Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [27]
Unfortunately, both Petersen and Donohue died in recent years, and I’ve been unable to confirm any claim made on their behalf. Still, Muñoz’s leads revealed a loose brotherhood of interwoven lives, through which the mystery has perhaps been solved. Like Flippy Hoffman, Muñoz told me I absolutely had to talk to a Hawaiian named Ilima Kalama. “Oh, and there’s another guy you should speak with,” he said. “You ever heard of Harrison Ealey?”
I met Harrison Ealey on a bright October day in Oceanside, California. Today, he’s a fit senior with a tiny gray ponytail, blazing blue eyes, and a root canal with a lightning bolt. “I had one with a dolphin, too,” he said with an impish laugh. “But I pulled it out flossing my teeth.”
When Ealey was little, he spent his childhood in Dana Point, Laguna Beach, and an amazing little bungalow he still owns on a hillside several blocks from Oceanside’s fishing pier. “It was a great place to grow up,” he said. “My dad had a little sailboat, and I was an adventurous little kid. I’d sail down along the street and into the estuary when the winter rain opened it up. It was a great time to grow up, too. I mean, Laguna Beach was all seashells and dirt roads. We had a little skiff over there in Woods Cove—near Betty Davis’s house. Her boyfriend and Flippy Hoffman taught me how to dive and take abalone. Dive down ten, fifteen feet with a speargun and pull out whatever you needed for groceries—abalone, white sea bass, and corvina.”
Ealey showed me a quiver of battered surfboards, including a couple he surfed as a kid. He grew up surfing with Mickey Muñoz and Phil Edwards, one of the best surfer/shapers ever to emerge from California. Through the mid-1950s, they surfed the legendary point break known as Killer Dana (before the Army Corps of Engineers buried the wave). There were then so few surfers on the California coast that if you saw another car with boards on the roof, you pulled over and talked story. Often as not, you’d turn around and follow them to their destination.
In the late 1950s, Ealey became an avid sailor and began regularly crewing and later captaining on racing and pleasure vessels that plied the waters between California, Mexico, and Hawaii. In 1961, Phil Edwards joined Ealey in helping to ferry to Hawaii a big ninety-foot sailing yacht owned by the president of Matson shipping lines. Shortly after they disembarked on Oahu, filmmaker Bruce Brown (of Endless Summer fame) captured Edwards on the first documented ride through the cylindrical barrels of Oahu’s infamous Banzai Pipeline—a wave up to then presumed unrideable. Pipeline would become the performance wave by which all others would be judged. A few miles away, Waimea Bay would simply become known as the biggest rideable wave of its day.
Ealey spent that winter surfing Waimea. He recalls dropping into mammoth waves alongside Butch Van Artsdalen and Greg Noll. As we talked, he pulled out a big photo of himself sketching into a Waimea bomb next to Buzzy Trent. “Waimea was just scary,” he said. “You stay down, tumble, roll, break the surface, and there’s so much foam just to get through. Then you have to go through another set or two. If you lose your board, you can’t get in. That’s how guys were killed. The current would take them down toward Haleiwa, and they’d find their bodies a few days later amid the coral.”
Another buddy of Mel Fisher’s and the first person known to have surfed the Cortes Bank is Harrison Ealey of Oceanside, California. Ealey reports that he accomplished the feat during the summer of 1962 on a big south swell. Here, Ealey holds up a photo of himself dropping in just inside of Buzzy Trent at Waimea Bay, Hawaii, in 1963. “If I’d never surfed in Hawaii, I would have been scared to death