Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [5]
Sets of waves appeared to the northeast of the buoy. Sharp approached the edge of the apparent surf zone on pins and needles. “We came up real slow,” he says today. “We had no idea if there would be a rogue wave that might take us out, and so we just putted around for a while and watched. It wasn’t really booming, the sets came every five or ten minutes. But when we finally got close and one rolled through, we were like—whoa, that’s a rideable wave!”
The breaking waves were glacier blue. Silhouetted against the sky, the mist in their wake lit up like a million tiny shards of rainbow ice. Most of the waves weren’t terribly steep, but they carried a great quantity of watery energy and seemed to approach the Bank at a terrific speed. They rolled, warbled, and peeled for a while and then disappeared back into the deep, continuing their march toward the coast of California. When a bigger one ran over what was obviously a very shallow spot on the reef, it reared up to vertical and threw out a beautiful, almond-eyed barrel. The surfers agreed that they seemed to resemble a cross between Oahu’s Sunset Beach and Pinballs, a righthander that breaks along the inside of Waimea Bay.
This was going to be an exceedingly difficult place to surf. Every other wave they had ever ridden offered land-based points of reference—a hilltop, a dune, a palm tree, a lighthouse—some landmark that allowed a mental triangulation of position. Out here, it would not only be impossible to figure out where to sit in the water, but the featureless expanse greatly limited depth perception—making it impossible to judge the wave’s size. Find yourself in the wrong spot, and you might be steamrolled and tumbled until you drowned or slammed down onto some nasty pinnacle of reef.
Hulse remembers, “You just had nothing to tell you where to be or how big the waves were. I was asking myself, is that 30 feet? Should I be writing out my will, too?”
To everyone’s amazement Bill Sharp produced a bundle of bamboo poles, gallon plastic jugs, dayglo duct tape, and lead fishing weights from the hold and ordered the boys to get to work. “It was ingenious,” says Sam George. “We were going to set a series of our little homegrown buoys to help triangulate a lineup.”
Today, the surfers have forgotten the name of the Black Watch’s wide-eyed, newly minted skipper, but now they handed him the helm, and Sharp and Flame worked mightily to convince him to reverse into position in the surf zone so the buoys could be laid. Backing in would allow for a fast forward escape should a set of waves lunge in from the deep at twenty-five knots.
As Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir played over the stereo speakers, the team made fine work of tying the knots for the buoys. But when the roiling boat began to reverse, they inhaled greasy lungfuls of diesel smoke. Suddenly George began to feel queasy. “I thought, What’s wrong with me?” he says. “Then it hit me. Oh my God, I’m getting seasick.”
George ran belowdecks to grab his wetsuit, the first waves of nausea washing over him. He would fight the seasickness by jumping into the bracing fifty-five-degree water. But in the cabin, as is the usual case, the feeling only intensified. George zipped up his suit, grabbed his surfboard, and leapt over the gunwale, simultaneously and spectacularly spewing his breakfast into the deep blue sea.
The buoys stayed anchored, offering the surfers a point of reference and a measure of relief. When the next set of four or five waves broke, they showed that the surf was perhaps twelve to fifteen feet from top to bottom. It wasn’t gargantuan, and hopefully someone might actually be able to ride one. But that someone would not be George. He lay on his back, prostrate on his board, and staring up at the sky semidelirious, while the California current carried him south at one and a half knots. Sharp eyed his fellow editor with at least a small measure