Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [67]
“I’m watching it come, bigger and higher and higher and it broke way outside, maybe four-five hundred yards outside of me. I said, ‘Well, maybe I got a chance.’ So, I dove as deep as I could go, again, and I just took the beating; a terrible beating…And when I couldn’t stand anymore—black spots are coming in front of my eyes—I just started heading for wherever it looked lightish color. You know, you didn’t know what was up or down. Wherever it looked kind of a light color, it might look like down, but ‘That’s where I’m headed for.’ And I got my head up!
“So, I figured, ‘Man, if I lived through this one, I got a chance!’
“So, they washed me up on the beach. I was so weak, I couldn’t stand up. I crawled out on my hands and knees and these army guys came running down. The first thing I said to them was, ‘Where’s the other guy?’ They said, ‘Oh, we never saw him after he got wrapped up in that first big wave.’ That was their words. ‘Wrapped up in that first big wave.’ I figured from that, this guy [Dickie] had so much guts, he tried to bodysurf the wave. Because, otherwise he would have dove down. Why didn’t he dive down under it? If he got ‘wrapped up’ meant that he was up in the curl, right? How else would you express it? So, I figured he tried to bodysurf in.”
Cross’s death put a voodoo hex on Waimea that would last better than a decade. As far as anyone knows, the first effort to ride what might be called the second great big wave on Oahu was led in 1957 by Greg Noll and his buddy Mike Stange. The burly, magnetic Noll and the picture-perfect righthander were ideally suited for one another. On the five to twenty days that Waimea broke each year, Noll and Stange laid down the gauntlet alongside well-known guys like Mickey Dora, Buzzy Trent, Butch Van Artsdalen, Mickey Muñoz, and underground surfers like Harrison Ealey.
Waimea soon became a media sensation, its waves providing fodder for Hollywood films like Ride the Wild Surf and Gidget. Waimea Bay regulars found occasional, and high-paying work trying to kill themselves standing in for Frankie Avalon and his buddies. Greg Noll rode the movies, photo shoots, and his hand-shaped “Da Bull” surfboards into a rare and wondrous place—an actual livelihood based almost solely around surfing big waves. It’s a feat that today, even in a world of million-dollar contracts for postpubescent small-wave aerial artists, is still a rarity.
In the ensuing decades after 1969, a cadre of other surfers would take their cracks at Greg Noll’s summit—mostly at Waimea. But despite countless epic rides, the consensus was that no one could, or perhaps would ever, top that wave.
I asked Noll why it was so hard to catch something bigger. “Waves that big are breaking on an outside reef,” he said. “They’re coming across from the Aleutians, and they’re moving much, much faster than smaller waves that are breaking on the inside. The water running up the face makes them even that much faster still. That’s why I rode a board that was 11 foot 4 inches long, 22 and 7/8 inches wide, and 4 and ¼ inches deep. That thing was a wave-catching machine. If you can’t paddle to catch the wave, nothing else matters. But the problem with a big board is that once you catch a wave, you’ve got this long, banging, slapping piece of equipment under your feet. It’s like a bucking bronco. A smaller board is easier to control, but you can’t catch waves with it.”
In short, there comes a point when a wave is carrying so much energy that you can’t match its speed by paddling. The wave passes beneath you or launches you into a deadly oblivion. Waves bigger than Noll’s came to exist in a hazy zone that a brash young North Shore local named Mark Foo would coin the “Unridden Realm.” After a near-death experience at Waimea Bay in 1985, Foo postulated that to charge into a wave better than 50 feet from top to bottom you would have to be towed onto it from the back of a boat—or maybe a Jet Ski.
The actual origins of