Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [29]
One winter’s day around 1967, Bank and a dive buddy named Kenny Cohen journeyed to Cortes aboard Cohen’s twenty-eight-foot abalone boat. “I’ve been a surfer and a diver and consider myself a waterman,” a ruddy and well-weathered Bank told me recently during an interview at his home in Long Beach. “I lived on the North Shore for a couple of years. That was terrifying. But to surf Cortes? I mean, those guys have got some balls. Diving out there, it was stupid. The place just always struck me with fear. There was a guy named Larry Doyle. He was a big guy, and he could really swim. One day he decided to go diving—to see what it was like under those huge waves. He just got beat to shit.”
Bank recalled his own near-death experiences. “You go down these sixty-foot-deep canyons where the abalone live,” he said. “One day, I was walking on the bottom and a big white shark appears. There I was blowing bubbles, and sitting down there in this bright green suit completely helpless. I was shit scared. When he turned, I climbed the hose and got the hell out of there. God, it was terrifying.”
One night after a solid haul of sixty dozen reds and pinks, the men anchored above the Bishop Rock alongside another boat beneath a stellar full moon in sixty feet of water. The air was utterly still, the light off the ocean wondrous. Bank turned in, content in the knowledge that they’d have another banner take tomorrow and a fat paycheck. Some hours later, he awoke to feel the boat free-falling through the air. She slammed onto the ocean’s surface, and a crash like artillery fire exploded from astern. Bank ran on deck to find a giant black monolith looming above her bow—a wave more than 40 feet high. It was the most terrifying thing he had ever seen in his years at sea. “It came out of absolute nowhere,” he said.
The boat climbed the wave for an eternal few seconds, reaching near vertical, before yet another free fall. Cohen fired the engines while Bank yelled to the skipper of the other boat. “Guys, get up, get up! We’ve gotta get out of here.”
Yet no one stirred as another wave, twice the length of Cohen’s boat, carried them up its face. Bank hurled a ten-dollar abalone through the window of the neighboring boat, and her crew finally awoke, then screamed. Bank sliced the anchor line while Cohen turned the boat 180 degrees and ran like hell, the neighboring boat in their wake, a stampede at their heels. “The foam from the broken waves, it was above the top of the boat,” Bank said. “We couldn’t even see.”
After they cleared the foam and collected their thoughts, Bank and Cohen realized the waves were only breaking atop the Bishop Rock. They wanted to see them closer. “The full moon,” said Bank. “The calm air. The wave. It was just, just beautiful.”
Bank continued: “Kenny later shot himself to death in Sun Valley. The man was crazy. He had a death wish. I don’t. I never went back to Cortes Bank.”
Kenny Cohen took at least one more waterman out for his very last dive above the Cortes Bank—a compact, powerfully built Hawaiian with a perennial smile on his face named Ilima Kalama. Like Rex Bank’s, his story is a lesson in how a big wave surf spot builds its reputation—by humbling the toughest characters in a small world built on pride and guts.
Kalama was born on Oahu and now lives on Maui. He comes from a long line of Hawaiian heavy watermen. His son Dave is a highly regarded surfer who for a decade and a half was the low-key towsurfing partner of big wave legend Laird Hamilton. Ilima’s father, Noah, was also a renowned waterman who, in 1958, loaded up the family and moved to Newport Beach, California, bringing the sport of outrigger canoe racing to the mainland. Ilima rabidly surfed Orange County’s chilly water through high school and won the West Coast