Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [56]
Chapter 6:
MAKING
THE
CALL
As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming.
‘There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!’
—from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, 1851
By 1985, when Cortes Bank first blinked onto his big wave radar, Larry “Flame” Moore was just as obsessed with chasing down the best swells nearer to shore. Nor were Bill Sharp, Sam George, and George Hulse his only comrades in arms. Flame had enlisted a group of reliable, hungry California chargers into a loose confederacy that friends and rival photographers only half-jokingly called “Larry’s Army.” The recruits came to include a cadre of hot Orange County surfers—guys like Chris Mauro, Dave Parmenter, and Terrence, Joe, Brian, and Pat McNulty, as well as a fastidious and fanatical redheaded shredder named Mike Parsons.
Flame would assemble his troops and photograph them dissecting the glistening, front-lit waves at Salt Creek in Dana Point, the point break peelers at San Clemente’s famed Trestles, or perhaps they’d make the two-and-a-half-hour drive below the U.S.-Mexican border to charge the heaving barrels of Baja Malibu. Flame was dictatorial, demanding that his subjects hold themselves to professional standards—an idea then completely at odds with the popularized image of the Jeff Spicoli slacker/stoner immortalized in the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High. If you weren’t on time, you were left behind. If your board or wetsuit didn’t have vibrant color, forget it. And it didn’t matter if you were Laird Hamilton, if you disappeared into a smoke-filled VW bus when you were supposed to be out surfing, you were going to catch pure hell.
Still, Flame demanded nothing of his subjects that he didn’t demand of himself. He considered it requisite to pull on his wetsuit and swim fins and swim or paddle into the heaviest conditions on a boogie board clutching a heavy water housing for his camera. The only way to get stellar barrel shots of surfers was to put yourself right in the teeth of a blue-green cyclone and prepare for the detonation.
Oftentimes, an eager understudy of Flame’s named Robert Brown would also show up and snap differently angled shots of the same waves—particularly at Salt Creek. Flame would bark at Brown for poaching his shots, yet Brown says it was mostly bluster, aimed at determining whether Brown could take the heat. Flame was an egalitarian dictator who saw talent and drive in Brown and was just as likely to use Brown’s shots as his own in the magazine. At the Surfing offices, Flame would offer encouraging critiques of Brown’s work and that of a great many upstart lensmen, offering advice on what lighting worked—most desirable was a front-lit condition everyone came to call “Larry Light”—and where surfer, ocean, sponsor logos, and points of land needed to be for an advertisement, a double-page spread, or the hallowed cover. The tech-savvy Flame also recognized great value in the fact that Brown possessed a boat for offshore expeditions. “We had a funny relationship,” Brown says. “I was working under Larry, but I was also his competitor. He was doing all he could to sabotage me.”
Brown had grown up surfing the sandbar barrels at Salt Creek. Early on, he particularly hated Larry’s top model, Mike Parsons. It wasn’t that Parsons was a jerk. He was a damn anachronism—polite to a fault and infuriatingly skillful. “We’d surf Gravels and he’d come down from Laguna with Chris Mauro and maybe George Hulse. He didn’t fit the profile of a pro. He was this skinny redheaded stepchild with freckles. But he had his perfect wetsuit with his sponsor’s logo airbrushed on it, and he pulled these perfect off the lips. We’d try to vibe him, but he out-surfed us so bad that it just didn’t matter.”
Parsons and Flame clicked particularly well. Not only was Parsons attentive and scrupulous, he was equally driven and obsessively