Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [95]
Skindog’s buddy and three-time Maverick’s surf contest champ Flea Virostko was also getting in very, very deep.
One day, Mel began to wonder if the house had shifted on its foundation. When voices began speaking directly to Mel through the box on his cable TV set, he cut the cable to quiet them. Shortly thereafter, he sat at home with his head in his hands after a major bender with Flea. Tara put her hand on Mel’s shoulder. “I said, ‘Honey, are you okay? Have you been using some drugs that could make you paranoid?”
Mel looked up at Tara through bleary eyes and said, “Yes.”
“It makes me kind of sick to remember,” she says, dabbing her eyes.
That moment became Mel’s wake-up call. Forty years ago, his grandfather heeded a similar call and has remained sober to this day. Back in 2002, though, meth killed Mel’s aunt—a fact he wouldn’t learn until after he’d made his own decision to quit. “I’ve had other family members who didn’t get it,” he said. “It took me a while, but I got it.”
Mel’s been clean now for nearly six years. He’s opted to channel his sensation-seeking genes back into big wave surfing—and keeping himself in top shape. As of this writing, Flea’s been clean for better than two years. He’s put his focus back into big waves, and into a rehab program for guys like him. He calls it “Fleahab.”
Tara’s been left in the terribly difficult position of having to hear the awful things Flea and her husband did, as they are rehashed publicly time and again. Both surfers told their stories for an article in 2009 in Surfer, titled “Coming Clean” by Kimball Taylor. Taking the fifth in the twelve steps—admitting “the exact nature of our wrongs”—Mel and Virostko voluntarily recounted everything from Flea’s literal fall from a cliff that should have killed him to the times he and Mel served both their addictions to drugs and big waves simultaneously. They revealed the grisly depths of their addiction to a drug—meth—that Taylor called Santa Cruz’s “gorilla in the room” in the hopes that, maybe, they could keep others from sliding down that same icy slope.
The story garnered a great many online reader comments. “Some people had some nasty things to say,” Tara says. “But most were really grateful and thanked Flea and Pete for the article. Then there was one guy—it was just one sentence.”
She pauses. Her eyes again well with tears and her voice breaks.
“It said, ‘I think you just saved my life.’”
Chapter 9:
ON THE
SHOULDERS
OF GIANTS
“Here comes one scurvy type leading another! God pairs them off together, every time.”
—Melanthios, from Homer’s The Odyssey
By January 2001, Larry “Flame” Moore had spent just over a decade being thwarted in his attempts to document a surf session again out at the Cortes Bank. In that time, he and Mike Parsons had launched at least three weather-aborted paddle surfing missions, and he and Mike Castillo had flown out over Bishop Rock perhaps fourteen times. They buzzed the waves at rooftop level on west swells and north swells, during long periods and short periods, and relayed their observations back to Sean Collins. Flame returned puzzled every time. Though they found big waves, they were never the eight-story titans they had witnessed during the seminal Eddie Aikau swell of 1990.
Then on January 14, Flame rang up Parsons. A 956-millibar storm was plodding across the Pacific. If the forecast held, hurricane force winds would soon be raking a thousand-mile swath of ocean between Hawaii and California. “I’m putting out the yellow light for this Cortes thing,” Flame said.
On January 17, the forerunner waves swept beneath NOAA’s Southeast Papa buoy, a storm-tossed distant early-warning system six hundred nautical miles west of Eureka, California. A solid twenty-second swell was two days out. According to Collins’s calculations, the angle of approach looked ide al for Cortes to work its magic.
Still, on January 18, Collins began sweating bullets. The winds on the Tanner Banks buoy had been bad out of the northwest all week long. Cortes