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By Root 1088 0

an imaginary shoreline while immediately windmilling his arms. To lasso a swell moving at twenty-five to thirty knots, you need at least five knots of self-generated velocity—preferably more. The wave overtook Hulse a few short seconds later and angled him straight down a rapidly steepening foothill. Acceleration was instantaneous, and the smooth fiberglass base of his board rose to a plane. With two final explosive strokes to seal the deal, Hulse leapt straight to his feet, immediately placing most of his weight on his back leg. This prevented the board from nose-diving and allowed for a quick, sharp turn to his right. He angled hard off the bottom of the wave, unwittingly allowing his right hand to skim along the mirror surface. He rocketed along, staying just ahead of a maelstrom of white water gnashing at his heels. George Hulse was surfing at the Cortes Bank.

“It wasn’t a heavy, adrenaline wave,” Hulse recalls. “But there was definitely this feeling of incredible speed—of how quickly you were moving down the Bank—like moving down a conveyor belt. I guess because the waves were coming out of the open ocean.”

In fact, the waves were moving around 50 percent faster than even comparable waves at Todos Santos or spots along Oahu’s infamous North Shore.

Hulse carved and swooped and S-turned for a couple hundred yards. After passing the boat, he kicked out, amazed at how far the wave had carried him along Bishop Rock’s shallow perimeter. Sharp scratched into the very next wave and rode nearly as far.

Hulse paddled over to Flame, not sure what to make of the ride. The wave had been astonishingly fast—faster than anything he’d ever ridden at a comparable size. Hulse only wished it had been steeper and more critical, which would have given the world’s most demanding surf photographer a more radical shot. But Flame looked as happy as a clam. “You got it,” he said, offering a big high five before Hulse paddled back out to the lineup.

Triumph was soon overshadowed by alarm. A set of waves marched onto the reef far outside and bore down. They were impossible to catch and would be impossible for the surfers to avoid. Flame’s captain gunned the boat’s engine and ran for deeper water just off to the west of the peak, while instinct again took over for Sharp and Hulse. Being caught inside involved the same drill whether you were a hundred miles out to sea or at Waimea Bay. They took three or four short, shallow breaths to fill their bloodstreams with oxygen, cast their boards to the side, eyeballed the craggy bottom and dove deep, saying a little prayer that the thin urethane leashes that bound ankle to surfboard would hold.

The first drubbing was lengthy but not as severe as they feared, a fact Sharp attributed to the deep water beneath the waves. After about twenty seconds in a violent spin cycle, each surfer corked to the surface with lifelines still attached and eyes wide open. Yet when the next wave came and the cycle repeated, Sharp had a panicked recollection. The chart guide had indicated a shipwreck right here. Maybe he was somersaulting right above it. He and Hulse were tumbled and spun down the reef, a good hundred yards farther inside from where they started. Another came. Eyes open, Sharp dove for the black bottom—he decided it was better to find what was down there on his own than to meet it involuntarily. With the churning foam, though, he couldn’t see a damn thing. When the fourth wave had at last spent its energy, he and Hulse sputtered to the surface, reeled in their boards, and paddled back to the lineup, quaking with adrenaline.

Three or four more midsize sets offered up a few more rides in the ensuing twenty or so minutes, and then the conveyor belt simply, inexplicably shut down. The most likely explanation was that the tide had risen too high for the swell to break.

Sharp and Hulse returned to the boat in silence while the truth sunk in. They had surfed the Cortes Bank on the smallest wave it was capable of producing. If a swell was any smaller, it would simply roll over the Bishop Rock without breaking.