Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [69]
“I was getting ready to get pounded,” says Keaulana. “Then my friend Squiddy comes right up to me on one stand-up Jet Ski—right in the impact zone. He just zooms in and looks me straight in the eye and says, ‘You all right, Brian?’ I was just amazed. I was like, ‘Yeah.’”
Sanchez zoomed away the instant before the wave detonated, pile-driving Keaulana. But that no longer mattered. “I was just goin’, ‘That was fuckin’ amazing. Someone actually came into the impact zone at Waimea. If I survive this beating, I’m going straight to the dealer, and I’m going to buy one Jet Ski.’
“The next day my wife goes, ‘What you do today, honey?’ I say, ‘I put down five grand on one Jet Ski.’ She goes, ‘You did what?’ I go, ‘But honey, I’m gonna change lifesaving with this thing.’”
However, when Keaulana tested it out, practicing pickups and rescues with fellow guard and best friend Terry Ahue, he found that lifting someone onto the wobbly machine was very tough. Then Keaulana’s mind lit on an old boogie board at home. He poked holes along the board’s perimeter and then wove an old garden hose along its length for grab handles before tying it to the back of his ski. “That was the first rescue sled,” he says, chuckling. “But it had no stabilizers or anything. I’d rescue people, and they’d be flipping over and over and half drowning. But at least I could get ‘em in.”
Todos Santos
A truly rideable big wave is a rare and wondrous thing. You need just the right combination of deepwater bathymetry, wind direction, and swell angle to produce a huge wave that you can both get into and escape from. By the mid-1980s, the good big wave spots on Hawaii were, in large measure, already spoken for. You might score big waves if you were from the mainland, but you probably wouldn’t score many. This is but one of the reasons that Flame and his compatriots began to search the deepwater nooks and crannies between San Francisco and Ensenada. If they found a spot, they might manage to surf in secrecy—at least for a while—and escape the madding crowds.
After he became a paid forecaster for Surfing magazine in 1985, Sean Collins began fine-tuning his predictions. The fiercely entrepreneurial and scientific nonscientist came to recognize a fact that had somehow escaped both surfers and even marine meteorologists. At the true deepwater breaks, it wasn’t only the height of a swell that was important, but its period from crest to crest. The longest-period waves were the deepest, fastest, and carried the most water. If you wanted to find massive surf—and that’s all that the growing ranks of dedicated big wave surfers wanted—you found the spot with the deepest offshore water at the very beginning of a swell.
At the same time that they first fingered Cortes Bank as a possible new target, Collins and Flame were lured by the fathomless bathymetry off the Islas Todos Santos, a pair of tiny, uninhabited moonscape islands seven miles offshore from Ensenada. Todos had a few known surfable spots, but everything about it was sketchy. To get there, you drove to Ensenada and then hired an impoverished local fisherman for a chilly, forty-five-minute cruise aboard a rickety panga. The captain puttered around just off the edge of the breaking waves, praying his sewing machine and rubber band two-stroke engine didn’t die or seize up amid a blanket of kelp. Due to the lack of accessibility and the fact that no one typically ever reached Todos at the very beginning