Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [8]
“You know, even at that relatively small size, it was beyond any scale of any surf spot I have ever seen—like something out of Waterworld.” Sharp says. “It was obvious to me that paddling into a really big wave out there was going to be incredibly difficult. But God, the potential. If it had been even 40 percent bigger, we would have gotten our clocks cleaned. There was a kind of recognition that if you went and tried to paddle out on a big day, you would die for sure.”
George and Sharp were itching to tell their readers the story of their first sighting of surfing’s great white whale. But when the Black Watch reached Newport Harbor early the next morning, Flame faced everyone and said, “Look, I want this mission kept secret.” He was already planning a return with a crew of A-list big wave surfers in a bigger swell—little did he know that that mission would not happen for better than a decade.
“You can just imagine the angst,” says Sharp. “Sam and I basing our entire lives around sharing these experiences with the entire world. To have gone out and done this landmark thing—but we can’t tell anyone.”
George laughs. “Bill and I have the two of the loudest voices in surf history, and we said nothing.”
George Hulse, December 1990, on what was long thought to be the first wave paddled into at Cortes Bank with Bill Sharp paddling on the shoulder. “There was definitely this feeling of incredible speed—of how quickly you were moving down the Bank—like moving down a conveyor belt,” said Hulse. “I guess because the waves were coming out of the open ocean.” Photo: Larry “Flame” Moore/A Frame Photo.
Chapter 2:
ONCE
UPON
AN ISLAND
“Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
—Ishmael, from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, 1851
Is it possible that what drives big wave surfers to hunt their quarry at Cortes Bank—a dangerous, monstrous confluence in the open ocean beyond human reference or scale—resembles the impulse that drove the first people to ever visit it? We can’t know. Evidence of the very first people to settle along the Southern California coast ten thousand years ago is modest, and written accounts of their culture are virtually nonexistent. It may be that no ancestor of California’s indigenous peoples ever set foot on Cortes Bank, but it would have been possible. And if big wave surfers are any guide, if it was possible, no matter how difficult, it’s likely that someone tried. Until it was steadily submerged by the slowly melting glaciers of the last ice age, Cortes Bank was an island, and we know just enough about the region’s original inhabitants that we can speculate what a voyage to it may have been like.
In constructing this imagined journey to the ancient Cortes Island, I am deeply indebted to the following researchers: oceanographers Gary Greene and Rikk Kvitek; geologists Judith and Paul Porcasi; archaeologists Roy Salis, Ellis T. Hardy, Collin O’Neill, Andrew Yatsko, Clement Meighan, Michele D. Titus, and Philip L. Walker.
Around ten thousand years ago, seafaring peoples established a permanent community on what is today known as San Clemente Island, around sixty miles west of the mainland town of San Clemente. These original inhabitants probably called their island home Kinkingna or Kinkipar, and they were the ancestors