Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [57]
Irascible, pioneering, devoted, faithful. This book would not have been possible without the work of the late, great Larry “Flame” Moore. Photo: A Frame Photo.
Flame’s early tenure at Surfing also coincided with the first forays into surf forecasting of a stocky, ruddy-faced photographer named Sean Collins. Long before he would become surfing’s one true media mogul, Collins was a brilliant high school dropout with an addiction to waves. He thought nothing of dropping everything—bartending or table-waiting jobs, girlfriends, responsibilities—to travel to the dustiest, remotest beaches of Baja California. He’d surf his brains out and take photos to make a few dollars on his return home. Collins lived feral for long stretches through the late seventies and early eighties, sharing barren campsites with Sam George and a few other friends. This was the sort of lifestyle that Harrison Ealey, Rex Bank, and Ilima Kalama treasured in the fifties and sixties, but in no small measure due to Collins, it was about to become permanently endangered.
Sean Collins’s slavish devotion to waves is shown in his calendar from 1986, just one of many pages of a years-long documentation of every swell to hit Southern California. Below that, one of Collins’s early hand-drawn charts of Bishop Rock, showing his best estimation of prime swell directions and periods for Cortes Bank. Collins keeps the very best angles and periods a secret.
Unlike most surfers, Collins wasn’t content to simply wait for waves. He developed a mania to understand where they came from and, just as important, when they would arrive.
Still today, Collins speaks in a soothing, Southern California surfer’s tone that betrays none of his intensity. He readily admits that his early motivations had nothing to do with making a living but, he says, were based on straight up fascination with swells and pure selfishness. He wanted to score waves—particularly summer swells that originated off Antarctica. Basically, he wanted to beat everyone to the punch.
Collins had become intrigued years earlier by the groundbreaking work of Dr. Rick Grigg, a Hawaiian big wave surfer and navy forecaster, and a navy scientist named Walter Munk.
In addition to figuring out why the moon only showed one side to the earth, Walter Munk used his mathematical genius to develop a measurement scale for wave energy based on height and period. He coupled swell measurements taken by the pilots of Pan American World Airways “Clipper Ship” seaplanes, which crossed the South Pacific in the 1930s and 1940s, with his own hard-fought understanding of the physics of wave propagation and decay (which refers to a swell’s loss of energy as it radiates out over long distances). He compared these PanAm records with weather maps of storms in the distant latitudes above Antarctica, a perennially tempestuous zone known as the “Roaring Forties.” By jibing the two, he figured out how a swell radiated across the ocean. This resulted in critical, lifesaving forecasts for Allied World War II landings in North Africa and Normandy.
In the mid-1950s, Munk helped marine landing parties understand waves along the beaches off Camp Pendleton, south of San Clemente. He then traveled sixty miles offshore to San Clemente Island, where he deployed deep-water pressure sensors that measured a swell’s power and direction. Among his less-celebrated findings was the fact that from certain angles of approach, San Clemente’s swells were far smaller than you would expect. Munk correctly postulated that their energy was being “shadowed” or blocked by a pair of big damn obstacles—namely, the Cortes and Tanner Banks. More celebrated and revolutionary was the discovery that some waves that reached California weren’t actually generated in the Pacific at all, but west of Australia in the Indian Ocean. The swells made a great circle around Australia and New Zealand and literally