Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [6]
“He’ll be back in a minute,” Hulse said. “Let’s get out there.”
Sharp and Hulse leapt over the side and immediately started paddling across the two-hundred-yard gap between the boat and the wave. The freezing water seeped through the seams in their wetsuits, inducing an involuntary shudder, and the sounds of boat and buoy quickly faded into a strange, muffled silence so complete they seemed to have entered a cave. That is, until the first wave of the next set blurred the horizon just ahead and its concussion split the air like an artillery shell, vibrating the beads of water on the decks of their boards. This was the strangest paddle they had ever made.
A jumpy Sharp kept telling himself not to turn around. He explains, “Surfers are used to looking out to the endless sea, but when you turn around you expect to see the shore. When it’s not there, it’s instantly disconcerting. Then you’d start to look down, and you realize you don’t want to do that either. The water was this deep cobalt blue. You could see thirty, forty feet down into the kelp, where you knew there were sharks the size of submarines. It was just so surreal.”
“You gotta understand something,” Sam George says. “There was no shorebreak, no white water between sets. Nothing. It was silent and flat as a lake. Then these waves come in. It was like the scene from Jaws where the shark would come up and scare Chief Brody and then slide back down in the water.”
Sharp and Hulse triangulated using their homemade buoys and took a position just to the east of a spot of water that boiled and surged ominously with the passage of smaller swells. You saw boils like this at most big wave spots. It meant the water was swirling around and through caves, boulders, or some other big obstacle. If you crossed one during a hard turn, your surfboard could slide out from beneath you like a snow ski hitting a patch of ice. A sea lion popped up a few feet outside, taking in one of the more bizarre sights in its open-ocean life and inducing a whimper in an already edgy Hulse. As it dove, a wave lurched in—an azure lump about the size of an Olympic swimming pool. They paddled over it and hooted. Another followed immediately in its wake, and another.
“All the things you’re used to doing: taking in a lineup from the beach, measuring how far you’ve paddled according to the beach, duck diving, sitting on the outside because of a crowd—all the things you measure waves by—not one of those things was there,” says Hulse. “And you could not see the approaching waves very well—you had to use the top of the first wave just to see the second wave. It just lifted up right in front of you. And everything was in motion—the boat and the buoys—everything. I remember just sitting out there after the set passed and thinking, We’re in another world.”
As if to punctuate the unreality of the morning, the stillness was suddenly shattered by a deep roar. Sharp first mistook it for an undersea earthquake. “A-10 Warthogs,” he says. “Tankbusters. These military jets came roaring in, like twenty feet off the water and tipped their wings and turned past us. We could see the pilots clearly, and I was thinking, Man, those guys are crazy. But then, they were probably looking down, too, and saying what the hell are those crazy guys doing down there?”
Sitting in the water, Hulse turned to Sharp and said, “I think we’re just going to have to see one break, get to that spot, and catch the next one. Just go for it, and see what happens.”
As if on cue, the horizon darkened again. Hulse paddled over the first wave, using the point where it had crested and a particularly big boil to line up for the second. Then, raw instinct took over. He grabbed the outer edges of his 8-foot 3-inch board, sunk the tail vertically, and then, using the boost of his board’s buoyancy, scissor-kicked and whipped around 180 degrees to launch himself in the direction of