Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [65]
Brian remembers watching in awe as “Uncle Greg” challenged the lumbering lines of his home break. “Makaha starts out kind of like humongous Laniakea,” Brian says, comparing the wave to another somewhat more forgiving break on the North Shore. “But then you end up at Waimea Bay. But Waimea goes shallow and back to deep—that makes it safer. At Makaha, it goes deep to shallow. You take off on a 40-footer and then it will grow to an 80-footer. It’s like running down a hallway full speed and then having the door slammed in your face. I’ve had the worst wipeout of my life here.”
Indeed, Makaha’s inside section contains a notorious backwash that can launch you straight up into the air. When Brian was in fifth grade, such a backwash nailed Buffalo and the trip to the bottom broke his neck, leaving him paralyzed for a year. His family considers his complete recovery a true miracle.
For Brian and Buffalo, and the history of big wave surfing, one Makaha day stands out above all others: December 4, 1969. A once-in-a-generation El Niño condition had turned the entire North Pacific into a gigantic tempest. The resulting waves had been hammering Oahu for weeks.
Brian was seven years old, but he still remembers the booming, mist-shrouded waves as they crashed down a half mile offshore and eventually flooded up the beach, threatening to carry his family home into the ocean. Early in the morning, his father paddled out. “It just got bigga’ and bigga’,” says Buffalo. “Come two, three o’clock, most guys came in. Not Greg.”
By late afternoon, the waves leapt up another notch; they were the biggest Noll had ever seen. He bobbed alone, far up around the top of the point with his heart in his throat, well out of sight of his fretful wife, Laura, and of Buffalo. The waves shook the earth and caused the droplets of water on Noll’s surfboard to sizzle, as if atop a kettle drum. With daylight fading, and stuck outside of the breakers, Noll accepted the fact that he had one chance at survival—catching a wave to the beach. He reckoned his odds of survival at around fifty-fifty, and yet he had waited his whole life for this moment.
A tremendous set began to feather far on the outside reef. Noll turned to face them and stroked over the first wave, gasping in awe at its power, his adrenalized pulse pounding in his ears, and set his sights on the second. He levered his board, aiming now for shore, and laid every watt of substantial horsepower into his shoulders.
The wave rose up beneath Noll and he leapt to his feet, assuming his trademark wide stance, with his foot near the tail of the board for control. Back on the mainland, Noll described the experience to me. “I’d spent my whole life looking for that one wave,” he said. “It was ten feet bigger than anything I’d ever surfed. Ten feet bigger is a leap of faith. You don’t fuckin’ know what’s gonna happen.”
Traveling at perhaps forty-five miles an hour, the rushing water amplified even the tiniest imperfections in his board. His skeg began to resonate—humming like a pipe organ.
Buffalo noticed a tiny, airplane-like contrail powdering the misty wall. It was Noll. “It was hard to see because it was near the evening,” Buffalo says. “It was a big, big wave.”
The wave is long reported to have been between 30 and 50 feet, and undocumented, though Australian filmmaker Alby Falzon claims a hotly debated three-photo sequence of a 25-footer he shot represents Noll’s epic ride. It’s a debate Noll refuses to enter. Noll simply calls it the biggest he ever rode while Buffalo calls it the biggest he’s ever seen ridden—so who’s to argue? “Then when he reach the bottom it close out.” Buffalo says, “Boom! It just bounce all over him.”
“I got the shit kicked out of me,” Noll said.
I ask Buffalo if he thought Noll would die. “I wasn’t thinking he was gonna drown,” he says. “He had good lungs—could hold his breath a long time. Everybody train