Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [60]
For most Americans, surfers were first revealed in the film and best-selling book Gidget. Both were based on the real-life Kathy Kohner and her 1956 summer spent on the beach at Malibu. In one scene from the film, a crush of Gidget’s named Kahuna reveals that he’s planning to leave the Malibu shack and head for Peru.
“Gotta follow the sun,” he says.
“You can’t mean…?” she pleads.
“Yeah, I’m a surf bum. You know, ride the waves, eat, sleep, not a care in the world.”
She stammers, “Um…uh…It may be awfully nosy of me, Kahuna, but when do you work?”
“Oh that,” says the former air force pilot. “Tried it once, but there were too many hours and rules and regulations.”
Before Surfline, Kahuna’s outlook was not only perfectly reasonable—that is, to unrepentant surfers—but almost necessary. If you couldn’t escape the pull of the waves, you had to make a life of chasing them. But Collins changed the equation. Not only did he take away the surfer’s go-to excuse for being jobless, his forecasts made it possible to keep surfing through one’s “responsible years.” Hell, after Surfline, you didn’t even have to live at the beach. For big wave surfers, reliable forecasting in the ensuing years would give the unheard-of ability to make a living by launching costly expeditions to meet the biggest storms on the planet.
Surfline was an anathema to Flame and to a great many dedicated local and “feral” surfers who would camp out on a remote spot waiting for the waves to show. Whenever Collins issued a “Surf Alert,” cherished empty lineups filled like Interstate 5 on a Friday afternoon. Surfers weren’t supposed to give, much less sell, forecasts to the masses. It was okay for Flame to plan his life around pending swells, but not everyone else on the planet. Flame possessed his own considerable forecasting knowledge, but nothing like Collins’s. To make matters worse, photographers at Surfer could now act on Collins’s intelligence. Shouting matches between Flame and Surfer lensmen soon ensued at outback spots all along the Baja peninsula.
Collins and Flame’s relationship became typically symbiotic yet competitive. If Flame had a good bead on a swell, he might or might not reveal his thinking to Collins. If Collins had the goods (which he always did), he might line up a crew and head to Baja but not tell Flame until he returned with a batch of photos.
Flame kept his building obsession with the Cortes Bank a secret from Collins. Yet Collins had conducted his own recon. His first inkling came around 1988, when a fisherman called to ask Collins about spots along the Channel Islands. In a surfer’s quid pro quo, Collins revealed a few secrets, and the fisherman opened up on what he had seen out at Cortes. “He fished and traveled out there a lot,” says Collins. “He told me about seeing some good waves at Cortes that seemed to have good shape for surfing.”
Collins then ran into Flippy Hoffman down in Baja. The aging charger described essentially the same scene to Collins that he had to Flame.
Yet when opportunity knocked in January 1990, it was Flame who first opened the door. A pinwheeling Aleutian low sent a now-legendary swell charging toward Oahu, creating all-time conditions for the fifty-thousand-dollar Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational at Waimea Bay. The swell then steamed toward the mainland with 27 feet of pure, long-period energy. The weather along the California coast was picture perfect. Flame got in a plane and flew over the Cortes Bank, and he told Collins nothing until several weeks later.
Sometime