Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [96]
Yet no one would know for sure until they were out there—bobbing in and hovering over MacRae’s Rock—if the wind would lay down enough so they could harpoon Flame’s elusive white whale.
During the last decade, big wave forecasting had matured a great deal, beginning with Collins’s first reliable forecasts for Todos Santos, but it was still exceedingly complex. To begin with, NOAA’s data buoys weren’t really telling the whole story. Your weather radio report might state that a swell hitting the Half Moon Bay buoy was 20 feet at twenty seconds—an earthshaker. Yet that swell might actually be a combination of a 5-foot, twenty-second westerly groundswell and a 15-foot, six-second southerly windswell—a comparatively miniscule event. Data buoys actually transmit data on all swells hitting them—a remarkable bit of scientific wizardry—but NOAA doesn’t make that data available to the public. If Collins and Flame wanted consistent, pinpoint forecasts for the Cortes Bank—or any big wave spot—they needed to sift through every swell in the water.
To help do this, Collins hit up a buddy who developed computer code for NASA named Jon Chrostowski. They eventually created a program that hacked those buoy data streams. “It was such a bitch to figure out that code,” says Collins.
The second piece of the Cortes puzzle lay concealed along the tortured, craggy seafloor off Bishop Rock. Collins partnered with a Scripps Institute Oceanographer named Bill O’Reilly, whose doctoral thesis involved modeling incoming swells around different bottom topographies. The Bishop Rock fascinated O’Reilly. At around six hundred feet, he and Collins noted a peninsular thumb of sandstone and basalt that juts out three to four nautical miles to the northwest of Bishop Rock. A long-period wave, something in the eighteen- to twenty-second range, carries energy down beyond a thousand feet, but the energy really begins to concentrate at around six hundred feet. If a wave swept toward the Bank from the proper northwesterly angle—somewhere between 270 (true west) and 360 (true north) degrees on a circle (though it should be noted that Collins keeps the best combinations of period and swell angle a secret)—the wave should hook onto that thumb, slowing and bending inward on itself and curving toward the shallows. The Cortes Bank’s ancient terraces would then cause the wave to shoal steadily, while the hook would focus even more energy onto the Bishop Rock like sunlight through a magnifying glass. The wave would rise higher and higher in the shallows until reaching the final big stair step. There it would trip up, careening and falling forward like an enraged giant while peeling down the shallow waterline like a line of toppling dominoes.
Collins and O’Reilly marveled. If they were interpreting the bathymetry properly, a 15-foot, twenty-second swell might grow to four, maybe five times its height as a breaking wave. With a pure swell of 20 to 25 feet, the comically impossible would become real—a peeling wave 100 feet high. Fifty feet of pure groundswell—perhaps a once-in-a-century event at these southerly latitudes—might create a 200-foot wave. If you could generate enough swell, a reeling, Malibu-style wave 1,000 feet high was theoretically possible.
To date, this is a combination of factors that exists at no other big wave spot yet revealed. Waimea, Maverick’s, Todos Santos, Outer Log Cabins, Jaws—all seem to have upper limits between 50 and 100 feet. Above that, a swell would simply rear up along the outermost reefline into a terrifying and unrideable