Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [26]
By this point, at least a few lights along Orange County’s rural shoreline were visible. Beronius breathed a sigh of relief when the captain told him he was heading toward the green and red entrance lights to Newport Harbor directly ahead. But a quarter mile out, Beronius realized something looked funny—the lights were switching from red to green. He grabbed the binoculars. “It wasn’t Newport Harbor,” he said. “It was a stoplight.”
Chaffee slammed his only functional engine into reverse and the boat slowly, painfully came to a halt within earshot of the crashing surf along the Pacific Coast Highway in downtown Laguna Beach—just shy of a nasty slab of barely submerged reef. Slowly and carefully, Chaffee turned north toward Newport Harbor.
“You know, I had never actually made the connection that this was the Mel Fisher until you brought it up to me,” Beronius said. “Looking back and realizing that this guy found all this treasure in Florida—this was really the beginning of a big career for him. This is all really going to make a nice after-dinner story,” he chuckled. “The whole thing—it was just a complete fiasco.”
The mystery of whether treasure exists atop the Cortes Bank lingers today. Despite repeated inquiry, the determined silence of the Fisher family hasn’t helped resolve the question. Maybe they found nothing, and would rather not discuss an embarrassing lark on the part of their old man. Or maybe, after a generation of legal wrangling over their past discoveries, they’re simply sticking to the unofficial treasure hunter’s law Mel shared with me in 1989: “Finders, keepers.”
Mel Fisher discovered the wreck of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha on July 20, 1985. It was the greatest treasure ever discovered on the sea floor. Coincidentally, singing storyteller Jimmy Buffett, a friend of Fisher’s, happened to be nearby. “I was fishing about a mile away when the wreck was discovered,” Buffett recalled. “Then they called me on the radio and said, ‘You might want to come over here.’” In the photo, Buffett is singing “A Pirate Looks at Forty” on the day of discovery, while seated alongside Fisher atop a pile of gold and silver bars from the Atocha. Photo and story courtesy of Jimmy Buffett.
Given what Cortes Bank is most known for today—as one of the world’s premier big wave surfing spots—one obvious question is: Who, exactly, was the first person to ride a wave above the Bishop Rock? Like most other “truths” about the Bank, this has proved hard to pin down.
The most widespread assumption was that Philip “Flippy” Hoffman must have surfed Cortes Bank while abalone diving in the 1950s, and if not Flippy, then perhaps his brother, Walter, or his hard-charging son, Marty. If not Marty, people said, maybe it was another surfing godfather, like Pat Curren or Jose Angel. Yet none appears to have surfed out there. I queried other editors and old-timers I knew, and chased frustrating dead-end leads, until finally, on the urging of Surfer’s Journal publisher Steve Pezman, I tapped the encyclopedic mind of Mickey Muñoz. A diminutive man, Muñoz once charged Waimea Bay alongside Greg Noll and donned a woman’s swimsuit to stunt double for Sandra Dee’s Gidget. Today he’s in his mid-seventies, but he’s still a regular fixture in the lineups from Lower Trestles to San Onofre.
Mickey thought it possible that two hard-core California watermen might have surfed the Bank. The first was Pete Peterson. “He was an intrepid explorer,” Muñoz said. “He was surfing out at San Nicolas Island before people would even go out there—before the navy got really entrenched. Another intrepid diver who had cojones grandes was Frank Donohue. He wrote for the Santa Monica Outlook, he was a movie stuntman, a commercial diver, a construction diver. That guy