Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [61]
Early on the morning of January 23, Mike Castillo motored his tiny Cessna along the tarmac at the Oceanside airport and pointed his single propeller toward the naval weapons outpost on San Clemente Island.
“It was funny,” Castillo told me in a later interview. “We had to get the okay with the controlling agency at San Clemente—Beaver control—my call sign was November262 Zero XRay. We just played it like we were Coast Guard on patrol out to Cortes Bank, and they were totally cool. I think maybe they knew we weren’t, but us sounding official was their way of not barring us from flying through their airspace. We flew right on by off the south end of the island, and when we got out to the open ocean we saw this big navy ship on the water. The lines of swell were fucking unbelievable. The interval on the swell was just huge. It wasn’t even breaking on the beach because the swell was so deep it was just getting blocked. The real swell never really even got to our beaches. That navy ship, it just looked like a toy boat on those waves.”
Castillo brought the plane down to within a couple of hundred feet off the water, marveling at lines of open-ocean swell he reckoned as 18 to 20 feet high. The Cessna buzzed over a school of many thousands of leaping dolphins. Then off on the horizon, their eyes fixed on a telltale hint of white water.
Ten minutes later huge, slow-motion breaking waves appeared through the propeller. “We were screaming at the top of our lungs,” said Flame. “It just, it just literally caught us so off guard.”
With noses fogging the windshield, and the motor drive on Flame’s Canon working overtime, the pair made several slack-jawed passes above Bishop Rock. The sole point of reference was the Coast Guard buoy, which was regularly buried beneath thundering white water Castillo figured was at least 40 feet high. Before the waves broke, they rose high into mammoth slabs perhaps twice that tall. The pair felt like astronauts on Neptune.
“If you surfed down there, there was a serious chance of death or dismemberment,” says Castillo. “It was like nothing anywhere else. Even Jaws over on Maui. I mean shit, this is the longest fetch in the world. You could surf a wave out there that had come off Siberia. The potential was unlimited.”
“It was huuuge,” said Flame. “Finding that—finding it so perfect when no one really had ever gone there. It was truly something that you could have qualified as, ‘Wow, we discovered something.’ You know, something that no one had ever done before, no one had seen and no one else had photographed. It’s a really incredible feeling to know that you’re the first one to tread out there.”
Mike Parsons isn’t sure how many days it was after the flight, but he remembers the phone call well. Flame said he wanted Parsons to come down to the Surfing offices immediately—and he wanted him to come alone.
“Flame had this weird ceremony,” says Bill Sharp. “He would usher in the unaware, lock the doors to the photo room, and scare the fuck out of them.”
Flame thumbed the lamp to his slide projector. Parson recalls: “He said, ‘I have some photos I want you to see.’ But before he showed the first picture, he threatened me—made me swear to the utmost secrecy ever. He said, ‘Absolutely, if this ever leaves your mouth…’”
Flame keyed the forward button, and Cortes Bank flashed into view. Parsons’s chest tightened.
“I just got this wave,” Flame said. “It’s out in the middle of the ocean. It’s way off the California