Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [48]
In your last moments, two existential questions might or might not arise: How is it that a line of North Pacific skyscrapers have appeared seemingly out of nothing, and how damn high can those waves go? For answers, we can learn much from the experience of the USS Ramapo. In 1933, the crew of this navy oil ship was granted a sight previously seen only by God or the dead. Trapped in the midst of what was to the time the most powerful storm ever recorded in the North Pacific, the ship somehow survived being overtaken by what was believed to be a physical impossibility: a wave 112 feet high. This remains the biggest wind-driven swell ever reliably measured by an eyewitness from a position on a ship in the open ocean. When this same swell eventually reached Cortes Bank, it created waves that were in all likelihood taller, and today the Bank is considered almost uniquely without an upper limit. The Bank not only produces the largest surfable wave on the planet, but no one really knows just how high a breaking wave, under the right conditions, might reach—a thousand feet has been tossed out as possible.
The storm that created the Ramapo’s record-setting wave had its genesis in the loneliest reaches of the North Pacific—a vast, malevolent swath of ocean below the Aleutian Islands that lies directly in the track of a wintertime jet stream whose high-altitude winds can exceed two hundred miles per hour. Reports from particularly violent tempests in this zone are scarce—captains dodge them or don’t survive to tell the tale. That’s why the experience of the Ramapo, recounted by its executive officer Ross Palmer Whitemarsh in a 1934 article titled “Great Sea Waves,” is singularly unique. Understand the gauntlet run by these sailors, and you can begin to comprehend how a pair of equally mammoth storms seventy-five years later could send incomprehensible giants roaring into Waimea Bay; Maverick’s; Todos Santos, Mexico; and of course, the Cortes Bank. While mariners have learned to chart the conflux of weather, swell, and current to avoid these beasts, surfers have schooled themselves in these arcane arts for the exact opposite reason.
Ross Palmer Whitemarsh was born in Olympia, Washington, in 1895. He was a mathematical genius who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1918 and went on to lead the sort of life that is the fodder for a Tom Hanks epic. Yet in “Great Sea Waves,” Whitemarsh recounts his almost unbelievable story in a somewhat dry, scientific manner. In short, the account doesn’t reveal much about who he was or what he was thinking during the experience. Fortunately, a few of his close family members were happy to shed light on their legendary patriarch.
His grandnephew James Whitemarsh—today, an auto shipping executive in his sixties who lives in West Palm Beach, Florida—remembers idolizing his great uncle before they even met. “I was reading this story of men and survival in the sea in a Time/Life Book,” James said during our interview. “And I was shocked to see his name. When I asked my mom who he was, she said, ‘Oh, that’s your uncle Ross.’”
James met his great uncle shortly thereafter in 1957, when James was eleven. By then a rear admiral, Ross Palmer had just retired and was visiting the Washington State side of his family. He was fit and robust, but James had expected someone taller.
“He was short, perhaps no better than five foot seven,” he said. “But being an officer and being so short, he had to have a big personality.”
The admiral regaled his young nephew with incredible stories of survival. At twenty-five, Ross Palmer had been assigned an unlikely duty as the senior naval officer on board the Dwinsk, a British freighter that ferried American troops to the European front during World War I. Dwinsk was returning home on June 18, 1918, when a German U-boat sank her around