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By Root 1148 0

big wave surfing apart and makes the difference. In terms of fatalities, I believe the statistical discrepancy has less to do with the sport’s actual level of danger than with its inherently terrifying nature. Of course, motocross riders and mountain climbers have their moments of terror, but the very ability to surf is predicated on learning how to cope with the simple, primal fear of suffocation—of drowning. The central skill sets of surfing, those basics you need to even catch a wave and stand on a surfboard in moving water, take years to master, and they include countless near-death lessons along the way to scare you straight. Initially, even the least-critical conditions humble the novice surfer, and through these experiences he or she develops the astonishing myriad of physical and neural strengths necessary to negotiate a bigger wave. But as important, this incremental skill-building, and the accompanying brushes with mortality, usually leads most surfers to conclude that they don’t need the heaviest waves to be happy. This fact alone keeps most surfers alive. But then for those surfers who continue into larger and larger waves, they steadily learn how to control their emotions and survive what would otherwise kill them if they panicked.

Let’s look at it this way. Say you’ve been surfing hard for better than a decade. From Santa Cruz to Sunset Beach, you’ve challenged—and been occasionally soundly beaten by—sizable waves, working you’re way up from knee-high peelers to solid 8- to 10-foot, or what most surfers would call double-overhead (a wave twice as tall from crest to trough as the average six-foot-tall surfer). You think, maybe, you’re ready to give Maverick’s a try—on a very small day. Of course, small at Maverick’s is relative. A wave has to be 12, 15 feet—almost triple overhead—to even break. Still, when a mid-period northwest swell hits the California buoy, you swaddle yourself in neoprene and wax up beneath the dramatic headland at Pillar Point. The paddle is long and spooky, but deceptively easy, and soon you find yourself sitting just outside a small, tightly clustered pack of laughing, trash-talking Maverick’s regulars. Some of the best big wave surfers alive are taking drops on waves 15, maybe 20 feet high. Among them are Jeff Clark, Mike Parsons, Peter Mel, Ken “Skindog” Collins, Darryl “Flea” Virostko, Greg and Rusty Long, and Evan Slater.

You spend half an hour in deep water off to the side, just watching, sizing up the waves. Then another set appears, and you take a position slightly to the inside and right of the crew. You hope to ride one of the smallest waves. Just take off on the shoulder. Soon enough, such a wave comes and the regulars let it pass. You line up and dig with all your might as it swells beneath you, but you’ve never felt a swell move so fast or with such power. The wave rolls past you, preventing you from catching it but allowing you to narrowly dive off the back. You kick and stroke backward as hard as you can to avoid being launched over in the wave’s pitching lip—a narrow escape. Your board, though, is carried over the falls, giving your ankle leash a long stretch and your knee a solid yank. You feel it pop, but you’re okay; you don’t get sucked over and into the white water. That was fricking scary.

Just as you finish reeling in your board, whistles come from the pack. A much bigger, more westerly set is stacking up. It loads up farther along the more southerly edge of the reef, and there’s no way you’ll escape it. The veterans dig confidently for the horizon, and you’re granted a filmmaker’s view as Peter Mel makes a picture-perfect drop down the first wave. It then falls on you—a two-and-a-half-story wall of liquid bricks that nearly rips your limbs from their sockets and sends you churning beneath black foam. Your neoprene hood is blown off, inviting the frosty, forty-nine-degree water to squeeze your skull like a vice of solid ice. The feeling is utter powerlessness and stark, airless terror—a come-to-Jesus specter that makes you realize you know nothing about the ocean