Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [70]
Collins thought the right off the northernmost island seemed an ideal spot for a long-period wave to rival Hawaii. But very few surfed there, with good reason. It’s nasty, scary, brutally cold, foggy, windy, and choked with forearm-thick bull kelp. Just inside the takeoff zone lies a submerged boulder that produces a heart-stopping surge of boiling water just as you’re dropping in. If you eat it, you might be pinned against an urchin-and-limpet-lined seafloor or swept across a boulder-strewn shoreline.
In late 1985, Collins saw the right conditions brewing at Todos, and he told Flame to send a Surfing contingent that included Bill Sharp, Sam George, Dave Parmenter, and Mike Parsons just as the first long-period waves hit. In the heart of the gladiator pit, Flame filmed Parsons slaying a 25-footer—by far the biggest wave any magazine had ever shown ridden on the West Coast. The caption read, “Sean Collins forecast this swell for Mike and this is what they found.”
The wave earned an appropriate moniker: “Killers.”
“Boy, that just really set off the sirens,” Collins says. “Everyone in California was just like, Oh my God. It was the first time anyone realized there was a Hawaiian-size wave just a couple of hours outside of LA.”
Subsequent Todos journeys upped the ante. On February 5, 1987, Bill Sharp and Sam George were out when Flame and photographer Rob Brown captured Parmenter, world champion Tom Curren, and pro surfer Chris Burke on even bigger waves. Parmenter later described a moment of sheer, naked panic during the session in Surfing magazine: “Missing a wave, I wheeled around to find my companions clawing for the horizon. I went over another, smaller wave, and then suddenly in front of me was a malevolent hillock of water surely sent from the bowels of hell. It was a no-win situation. I didn’t know which way to paddle. Easily five times my height, the wave felt bottom, skidded, and vaulted into the lethal slow motion of all deadly things. I felt like I was in the throes of a nightmare.”
For latter-day Hawaiian hellmen like Ken Bradshaw, Brock Little, Todd Chesser, and Mark Foo, the photos from this session were a wake-up call. When a swell hit Waimea, the same waves would sweep into Todos Santos two days later. Hawaii surfers began traveling to California for big waves. This was unheard of.
Unlike Hawaii, though, no one lived at Todos. There was no established hierarchy, and no angry locals. All you had to do to prove yourself was to muster up the shriveled cojones to paddle out and make the drop.
Mike Parsons began to hurl himself over the ledge on particularly suicidal waves. Sometimes he would take off on a beastly closeout he knew he couldn’t make, just to see how long it would be before he popped to the surface. Thanks to a strange quirk in his genetics, he somehow managed to shake off the steamrolling. He would, in fact, often emerge laughing like a maniac. He scared the hell out of Flame and Rob Brown.
“Guys like Brock or Todd would come over,” Parsons recalls. “And I just felt, ‘Todos is my spot.’ I wanted the biggest wave of the day. I knew every rock and learned everything that happens when you’d get caught inside.”
Yet just because you understand the dynamics of being caught inside at one spot does not necessarily make you safer at another. In fact, such overconfidence can make things much, much worse. Parsons would learn this lesson at Maverick’s.
Maverick’s
During the 1980s, Bill Sharp, Sam George, Mike Parsons, and a handful of buddies also explored, in addition to Todos Santos, a few other bona fide big wave spots off San Clemente and San Nicolas Islands. However, when Sean Collins said it was going to get really big, the smart money still lay on Todos.
But there was another spot well to the north. It had exploded in plain sight of Ohlone Indians for eons,