Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [30]
In 1963, while working as a lifeguard, Ilima was asked to pen the liner notes to a genre-defining album by the Ventures, a work of blazing guitars simply titled Surfing.
Surfing is more than just a sport…it’s a fever. Surfing has become a state of mind…a wild, uninhibited existence that revolves around the sun, the surf, and the sand…Plummeting down a hill of moving green water and being able to move your board right or left—up or down—is a feeling akin to flying, to skiing, and to sailing. The difference in surfing is that not only are you moving, but the force you’ve harnessed is also moving…
The life of a surfer has a definite rhythm and beat to it…the beat of the surf and the beat of the wild, driving music he listens to. More than any other group, the Ventures have this sound…the beat of the surfer and the sound that he associates with the driving ride through the curl…a wipe-out…the life of the beach.
In 1966, Kalama joined a big, solid waterman named Larry Doyle on his first abalone dive out to the Cortes Bank. “I met some friends who were ab diving out of San Pedro,” he said. “Hawaiian boys—former black coral divers. Oh, there were lots of pinks and reds at Cortes Bank. They were fetching about five dollars a pound, and there was lots of money to be made. The diving out there was amazing. I mostly remember how the water was just the most beautiful blue. Along the bottom it was rocks and sand and where we mostly dove, the surface was fairly flat and regular. There was no big tree kelp, more just small palm kelp. We went out probably three to four times on calm days and had good experiences.”
A bat ray soars through the teeming kelp forest atop the Bishop Rock—directly beneath the surf zone. Photo: Terry Maas
On a placid morning in early 1971, Kalama climbed aboard the Sea Way, Larry Doyle’s twenty-seven-foot cabin cruiser. When they reached Cortes Bank, they found four other abalone boats scattered around, and set anchor in thirty-five feet of water with the clanging Bishop Rock bell buoy in the near distance. It was still daylight, so they both decided to climb into their gear and dive. “We found a hot spot,” Kalama said. “I brought up twenty-four or twenty-five dozen. Larry made a dive and came up with about the same.”
Around midnight, Doyle awoke Kalama to tell him that the seas were getting rough. Other boats were leaving and Doyle thought it prudent to do the same. Kalama thought otherwise. He told Doyle that despite steep wind waves that were lapping over the boat’s bow, they should just wait till the next morning so they could lever another motherlode off the rocks.
“Five hours later, he wakes me up again and says, ‘Ilima, the boat’s sinking.’ The water’s up to my knees. I told him to call the Coast Guard and to tell them that we’re at the Bank, that we’re sinking, and that we were going to try to swim to the bell buoy.”
A few minutes later, the Sea Way disappeared beneath its fully clothed crew, leaving them to swim in breathtakingly cold water that Kalama reckons hovered in the high forties—a temperature capable of inducing hypothermia in a matter of minutes. Kalama was so disoriented that it took a while to realize that the reason he could barely swim was because he was still wearing his boots. He kicked them off. Then, after a few minutes in the water, as things seemed utterly bleak, came the epitome of a miracle. Both men’s thick, hooded wetsuits unexpectedly corked to the surface like Queequeg’s coffin in Moby Dick. They shed their clothes and climbed in.
The men next made a desperate swim for the blinking Bishop Rock buoy, but the black sea was a combat zone of steep, short-interval 12-foot swells, smothering whitecaps, and strong currents. They were rapidly swept out into the open ocean. “I’ve been out in the water in big waves,” Kalama said. “Makaha and Sunset. I’ve been near death and near drowning, but none of that was even close to this. Larry was swimming right next to me. I told him to relax, and after a few minutes I started trying to crack jokes. We