Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [2]
“Here’s what it says,” Flame read to Sharp and George. “Cortes Bank is about twenty-five miles long west-northwest to east-southeast by seven miles wide, with Bishop Rock awash and buoyed. The rock was struck by the clipper Bishop in 1855 and is the farthest-outlying coastal danger. Nontidal currents of one to two knots cause much swell and moderate sea often breaks over the rock. A wreck near the rock is covered by only three feet. The bottom from five miles west-northwest to two and a half miles east-southeast is broken with hard white sand, broken shell, and fine coral. Anchorage is reported impractical due to swell, breakers, and lost anchors.”
Sharp’s blue eyes traced the tight contour lines. In addition to Bishop Rock, other shoal spots lay on Cortes Bank, one only nine fathoms deep. Another nine-fathom bank called Tanner lay just to the northeast. A few miles out, the ocean plunged to a thousand fathoms, or six thousand feet. “Good lord,” Sharp said to Flame. “Three feet deep?”
Flame’s first enquiry about Cortes Bank was with Philip “Flippy” Hoffman, a gruff old diver and local textile magnate. Hoffman had been among the very first Californians to challenge the giant, empty waves along the North Shore of Oahu in the early 1950s, and in 1973, he became one of the very first to surf Kaena Point, a frightful open-ocean wave off Oahu’s easternmost edge. Hoffman moored his boat in Dana Point next to Flame’s cherished Candace Marie, and he was as hard-core a waterman as you could ever hope to meet.
“I used to dive the Bank with the abalone fleet back in the 1950s, and I told Larry it had big wave potential,” Hoffman said, his strong, old voice sounding as if it had been run through a fan.
“We’d go out there mostly in the fall. That’s the nicest time of year for weather. I never saw it break all that big, and I never surfed out there because the currents are horrible and you couldn’t stay in the lineup.”
Diving was an isolated, dangerous business. Even with no breaking waves, the entire Bank was subject to tremendous, swirling surges of swell that could push or pull you sideways, or up and down in the water column, far faster than you might equalize the pressure in your ears. There were abalone the size of Bibles, lobsters the size of men, and sharks the size of busses. Were you swept from your boat, a current that suddenly rose to two or even four knots could make return utterly impossible.
Hoffman recalled being able to see the top of Bishop Rock, a pinnacle of hard volcanic basalt, in the trough of waves on a very low tide. “We went, maybe, four or five times from 1951 to 1958, just commercial fishing for abalone,” Hoffman said. “The water could be very clear or dirty with plankton, and the fishing was just not quite as good as we thought it would be. It was a very rough place to try to sleep at night. Cups and plates would fly across the galley. I knew sometimes it must get really big out there.”
Hoffman also told Flame that at least one diver—a famous Hawaiian big wave surfer named Ilima Kalama—had very nearly died out there.
In short, the Bank was not a place to be trifled with.
After that, Cortes Bank became an obsession for Flame. In January 1990, he and a gonzo surfer and bush pilot named Mike Castillo decided to see it for themselves. A now-legendary swell had just blitzed Hawaii, and they wanted to see what happened when it reached Bishop Rock, Cortes Bank’s shallowest reach. From Castillo’s tiny Cessna, a few hundred feet up in the air, Flame and Castillo were shocked to find a titanic, unruly wave unloading onto the submarine reef. Flame had traveled the world in search of surf, but he had never seen anything like this. A mile-long mutant Malibu was reeling off in the middle of the ocean. Castillo dove low and flew