Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [66]
Noll wasn’t so sure though. When Makaha gets big, a river of current pours southward, pulling the hapless surfer toward a deadly cheese grater of volcanic reef. Noll struggled while eyeballing the angle he’d need to, hopefully, safely intercept the sand. Buffalo keyed his Jeep and followed along the beach, quietly wondering if his friend would be butchered.
“Buff’s just driving down the beach with a six-pack,” said Noll. “He’s drinking a beer and I’m sailing down the beach. I ended up goddamn near eating it. Twenty feet more and I’d have been fucked. Just before I hit the rocks, I drag my sorry ass out of the water and he hands me a beer.”
“Good t’ing you make ‘em bruddah,” Buffalo told Noll at the time. “‘Cause no way I was coming in after you.”
It was arguably the biggest damned wave a human being had ever surfed, and that was how it was regarded by the surfing world for the next twenty-five years.
“I came in, I got to the beach, and I was like, okay, for twenty years here, I’ve been waiting to catch a wave—this sounds very egotistical—but to basically catch a wave bigger than anything ever ridden,” Noll said. “That happened. I had waited twenty years, and then what? By the time another twenty years rolls around, I might be in a wheelchair. Usually I’m stoked at the end of a good day of surfing, but it took me two, three days to get out of that zone. I just went home with Laura. Here’s this guy whose gone through twenty years in the islands, this eager, overly adrenalized monster, and all of a sudden it’s over. The pressure was off. The monkey was off my back. It was, well it was like taking a giant shit. I could go surf and just do what I had to do. It was totally unintentional and totally lucky. I could just exit gracefully. A little bit like a prize fighter.”
Popular myth is that Noll quit surfing after that wave. He didn’t. He just stopped competing and started enjoying surfing more—appreciating smaller days at Sunset and other breaks. After trekking across Alaska, Noll moved to Crescent City, California, and became a fanatical commercial fisherman. He and Laura still live there today.
Waimea Bay
Makaha wasn’t the only giant wave Oahu offered. Everyone knew that on those rare occasions when winter swells got big enough, the waves on the North Shore in Waimea Bay were sometimes even taller. Yet like a monster in the closet, Waimea Bay was long considered kapu, a place to avoid—too big and deadly to risk.
That reputation was due in no small part to what happened on December 22, 1943. Oahu surfers Dickie Cross and Woody Brown had paddled out to surf the lonely point break waves of Sunset Beach just as the first pulse of a powerful long period swell began to sweep across Hawaii. The swell rose with such ferocity that the terrified young men were unable to paddle against a river of ripcurrent that rises between the breaking waves and the beach on giant swells. Now they faced a nightmare. They couldn’t catch a wave and surf into Sunset Beach, and the only possible way they could see to survive was to make the two-and-a-half-mile paddle from Sunset down to Waimea Bay. During much of the year, when the waves are small, Waimea Bay is a calm, paradisiacal cove. When the surf gets big, the bay’s deep inside waters make it one of the last places you might safely negotiate your way to shore on a surfboard. The men hoped that perhaps they could sneak in between a huge set in the dwindling daylight and negotiate the crushing shorebreak to kiss the sand.
Yet conditions at Waimea were little better. Waves they reckoned at 60 feet were exploding in eighty feet of water across the bay’s entire outside reef. They waited and watched, unsure what to do, when eventually a huge set relieved Cross of his board. That left apparently one choice: to try to belly ride a wave tandem on Brown’s board. However, another huge wave came, and Cross apparently swam for it, leaving Brown to face another horrific set that stair-stepped