Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [97]
“Cortes is a ridgeline,” says O’Reilly. “The crest has an orientation that lines up off to the northwest. Where a wave breaks depends on the size of the swell. You have this natural slope that can take just about anything thrown at it.”
Really, anything? I ask. What about an earthquake-generated tsunami? O’Reilly and Dr. Gary Green, a professor at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory who has worked on exquisitely detailed sonar-mapping projects of the Bank, point out that a tsunami is fundamentally different. A huge, storm-driven Cortes wave might be 100 feet high, while the tsunami that hit Japan in March of 2011 was, by most accounts, 60 feet at its highest. Yet rather than, say, a sixty-knot, mile-wide storm wave with a twenty-second period from trough to crest, a tsunami might be a four hundred-knot wave one hundred miles wide with a twenty-minute period, and thus countless orders of magnitude more power. The effect at Cortes would depend on how far away the tsunami was generated and the force that spawned it. There might only be a violent surging and swirling of waters and a slow rise and fall of only a few feet of sea level, or the results might rival a science-fiction movie. “If you have 60-, 80-, 100-foot waves out there just from a storm, and you have a big tsunami in the Aleutians that comes up on that island, it’s going to build up at least that high,” Dr. Green says. The Cascadia subduction zone—a massive fault stretching from southern Canada to northern California—tends to generate apocalyptic tsunamis every three hundred years or so. Over millennia, particularly when Cortes Bank was Cortes Island, plenty of such science fiction waves likely swept entirely over it.
Naturally, the enormous January 2001 swell that was brewing caught the attention of big wave surfers everywhere. In Northern California, Jeff Clark served notice on January 17 that the Maverick’s Invitational contest might run in two days. This presented a problem. Pete Mel, Skindog, and Evan Slater were expected to show in Half Moon Bay for the contest, but Flame wanted them at Cortes.
Further, Mel and Skindog had promised filmmaker Dana Brown they’d surf the Maverick’s contest for his film Step into Liquid. On the morning of the eighteenth, Mel’s phone rang. “Hey, are you going to Maverick’s tomorrow?” Brown asked.
“Uhh, I’m kind of doing something else, and I’m kind of sworn to secrecy,” Mel said. “Let me call you back.”
Mel nervously called Flame. Was it okay if Dana came out to Cortes? “I don’t care what he does,” Flame said.
Mel then called Jeff Clark. “Ummm, I have this other deal, to go down south,” he cryptically told his old friend. “Mavs is supposed to be windy and, umm, not that good.” Mel laughs about it today. “I don’t remember actually trying to bait Jeff into not running the contest, but I told him, ‘if you’re not running the contest, I wanna do this.’”
Clark decided to delay his Maverick’s contest, and Mel called back Dana Brown. “We’re going to surf the Cortes Bank, a hundred miles out to sea. Get yourselves a boat.”
Once Flame made the decision to go, everyone flew into action, preparing for the trip. The first order of business for Flame was ensuring their boat and its crew were ready. He and Evan Slater had earlier lined up Gary Clisby, a former pro Surfer and professional sportfisherman who owned a fifty-one-foot charter vessel called Pacific Quest. When the word was given, Clisby assigned his twenty-one-year-old captain John Walla to lead the effort. Walla didn’t have much notoriety, but Parsons and Slater knew the rugged youngster was one of the most driven, hard-core young watermen in all of California. As a surfer, he charged Todos Santos just as hard as they did. Maybe harder.
Walla was over the moon. He called his buddy James Thompson, a young man he regularly terrified with hair-ball diving, climbing, spearfishing, and surfing adventures. Walla offered him a first mate’s position