Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [4]
Sharp was the son of a hard-charging Air Force fighter pilot. He had studied business at San Diego State University, where he founded the school’s surf team. Hulse and George went on to compete in the ASP World Tour, a championship series of contests run by the nascent Association of Surfing Professionals. By 1989, Sharp and George had found their way—somewhat unexpectedly—into the small world of surf journalism, while Hulse, ground down by nonstop travel and a debaucherous party scene, had quit the World Tour. He was not nearly so widely known as Flame’s “A-listers,” pro surfers like Tom Curren, Brad Gerlach, Dave Parmenter, or budding West Coast big wave specialist Mike Parsons. Fortunately for Hulse, on this day all were off competing.
Sam George didn’t share Sharp or Hulse’s big wave bloodlust, but he could hold his own in most of the world’s more radical lineups. He regarded the polished water and surging swell. “A lot bigger than it was when we left,” he said to Sharp. “I wonder what the hell we’re getting ourselves into.”
“Shit, man,” Sharp chirped, clutching the wheel and striking his best sea captain’s pose. “Adventure is our business!”
At around 11 A.M. , the LORAN indicated that the Black Watch was approaching the shallow southern periphery of Cortes Bank. “Something’s going on,” Sharp told George. “Look at the horizon.”
Rather than the ruler-straight undulations of the previous several hours, the wave pulses suddenly steepened. They approached from odd angles, wobbling and lurching toward the boat like punch-drunk ski moguls. There was no obvious cause, but there was a reason.
The boat had rapidly passed from waters more than a mile in depth to the 150-foot-deep edge of a vast sunken mesa, which had disappeared beneath the Pacific Ocean a mere four thousand years ago. Swells whose energy columns ran nearly twelve hundred feet down were reacting to the first obstacle since slamming into the Hawaiian Islands twenty-five hundred miles ago. The Black Watch was built with a stable V-shaped hull, perfect for offshore fishing missions, yet she swooned from starboard to port. Confused, lumpy seas like this wouldn’t have been all that unusual in a gale, but the air remained warm and calm. Sharp hoped the depth finder, which indicated that they were still motoring safely in more than a hundred feet of water, was functioning properly. He eased the throttle back a notch and strained for any point of reference. None was to be found.
Fifteen minutes later, the LORAN seemed to indicate that the Black Watch was still on a correct approach to Bishop Rock, but the team still saw no breaking waves. Had they entered an incorrect course heading? Was the swell too small?
“It’s gotta be out here,” Flame said, nervously staring through binoculars from the boat’s upper platform like a sailor on the Pequod. “It’s just gotta be.”
Off the bow a few miles distant, weird ripples, a glint of sunlight, and a wisp of mist grabbed Sharp and George’s attention. A surfacing whale? A gap in the swells gave a full view as another humpbacked shape breached in the same spot—followed by geysers of offshore spray. “It’s a wave,” Sharp yelled. “Thar she breaks!”
Flame began to unpack his camera gear, a flashbulb smile lighting the deepest creases of his face.
“It was just the most fantastic feeling,” Sam George says today. “We had found Flame’s Moby Dick.”
Within a few miles, they spotted Bishop Rock’s swaying warning buoy—Flame figured it was the same one he had seen from the air—and set a course that soon put them within earshot of what seemed the loneliest bell on the face of the planet. The tiny man-made island was laden with guano and inhabited by an argumentative posse of eight or nine sea lions. Sharp realized with shock that the buoy was big—maybe twenty-five feet tall. In the photographs, the white water from the broken waves completely buried the buoy, and thus must have been 40 to 50 feet high—bigger than any Flame had ever