Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [72]
A couple of days later, with the swell winding down, a trio of Hawaiians, Ken Bradshaw, Brock Little, and a recently engaged Mark Foo, decided to catch the red-eye from Honolulu. Only Bradshaw had surfed the wave before—at a smaller size—and all wanted to see if this wave was really worthy of comparisons to Waimea Bay. Fellow Maverick’s virgin Mike Parsons joined photographer Rob Brown on a coffee-charged drive up from the San Jose airport.
Jeff Clark stood in reverent awe early the next morning. Four of the best big wave surfers on Earth would be consecrating his home break with him. Yet none of these men were immortal, and the waters around Maverick’s were anything but holy.
Parsons found Evan Slater and a small crew of surfers loading onto a boat called The Deeper Blue and was invited aboard. He was wonderstruck by the bluebird conditions—and the wave. He had studied photos and video of Maverick’s—but not as hard as he should have. Nor did Little or Foo spend a great deal of time talking to Jeff Clark about hidden perils and currents. But that was okay. Somehow, they always popped up.
Rob Brown climbed up the steep, muddy cliff above Pillar Point, scared out of his wits that he was going to slide down and die. The sun shone through broken clouds, and a light breath of offshore wind left a twinkling mist behind massive green righthanders. “Other than Waimea, I’d never seen anything like it,” Brown said. “Taking off on a wave there was like free-falling off a cliff.”
Parsons immediately and successfully scored a couple of epic waves. “I was screaming and yelling, and we were having a ball. Mark Foo was having a blast. We were laughing about leaving our girls behind on the day before Christmas, and just saying, ‘Wow, isn’t this just so great? There’s all these great waves in the world, and we get to ride them.’ Mark was just on fire. It was such a small crowd—six to eight of us. It was just so bitchin’.”
At just after 11 A.M. , the horizon turned a deep emerald. The small pack of surfers clawed the water. The lead wave was relatively small, and it was allowed to pass. Foo and Bradshaw were in position for the second. Bradshaw actually had the inside line—the unspoken rule among surfers is that whoever is closest to the breaking curl has the right-of-way. But Bradshaw saw that Foo was a few more strokes into a commitment. He grabbed the reins, wrenching his board into a vertical position to halt its momentum. Foo dropped down a medium-size wave—perhaps 25 feet from top to bottom. It jacked to vertical in an instant.
Approximately fifteen seconds behind came another wave—a near carbon copy of Foo’s, but 15 percent bigger. Parsons paddled like hell. In his peripheral vision, he caught a glimpse of Brock Little. Both popped to their feet almost simultaneously, bent low, and negotiated a zero-g drop. But at the bottom of the wave, weightlessness gave way to a high-g compression of legs and body. Parsons lost his balance and leapt feet first off his 10-foot 6-inch Timmy Patterson. A half second later, Little realized he had no choice but to straighten out and leap, too.
Resistance was futile.
“The lip just crushed my chest,” Parsons said. “And I was immediately way down on the bottom.”
The shockwave was an invisible fist that held Parsons prostrate forty feet down. His eardrums nearly burst and the ice cream headache brought on by the freezing water was horrendous. Suddenly, he was stunned to feel Little bang into him from below. They became briefly entangled by either kelp or a surfboard leash. Beneath the foam, Parsons was completely blind. Little didn’t seem to be struggling, just sort of bouncing against him like a wayward balloon. Mike imagined a dire scenario: Little might be unconscious. If you survive, how will you rescue him—down here?
Another wave dragged Parsons away by his ankle leash like a cowboy with a boot locked in the stirrup of a runaway horse. After nearly a minute in swirling, frigid blackness,