NOAA fisheries biologist John Butler in relaying the gloomy state of the Bank’s abalone fishery.
Kvitek’s mapping mission to the Bank was a typically wild ride. First, his remote-operated camera was ensnared in the propeller of their research vessel. “Then at 2 A.M. , all the data stopped coming onto our screen,” he said. “And sparks and flames started shooting out of the smokestack—we had a flue fire. Then I looked off the side and saw the thickest school of mackerel I’ve ever seen in my life—millions and millions thrashing everywhere. I went to pull up the sonar but it had been snapped off. That’s why we don’t have the best data set. We ran into this feeding frenzy and the best indication is that the sonar clipped a feeding whale.
”
Kvitek’s hypersensitive sonar thus fired blanks along portions of Cortes’s shoalest waters, but he was still troubled and amazed at his scans. First, largely illegal commercial overfishing has nearly eradicated the Bank’s abalone. Then there was the strange seafloor. At Tanner Bank, Kvitek imagined a lagoon, 250 or so feet deep, ringed with low rock hills, where canoe-bound Native Americans once hurled spears and cast nets. “Then what you see at Cortes are old, historic shorelines,” he said.
Dr. Greene said that Cortes and Tanner were heaved to the surface by tectonically tortured basalts in a process that may be ongoing. At Bishop Rock and Cortes’s nine-fathom shoal, softer sandstone has been scoured away to reveal a hard, black basaltic heart—a formation called a “buried hill.” “These are volcanic rocks, twenty million years old,” said Greene. “They’re relatively young in geologic time, and they’re exotic in that we’re not sure exactly where they came from.”
2. The following sources were also invaluable:
A. Chuck Graham, “Chumash Tumol Makes 22-Mile Crossing,” Canoe and Kayak Magazine Web exclusive (http://www.canoekayak.com/canoe/tomolcrossingchanelislands).
B. Roberta Reyes Cordero, “Our Ancestors’ Gift Across Time: A Story of Indigenous Maritime Culture Resurgence,” News from Native California 11, no. 3 (Spring 1998): (http://channelislands.noaa.gov/drop_down/chumash.html).
C. Charles Frederick