Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [75]
Sometime around 1987 the first two-person, sit-down personal watercraft—the Yamaha WaveRunner—hit the market. Hamilton and his friends got their hands on one in the early 1990s and called it a turtle. It could carry more than one rider. It was fast, stable, reliable, and most importantly, one of Brian Keaulana’s grab-on rescue sled inventions might easily be mounted to its rear. Freed of the buoyancy needed for paddling, surfboards were shorn down dramatically in dimension and fitted with chop-defeating lead weights and windsurfer foot straps. Now, with feet locked in, the largest waves anyone had ever seen were not just ridden by Laird and his friends, they were ripped. Massive top-to-bottom carves, impossible aerials, and gaping pits became commonplace across a mind-blowing blue water playing field. It was a quantum leap in performance—a completely new way to inject the earth’s purest form of energy directly into your veins.
The images of these revolutionary exploits hit the stunned staff of the surf magazines like a gut punch. In 1994, Surfer associate editor Ben Marcus sat in his San Clemente home watching advance copy footage from these epic Jaws sessions for the first time. He keyed his remote back and forth, replaying the titanic rides and rodeo backflips in sheer disbelief, continually repeating, “This changes everything.”
Heated debates ensued among Marcus and Surfer magazine’s other editors Sam George and Steve Hawk. Was this even surfing? If it wasn’t surfing, then what the hell was it? And what did this mutant—or what some called satanic—hybrid of snowboarding, waterskiing, and monster truck racing mean to the future of the sport?
The contrasts were stark. Into surfing’s longstanding, environmentally pure world of rugged individualism was born a terribly polluting, technology-driven team dynamic. Early skis in particular burned and belched a nasty, pungent mixture of gas and oil.
In big wave lineups, the rule had always been “survival of the fittest.” You had no choice but to earn your place among the world’s heaviest swells—or drown trying. Few begrudged the added safety that Jet Skis brought to the lineup, particularly in light of Mark Foo’s death, and increased safety might allow paddle surfers to push even harder. Yet something was also lost with the addition of the ski—particularly with the rise of towsurfing. Whatever this new sport was, it heaved time-honored traditions of self-sufficient, primal forays into the wilderness out the window. Big wave surfers were no longer Lewis and Clark. They were astronauts.
“You gotta match power with power,” Laird told me. “Or as Darrick Doerner says, ‘Horsepower with horsepower.’”
K2
In the years just before horsepower-driven surfing hit the mainstream, Bill Sharp and Sam George grew weary of editing Surfing magazine. Under their tenure, the magazine had grown from just over 100 to 250 Day-Glo pages. “But it got to be like Mexican food,” Sharp said. “Same ingredients, different mix.”
George made the move over to Surfer, but in an unusual move for a journalist, Sharp saw opportunity in a storied brand of surf trunks, “Canvas by Katin.” He and his best friend Rick Lohr convinced owner Nancy Katin to put them in charge of wholesaling, and they took the company from a literal cottage business to one with fifty-three employees and millions in sales. In 1997, Katin sold to the mountain sports juggernaut, K2. Sharp stayed on for a while to help direct their marketing while using some of the money from the sale to launch a hilarious gossipy tabloid titled Surf News.
Late in his Katin reign, Sharp came up with an explosively controversial idea. Sometime in the late 1950s, Waimea pioneer Buzzy Trent famously said, “Big waves aren’t measured in feet, but in increments of fear.” Big wave surfers were notorious for applying a weirdly inverse,