Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [68]
Randy was soon traveling on the worldwide surf circuit on Kawasaki’s dime, testing stand-up watercraft in big waves at Todos Santos and running ski demos at surf contests from Huntington Beach, California, to Bells Beach, Australia. He became one of the best stunt riders in the business. “I knew that surfing and Jet Skis were going to come together from the first time I saw a ski,” Randy told me. “I just didn’t know how it would happen, and I didn’t capitalize on it. I just loved doing it so much.”
Around the time Foo first pontificated on the Unridden Realm, Randy Laine and a nephew-in-law of Flippy Hoffman’s named Herbie Fletcher started riding waves along the North Shore atop a stand-up Jet Ski. They were eventually joined by a good buddy of Brian Keaulana’s named Squiddy Sanchez and started charging Waimea Bay and outside reef breaks like Himalayas and Outer Log Cabins on their little one-man aquasleds. At Pipeline, Laine and Fletcher actually towed pros Wes Laine and Brian McNulty, Martin Potter, Tom Carroll, and Gary Elkerton into a few waves. The rides drew cheers but didn’t set off the lightbulbs. Perhaps the Jet Ski’s loud and smoky two-stroke motor was an anathema to the surfing aesthetic. Perhaps the stand-up craft was too unstable and underpowered. Or perhaps the surf world just wasn’t ready to admit that you’d actually need a machine to crack Foo’s “Unridden Realm.” Randy Laine didn’t know it, but one day he and his ski would become intimately, and terrifyingly, familiar with this realm atop the Cortes Bank.
Then, near the end of the second week of 1990, storm warnings sounded from Hawaii to California: a meteorological “bomb” was arriving. A 940-millibar low had generated a fifty- to sixty-knot windfield along better than a thousand miles of Pacific Ocean, aiming 27 feet of deepwater groundswell directly toward Hawaii and the West Coast. Comparisons flew between this swell and the monster of 1969. This would be the swell that Flame witnessed from the air over Cortes Bank.
The waves bore down on Oahu on January 21, and for the first time in four years, the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational at Waimea Bay was a go. Invitees included Mark Foo, Ken Bradshaw, Brian Keaulana, and his good friend Brock Little. The twenty-one-year-old Little was in the prime of his surfing career and felt well nigh invincible.
When the biggest wave of the day came through, Little aimed his gun. The crowd gasped—then shrieked. If there had been a wave comparable to Noll’s, this was it. Little could not have positioned himself any better. But that didn’t matter. “There was too much water moving,” he said. “That wave was not meant to be ridden.”
Brock made the drop, but then fell, his life flashing before his eyes as he bounced across the water like a crashing speedboat. The wave swallowed him, but an instant later, he was churned to the top. His head poked out through the roof of the wave, and in the instant before he was buried again, Brock was granted a beautiful view of Waimea Bay, with the crowd and the mountains spread out before him. He wouldn’t unseat Noll, but the epic instant before the wipeout nabbed the cover of Surfer magazine.
Another incident went down that day, one far less celebrated but no less important. Brian Keaulana caught