Hound of the Sea

by Garrett McNamara

  It was unfair. For refusing to play by the very specific rules of the lineup, he was offered up in the service of controversy and drama. He sometimes complained that the judges of the contests were prejudiced against him, and who’s to say they weren’t? His entry in Matt Warshaw’s respected Encyclopedia of Surfing says he’s “often mentioned as the sport’s most disliked figure.” I lived under his shadow, the brother of Liam. People who didn’t know me disliked me. Even though I tried to stay out of the lineup when Liam was there, I felt the chill whenever I paddled out.

  I STILL lived at my mom’s in Pūpū-kea. It was another Hicks Home, three bedrooms with a screened-in carport that doubled as a Japanese surfer hostel, with three or four bunk beds. From the front the house looked more presentable. It was blue with white trim, and a little front deck that opened onto a patch of green lawn. I couldn’t think of any reason to move. I crashed on the couches of various friends whenever I felt like it. During the winter months there might be a dozen surfers living in the garage and more in the house. We had bunks in the bedrooms and foldouts in the living room. Liam was also living there with his girlfriend, Brandee, whom he’d met in California and who had moved from Santa Cruz; and Brandee’s mom, who claimed to be looking for her own apartment but as far as we could tell had no intention of leaving. And my girlfriend had also moved in. At one point there must have been twenty people living there.

  My mom was obviously no stranger to communal living. As long as people kept the kitchen table clear so she could paint, and the kitchen counter relatively clean, she didn’t mind. Then Barney Barron, Josh Loya, and Flea Virostko, buddies from Santa Cruz, started staying with us. They’d been staying next door at a pig hunter’s house, and the pig carcasses hanging in the garage had gotten a little too gnarly, local style. Liam and I were stoked to have them. I don’t think we charged them rent. So, all these surfers with their damp trunks and piles of slippers by the front door and boards stacked hither and thither, and the girlfriends and Liam’s girlfriend’s mother, each with their own special shampoo on the ledge in the shower, and the wet towels they left hither and thither and dishes in the sink, so many dishes in the sink.

  Finally our once-upon-a-time hippie mom had had it. Every surfer who wasn’t paying rent, out! Every Japanese who didn’t have a bed, out! Girlfriends and their mothers, out! Liam and Garrett, grow up and get out! We thought she was joking about kicking us out. We laughed our asses off, we teased her about how she had raised us in a commune and we were just doing what we’d been raised to do, live with a bunch of more or less strangers in perfect harmony.

  But she was serious.

  Two weeks later we found ourselves a nice, remodeled house at Velzyland. While we were in the midst of moving, by which I mean we got the key from the landlord and dropped a bag of clothes inside the front door before we went out to surf an overhead day, Mom’s house burned down, two weeks to the day.

  The fire department said it was due to faulty electrical wiring in the garage. Miraculously, no one was home at the time. But all of the boards belonging to the renters and our visiting Japanese friends went up in flames, as well as our mom’s paintings, the ones she’d been working so hard on.

  TOW-IN NOW

  YOU COULD ALWAYS TELL when there was no school because Sunset and Velzyland were packed with groms in their neon-colored rash guards and itty-bitty boards. V-land was grom paradise, very local, with a big buffet of rideable waves on offer. A lot of uncles (as Hawaiians traditionally refer to respected and beloved elders) loved that break, too, so sometimes the lineup was as crowded as a mall at Christmas.

  If the surf was closing out inside, the outer reefs would be going off. From the beach you could see them, gleaming far-off white water curling in the sun, beautiful and empty. A pure waste of epic waves. But no matter how crowded the lineup got on the inner breaks, those outer breaks stayed empty. All wisdom, both the conventional and the un-, said they were pretty much impossible to ride. Even if you had the patience and stamina to paddle all the way out there, you could never paddle fast enough to catch them. The bigger a wave is, the faster it moves. Anything bigger than about twenty-five feet Hawaiian was thought to be moving faster than the human shoulder could rotate. And you had to be stronger than the average swimmer, comfortable in the wild, wide open ocean, willing to have a skyscraper-high wall of water crash down on you, delivering wipeouts that didn’t just toss you around, but sent you down into the inky depths, thirty forty fifty feet down, into the abyss.

  All this changed one day in 1992. I was standing on the beach staring at the break at Outside Backyards between V-land and Sunset when I saw a few specks of color moving in the water way outside. One speck moving across the face of the wave, while another floated in a raft or something like it, finally meeting up with the first after the wave broke. It was a bright day, high noon, and I rubbed my eyes. Thought maybe I was seeing things.

  But no. It was Laird Hamilton, Darrick Doerner, and Buzzy Kerbox, in a fifteen-foot Zodiac with a 60-horsepower outboard motor, out there pioneering tow-in surfing. I didn’t know that then, of course. Didn’t know that it would change my life. Without thinking I ran home and grabbed my 9′ Wai-mea gun. I was so stoked I wasn’t thinking straight. I had an underdeveloped idea that I would paddle out and say howzit and ask Laird to tow me in. But when I made it back to the beach with my board I just stood there. It was a bright day and I shielded my eyes with my hand and stared with a dropped jaw.

  I must have stood there for hours. I watched while the driver of the Zodiac towed the surfer along, water-ski style, getting a running start on the gathering swell. When the surfer felt he was at the right spot, he let go and it was on. The Zodiac driver drove back over the shoulder of the wave and waited, then collected the surfer when he was done and drove him back to the lineup.

  Excitement brewed in my heart. At that time I rode a little 6′6″ or 6′8″ board. They were more maneuverable than longer boards and duck-diving was easier. But it was harder to catch the bigger waves, and I was in the middle of the pecking order as it was. Part of the reason I fell for surfing in the first place was the escape it offered. But as more and more surfers started showing up from all over the world, the breaks became more crowded. If I towed in, I wouldn’t have to battle with the rest of the boys for every good wave. I wouldn’t have to battle with my brother.

  I WATCHED until the sun was dropping in the western sky, more stoked than I’d been in a long time. I envisioned those mysterious outer reefs, all empty. Avalanche. Walls. Hammerheads. Backyards. Phantoms. Suddenly, they were accessible. Everything would be more epic—the rides, the drops, the rush. All those big waves I loved? It was as if God had suddenly tripled the supply.

  I made a pact there and then to start saving for my own Zodiac. A year later I bought a used one and refurbished it. It was black, and I painted a big red-and-white shark mouth on the bow. I went out a few times by myself with a few friends, but the Zodiac was big and bulky and hard to steer. It wouldn’t go over white water. Then there was the outboard engine rumbling on the back, threatening to chop you to pieces, or that’s how it seemed.

  Another challenge with tow-in was putting together a team of guys you could trust. Paddling in was a loner occupation, and if you messed up you had no one to blame but yourself. Towing in was trickier. You needed to find guys with the right skill set who needed to be able to drive a jet-ski through often massive swells, and who would not just drop you at the right spot on a wave, but also had the guts and discipline to power straight into treacherous surf if you got pounded. Your life depended on it.

  At the time, I was also into prone paddle racing—where you lie on a board and paddle a certain distance over unbroken swells. My top two competitors were Charlie Walker and Dawson Jones. They were also experimenting with towing-in and had just bought a brand-new Sea-Doo Explorer jet-boat. They invited me to Lani-ākea on a hot, windless day when the waves were triple overhead.

  Driving was tougher
than it looked. The goal was to put the surfer on the peak of the wave, but you could only guess at where that was, since you were always thirty feet—the length of the towrope—ahead of where your partner wanted to be dropped. Dawson was a pilot for Hawaiian Airlines. He would disappear for weeks at a time, and Charlie and I became tight partners. We took out the Sea-Doo and practiced until I could read a wave well enough to know with only a glance over my shoulder how it was breaking thirty feet behind me.

  One glassy day during the second winter we were together, we towed out to Alligators, an outer reef with very fast water where twenty-five-foot waves are business as usual. That day it was twenty feet of perfection. We passed Ken Bradshaw, who was anti-towing—“if you can’t paddle you shouldn’t be out there” was his mantra—until he decided to try it; then he never looked back.

  Dawson was driving. A deep blue mountain rolled beneath us and put Charlie right on the peak. We ride along the shoulder and see Charlie eat it. We cruise over to him. Charlie’s treading water and the ’ski catches on something, or that’s what it feels like. Dawson’s gassing it, but the ’ski is struggling. We’re a little inside the break now and a huge wave arches up. We’re going to get crushed if we don’t move. I look back at Charlie and he’s got an odd, panicked expression. Then Dawson yells, “Abandon ship!” We dive off and the wave crashes right on the ’ski and it’s a yard sale. The hatches are blown, the seats fly off. Everything that can come off the thing comes off, and the debris field looks like a plane crash. We’re forced to swim in, but in this swell that means going over the falls and getting pounded all the way in to the beach. It’s only when we’re sitting on the beach, gasping, that we figure out that the towrope had been wrapped around Charlie’s leg. Luckily it was one of those cheap old water-ski ropes. It snapped right as the wave broke. Had it been new, Charlie’s leg would have been yanked off at the thigh.

  A lot of us learned the hard way that you couldn’t ride a fifty-foot wave you’d been towed into the same way you ride a twenty-foot wave you’d paddled into. The water moves too fast and the usual drop-to-the-bottom-and-turn maneuver usually does nothing but put you in a position to get pounded.

  Marvin Foster was a local Hale-’iwa goofy-foot who’d been an idol when I was just learning. He was one of the first guys to grab the rail of his board and get barreled (the move became called a Marvo). Like a lot of North Shore boys, he had trouble staying out of trouble on dry land, finding himself in jail for one reason or another. He was eligible for a weekend pass, however, and one Saturday Himalayas was pumping, fifty-foot faces at least. I’d saved up and bought a four-seater Yamaha SUV jet-ski, with my friend Maeda Yasuo. The gunwale was wide and flat and I didn’t even need a sled. I could just haul people up and drop them there.

  I told Marvin what I’d learned the hard way, that once you dropped the towrope you rode across the face. “Whatever you do,” I said, “don’t drop down to the bottom of the wave. Set your edge and stay on the face.”

  Of course, I put him on the wave and the first thing he did was drop straight to the bottom and get completely pounded. He hadn’t been surfing since he’d been in jail, and he’d also taken up smoking to pass the time, so he wasn’t really up for this kind of beating.

  The waves are fifty feet, fifty-five feet, and they’re thundering in. There are some Brazilians sitting on their ’skis in the channel, and they can’t believe I’m going in to rescue him. I fight my way through the crashing white water and haul him up—he’s a huge, impressively tattooed Hawaiian—and his eyes are like silver dollars. Even though he was gasping and choking on seawater he saw how it could be. The next year he was in the tow-in surfing championships at Pua’ena Point.

  NO MATTER how hard we fine-tuned our equipment or tested out different flotation devices, we were always light-years behind Hamilton, Doerner, and Kerbox, who moved to Maui where they continued perfecting their act at Pe’ahi, also known as Jaws, the giant outside break on the north shore of Maui. Just when we were figuring out we could use shorter boards—the reason you needed a gun in the big waves is that all that surface area, coupled with paddling, generated enough speed to catch the wave—Laird and Darrick and Buzzy had stuck foot straps on their boards. I didn’t mind being behind the curve. I relished it, in fact. Tow-in surfing now enjoyed the same off-the-radar status that paddle surfing once had. There were no competitions, no battling over sponsorships, and the waves were empty. Total freedom, and I loved it.

  Paddle surfing had felt more like an exercise in pure survival. You had a big board, had to sit out and wait for hours for the perfect wave in the open ocean, hoping to be in the right spot. Then, when the wave finally came, you had to paddle like a maniac. Once you caught the wave, you could barely turn your board on account of its size.

  Tow-in surfing was another world. Just you and your friends out in the water having fun, riding wave after wave. You no longer needed a big board, and whoever was driving the jet-ski could put you in the right spot. There was an artistry to it. You could focus, now, on carving and flowing with the wave.

  When I was a kid at school I used to draw in my notebooks. A favorite drawing was of a huge wave with a little surfer on the face making big, swooping turns. It was a vision, and a dream I’d never thought possible, and now I was living the dream. I’d become the little surfer in my childhood drawings.

  FAMILY GUY

  THERE WAS A GIRL named Connie who lived across the street from my mom’s house in Pūpū-kea, the one that burned down. She was a local girl, dark-haired and petite, quiet and, to me, mysterious. Her mother was a Jehovah’s Witness so she wasn’t allowed to run wild like some of the other North Shore girls, but somehow she managed it. The first time we hung out I invited her over for some Häagen-Dazs. After we were married we joked that I’d angled for a booty call and instead found myself taking a walk down the aisle. It was 1994 and I was twenty-six years old, a real adult now.

  We moved into a cool little house not far from Foodland. The only furniture we had was a Ping-Pong table and a bed. We continued the rental business. We could not pack that little house full enough. At one point in the winter there were fifteen surfers staying there. The Japanese sponsors I’d managed to woo back were paying the bare minimum, but between that and renting rooms we were doing well for ourselves.

  Our daughter was born on March 9, 1995, and the joy of becoming a father took me by surprise, as I guess it does everyone. Ariana was dark-eyed like her mother, with a heart-shaped face and a wicked smile. I was smitten. Now that I had a family it felt important to try to be a better person. God had always taken good care of me and blessed me all over the place. Blessed me when I didn’t deserve to be blessed. I’d slipped up a lot and still the blessings came, and I was not about to take my good fortune for granted.

  I stopped partying and also, once and for all, stopped kidding myself that I had any interest in anything other than big waves. In that I had any genuine gift for surfing, it was on the outer reefs, riding the monsters. It wasn’t that I was fearless, as some people said. I was afraid, but I didn’t mind feeling that way. It was all part of the rush that made me feel so alive.

  I gave up on the ASP tour and entered the few big-wave contests that came along, most of which were within walking distance from my house. I made the Triple Crown quarterfinals one year, and hoped I’d be invited to the Eddie someday. I’d managed to snag a couple of surf-mag covers and that pretty much constituted the rickety scaffolding of my professional surfing career—those few great photos. I tried to be philosophical and accept the good things that came my way. I wasn’t winning contests but I no longer cared. I was never really a small-wave contest surfer, and the only thing that spoke to me now, the only thing that interested me, was the rush of riding big waves.

  Around this time I was blessed again and found myself getting in good with the Brazilians. In the same way we’d shown the Japanese surfers the ropes when they hit the North Shore, we befriended the Brazilians who needed a
place to stay. Taiu, Zecau, Jimenez, and Jorge Piceli were the first. I looked up to Taiu, who surfed with cool precision at Sunset and Wai-mea. (Later he would break his neck, suffering quadriplegia, in two-foot waves on a small sandbar.) More and more of them showed up regularly on the North Shore every winter, ripping on the pro circuit and winning a lot of the big contests.

  Bad Boy was a sportswear company out of San Diego founded in the early eighties, specializing in apparel and equipment for extreme sports. In the early nineties Marco Merhej licensed the brand in Brazil—still does. Marco surfed the North Shore in the winter and was also a devotee of Brazilian jiujitsu, at the time an edgy, out-there form of mixed martial arts (MMA) more or less unknown in the States. Jiujitsu was huge in Brazil. Marco suggested Bad Boy sponsor Rickson Gracie (son of the founder of Helio Gracie), and all the jiujitsu guys started wearing Bad Boy, which led to their introducing an MMA combat line. People called Marco “Marcoting” because he was a master at marketing, so when he suggested to Bad Boy that they up their power surfing presence, they signed me.

  Marco and I hit it off. Peak surfing months in Brazil are April through October, Southern Hemisphere winter. He’d fly me down to stay with him at one of his two beach houses at Maresias or Florianópolis. Marco dragged me along with him everywhere he went, even business meetings. He was a one-man operation. I saw firsthand how this sort of business worked. I learned the importance of marketing, something I’d never really thought about, despite my prior experience with my Japanese sponsors.

  Maresias is known for its big-wave break and its nightclub, so when we weren’t surfing we’d throw parties where we’d give away Bad Boy product, or we’d literally wander around town giving stuff to anyone who looked as if they’d wear it—surfers, tough guys, fighters, even the special forces guys. Law enforcement loved Bad Boy. They’d stop by Marco’s little office for whatever swag was on offer. For a while, Bad Boy manufactured their boots.