Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [28]
When Ealey sailed to and from Hawaii or Mexico, he always made it a point to sail past Cortes Bank during the day. That way, he could avoid the Bank’s shallowest reaches and see if big waves might be breaking above Bishop Rock.
“Sometimes we’d hit big patches of kelp and just go, ‘Whoa,’” he said. “Sometimes you’d see this smoking thing out there. You knew it was big, and just to stay away. When the wind was blowing, you could see this fog cloud from the wave. With the bioluminescence it must have been a beautiful sight at night.”
In the following summer of 1962, Ealey made a passage from Hawaii back to California with a Canadian couple. They reached the Bank in July. Ealey was surprised to find relatively smooth seas, a sizable long period southern hemisphere groundswell, and a beautiful breaking wave. The Canadians were game for a closer look.
“It was glassy,” he said. “Otherwise we wouldn’t have stopped. We anchored in a questionable spot, though, on the backside of the wave. There was a lot of kelp and rock. We didn’t have fishfinders or anything that tells you the depth, and we didn’t find sand. We rehooked and rehooked the anchor and finally caught on something down deep. Then we went snorkeling. The water was so clear. It was just beautiful down there.”
Afterward, Ealey left the Canadians on the boat and decided to paddle his big board around to check out the chilly wave. It was inconsistent, and far from huge, at least by the standards to which he had become accustomed. “I’d been surfing Makaha and Waimea, so it didn’t look scary. But then again, it wasn’t fifty feet either. It looked like it was maybe eight feet. A good-size wave, well overhead. I used the boat to line up. I watched it and watched it before I tried to catch one.”
With his big board and low-key confidence, Ealey stroked into his first wave. It was a long and remarkably fast righthand point break wave that deposited him safely in deep water before continuing on its way to California. He paddled back out, rode a few more, and when the tide began to stir the current, simply paddled back to the boat and pulled anchor.
“If I’d never surfed in Hawaii, I would have been scared to death out there,” Ealey said. “It was the middle of nowhere. But it just wasn’t that big. I mean, sure, I knew something could pop up. I knew it could get big. It was in the back of my head while I was surfing. That’s why we didn’t spend the night there. We went in, anchored, spent four or five hours, and split.”
I asked Ealey why he never told anyone in the surf media about the episode—particularly after the wave burst into the consciousness of the surfing world three decades later. Ealey just shrugged. “I mean, I just wasn’t all that associated with the surfing world. I kind of got away from the group when they became more financially interested in shirts, retail stores, clothing. They went one way and I went the other.”
Ealey never stopped surfing or traveling. At one point while his boat was hauled out for repairs in Miami, he even befriended treasure hunter Mel Fisher.
“I never married either. No one could put up with my lifestyle. I just wasn’t ready for the diaper service and the white picket fence. I mean sailing, surfing, it’s exciting. It’s an adventure. It’s one of the few things left around where you’re totally responsible for your own outcome—except for maybe going across the Mojave with a donkey and a canteen. Everything else is stoplights, or follow the yellow line, or do this but don’t do that. Surfing’s one of the few things left.”
The circle of sailors, divers, and surfers was relatively small during Ealey’s heyday from the 1950s into the 1970s. Smaller still was the troupe of hard-core watermen who included Cortes Bank in their perambulations, either to satisfy a jones for serious free diving or to provide a nice, if terrifying living spearfishing or harvesting abalone in the middle of the deep blue sea. One of these was an Aussie who once crewed with Harrison Ealey named Rex Bank. When Bank wasn’t sailing,