by Susan Casey
The details of that day, and the degree to which Teahupoo had demanded that Hamilton walk the razor’s edge of his abilities in order to survive it, had been written into history as “the heaviest wave ever ridden.” As if to emphasize the memory, the approaching storm—an out-of-season southern hemisphere low that had brewed in Antarctica before winding toward the South Pacific, fueling itself with tropical moisture along the way—was shaping up to be the hardest hit in years. It was fierce enough, slow-moving enough, and visible enough on the weather maps to give the surfers a full two days’ notice to get to Tahiti. Hamilton had been eating a breakfast of ahi and eggs in Maui when he’d gotten the call from his friend Raimana Van Bastolaer, a Tahitian surfer, the previous morning. Thirty-four hours later he landed in Papeete.
I found my bags and lugged them to the curb, where I waited for Hamilton and the two photographers who accompanied him, Sonny Miller and Jeff Hornbaker. Miller, forty-seven, and Hornbaker, forty-eight, were well-known names in the world of surf imagery. Both men were Californians who had developed a taste for the waves early in life. Miller, wild-haired, blue-eyed, and given to an infectious, sandpapery laugh, was a former pro skateboarder known for ocean cinematography that was half fine art, half gonzo mission. Hornbaker was a tall, soulful guy with white whiskers and sun-blasted skin; his work was iconic, beautiful, and principled. In the beginning Hornbaker shot nothing but empty waves, mesmerized by their form. As a purist nothing vexed him more than crass sellouts, or people who failed to see the simple magnificence in the world around them.
In the crowd I caught sight of Sean Collins, the founder and chief surf forecaster of Surfline.com. Above anyone, he was aware of how the swell bearing down on Tahiti was progressing; if pressed, he probably could have recited its real-time longitude and latitude. Collins, fifty-four, was a wave-forecasting savant, and he had turned that talent into a formidable business. Surfline, with its slogan “Know Before You Go,” provided guidance to anyone with a vested interest in what the waves were up to. The service delivered forecasts, weather maps, wave models, news, stories, photo galleries, videos, webcams, travel information, and glossaries; it did everything but wax the surfboard for you.
Yet as all big-wave surfers knew painfully well, no forecast was infallible. For every storm that appeared right on cue, at the size and intensity that was predicted, there were two that defied expectations. Small swells turned out to be nasty (and not so small) backhand slaps; lumbering beasts came in with a whimper. Occasionally swells popped out of nowhere, their very existence unforeseen. The best long-range bets were storms that, like this one, showed up as such a pronounced whorl on the radar maps that even the worst-case scenario would produce noteworthy surf. Which was a comforting thought if you had just traveled halfway around the world in search of that.
Collins, a Pasadena-born surfer himself, had only a hint of the detail-obsessed weather geek to his appearance. It was in his eyes, which scanned the airport taking everything in, as if logging data for a future computer program. Remove that, and you were left with a pale-haired guy of average height, with a shy smile and a low, quiet voice, standing around in jeans and a T-shirt. I was curious to hear what he had to say about this storm, so I went over to ask. “It’s going to be big,” he said, with a nod on the final word for emphasis. “It’s a dangerous swell, for sure. The storm is close. It’s within two and a half days away. The satellite at that location measured fifty-foot seas and sixty knots of wind.” Collins paused, looking out at the horde of surfers. “Everybody’s here,” he said, then quickly revised that. “Well, some guys didn’t want to come. One said, ‘I’ve got a kid on the way. I don’t need to split my head on the reef right now.’ ”
At that moment Hamilton walked over to steer me toward the rental car. Seeing that I was talking to Collins, his face turned stony. “Well, Sean,” he said, “I see you’ve got the whole world here.” Being on the receiving end of Hamilton’s anger is not pleasant for anyone, and Collins flinched beneath his baseball cap. Without waiting for a response, Hamilton picked up my bags, turned, and walked away. I followed. “This is what happens when you send out a mass e-mail that says, ‘Giant Swell!’ ” he said, waving his hand toward the terminal.
Unlike many of the surfers here, Hamilton was old enough to remember the days when you didn’t have forty-eight hours’ advance notice to get to the waves, and had to rely on a combination of patience, persistence, luck, and your own meteorological divinations to score an exceptional ride. No one e-mailed you the information; that expertise couldn’t be bought. Now it was on sale for a monthly subscription fee, along with all the other gear a fledgling tow surfer might want. Like it or not, the days of having to sniff the air for signs of a storm and invent the equipment in your garage had been overtaken by technology and a thriving commercial enterprise.
Miller and Hornbaker were busy loading a dozen cases of camera gear into a pickup truck that was already piled high with Hamilton’s surfboards. The truck would meet us at Raimana Van Bastolaer’s house, where we were staying. For a little island, Tahiti had more than its share of renowned big-wave riders, and Van Bastolaer was one of the best. Small-statured and agile, he began his career at Teahupoo as a body boarder, braving the waves with only a pair of fins. (Instead of a surfboard slicing through the water, a body boarder uses, well, his body.) This activity was confined to the tamer days, of course, but it allowed Van Bastolaer to learn the nuances of the wave’s motion; by the time he was tow surfing it on the biggest days, he knew its every last trick. He had home court advantage and he surfed it that way, but he also made sure the visiting teams had everything they needed. When a swell rolled in and the megawave Who’s Who came to town, Van Bastolaer could be found in the center of it, an omnipresent host. He was acquainted with all the players—the locals and the outsiders, the sponsors and the riders—and he coordinated things to such an extent that surfers often referred to Tahiti as “Raimana World.” On this swell, he and Hamilton would be tow partners.
The pickup fully loaded, Hamilton, Miller, Hornbaker, and I squeezed into our rental car, a black boxy subcompact that was apparently the last available vehicle on the island. “Like the car?” Hamilton said, wedging himself into the driver’s seat. “I could probably lift it.” He steered through the crowds, still overflowing from the baggage area onto the road. Rolling down the window, Miller let loose with a long, rattling laugh. “Everybody’s coming to Tahiti,” he said, leaning outside. “Look at this madness!”
Three hours later I awoke to clanking noises and mumbled voices. Groggy, lying on a mattress in the dark, hearing waves breaking nearby, I experienced a brief, disorienting moment of having no idea where I was. The Tahitians, I’d discovered, have a nomadic way of dealing with sleeping arrangements. When they want some shut-eye, they simply pitch a light mattress down on the floor wherever they happen to be. If they don’t feel like bunking down in the bedroom and would rather sleep in the kitchen or the living room, then that is where they go. The entire house is flung open to the cooling night breezes—there are no closed windows or doors (and virtually zero crime). It’s like camping, but indoors.
Getting up quietly so I didn’t disturb Van Bastolaer’s wife, Yvanne, and their eight-year-old daughter, Rainia, laid out on the living-room floor, I tiptoed to the garage where Miller and Hornbaker were attempting to shoehorn their gear into the car. Things were tight. Photographing giant waves requires all kinds of specialized housings and fittings and waterproof rigs, and none of it is small or light. The job is a jamboree of complications, a never-ending list of highly specialized stuff to buy, maintain, haul around, wield, master, and in general worry about. Rearranging the cases for a fourth time, Miller stood back and shook his head. “We’re grown men dragging hundreds of pounds of equipment all over the world,” he said. “Yeah,” Hornbaker said. “But I’d rather overpack than have to hacksaw a bolt onto something in the middle of the night because I don’t have the one piece of equipment I need.”
During the first twenty years of his career, Hornbaker never stayed for more than three months in any one locale. Instead he embarked on decades of perpetual motion, roving between the northern and southern hemispheres in pursuit of the ultimate waves. Miller was equally peripatetic; one time he had spent almost three days traveling from San Diego to a remote Indonesian island for a shoot, got the images he needed, and went home, which took even longer. Five days later he was asked to return to Indonesia for another assignment. Both men’s passports were gridlocked with visas and stamps and customs carnets. Like most top surf photographers, they had logged plenty of time in Tahiti.
Even though it was only five-thirty a.m., and this was just a prep day, the swell still miles offshore, Hamilton and Van Bastolaer were already long gone. Teahupoo was located forty miles away, on the southern end of the island in the less populated region known as Tahiti Iti (Small Tahiti). Once Miller and Hornbaker’s gear was crammed in, with a microwave-oven-size space carved out for me in the backseat, we set off in that direction too.
As the light came up, first as a faint wash and then fully illuminating the island’s kaleidoscope colors, I began to see the beauty of the place. Tahiti was a riot of flowers and plants and trees bursting out of every available patch of land, birds of paradise squeezing in next to banana trees and orchids; royal palms bursting with coconuts vying for space with avocado trees, red torch ginger, and flamingo flowers. Dogs ran onto the road, which wound past sapphire and emerald lagoons straight from Gauguin paintings. Knife-edged volcanic peaks towered above, so heavily draped in dark green rain forest that they almost looked black.
The island was shaped like a wonky figure eight, with the top circle about three times larger than the bottom one. We traced the edge of Tahiti Nui (Big Tahiti), past tiny stores with French signs and roadside stands selling monoi oil and papayas. Along the way we stopped for baguettes. We passed Taravao, the isthmus that links the two parts of the island, and continued on to Tahiti Iti. Our destination was literally at the end of the road, marked with a painted stone that said “Teahupoo: Mile 0.”
The pavement winked out in front of a narrow bridge that spanned a freshwater river streaming down from the flanks of Taiarapu, an extinct volcano. The river ended in a crescent of black sand beach. “People live on the other side of the bridge, but there’s no electricity or anything,” Miller said. “It’s like stepping into another century.” We turned into the last house at Mile 0, a white, two-story place known as Mommy and Poppy’s. It was a private home that morphed into a big-wave staging ground when conditions warranted, hard at the water’s edge and ideally situated to get out to Teahupoo’s break, about a mile offshore.
It was barely eight a.m., but the yard buzzed with action. There were men and Jet Skis and surfboards everywhere, with roosters scuttling among them. Surf stickers, posters, and autographs plastered the wooden walls of the house and the garage. Mommy, a pocket-size Asian lady in her sixties, emerged from the kitchen in a red apron and baseball cap and placed a skillet of eggs and sausage on a long outdoor table. Several guys in their early twenties sat there, gathered around a laptop that was playing a surf movie, and they reached for the food without breaking their gaze. Commenting on the film, they spoke in their tribal dialect:
“That’s radical! That G-Land?”
“Ahhh, fuck that was heavy. He was so far inside.”
“I was there, that day on Pipe. People were frothing.”
“Brah, I gotta get back to Indo.”
I noticed Hamilton across the yard, puttying a fin onto a surfboard. His movements were brisk and efficient, his arm muscles flexing as he worked. It was an improbable display of vigor from someone running on two hours of sleep. “I have a lot of energy,” he said, when I mentioned this. “Especially when it comes to this stuff. I almost don’t need to sleep.” Every big-wave rider I’d spoken to had stressed the impossibility of getting a good night’s rest before a large swell. Hamilton referred to this tossing and turning as “doing the mahi-mahi flop. Full pan-fried mahi. Up every hour, looking at the alarm clock.”
Behind Hamilton, four Jet Skis sat on trailers at the top of a launch ramp. Van Bastolaer leaned over one of them, suctioning fuel with a length of rubber hose. The smell of gas wafted through the air. “Hey, keep those Frenchmen with their cigarettes away from here!” he yelled, gesturing at a group of photographers who had gathered in a corner of the yard to smoke. Then he laughed, flashing a set of brilliant white teeth. At first glance, you wouldn’t look at Van Bastolaer and think “elite athlete.” Where Hamilton and many of the others had hard lines and sharply defined edges, Van Bastolaer had rounded corners. Even his hair was curly. In the big-wave pantheon there were plenty of poker faces and endzone stares, but Raimana was the kind of man who smiled with his whole body, his brown eyes radiating a deep joy.
Next to Van Bastolaer, a mechanic in a Red Bull T-shirt worked on the engine of a Jet Ski emblazoned with Red Bull logos. Beside him stood a surfer wearing a Red Bull baseball cap. This was Jamie Sterling, a compact, hard-charging twenty-six-year-old from Oahu. He and Hamilton struck up a conversation, and other riders drifted over to join in. There was an aura of nervous excitement, the adrenaline already starting to flow. As Hamilton continued to fine-tune his board, one of the younger surfers announced that he planned to wear a thin wetsuit under his flotation vest—not for warmth but to add another layer between his skin and the reef. “And if you have enough buoyancy,” he reasoned, “you won’t be driven down as hard.”
Hamilton looked up from his work. The force that this wave unloaded made the idea of adding an extra millimeter of neoprene for safety seem absurd, like hoping an umbrella might cushion the impact of a falling anvil. The flotation vests were another story; all of the riders wore them now, and some men wore two. Undoubtedly they had saved many lives. But this practice had begun at Jaws, in the sixty-foot water where a fallen surfer might never make it back to daylight. The reef at Teahupoo, on the other hand, lay only three feet below the surface.
“I’m not as worried about flotation here,” Hamilton said.
“Yeah,” Sterling agreed. “It’s not like Jaws.”
Hamilton nodded, reaching for a screwdriver. “Jaws is all about the hold-down,” he said. “Teahupoo is all about the bounce.”
Sometime during the night the waves arrived. By the time Hamilton and Van Bastolaer left the house at four a.m., surf boomed against the breakwalls, and when they drove up to Mommy and Poppy’s, they saw water washing through the yard. At dawn, Miller, Hornbaker, and I met our boat captain, a tuna fisherman named Eric Labaste. In the marina where we gathered, heavy surges made it hard to load the camera gear. The morning was clear and sunny, with a riffling breeze and a shape-shifting batch of clouds. It looked like a carbon copy of the previous day, except for one thing: this was a completely different ocean. Where the swell hit the barrier reef, a few miles out on the horizon, a thick band of white spray pulsed and flared like a ghostly runaway fire.
We were sharing our boat with three French photographers, all of whom Hornbaker and Miller knew well. On any big swell the shooters were key to the enterprise; as with the proverbial tree falling in the forest, if you ripped down the face of a hundred-foot wave and there was nobody there to take a picture, did you really surf it? There were many responses to that question, of course, but no one really wanted to answer it. In North America alone the surf industry is a $7.5-billion-per-year business, fueled by aspiration. Films, posters, magazines, screensavers—images of all kinds—are the currency of the realm, with giant waves in especially hot demand. So like the riders who lived separate lives until the weather map funneled them to the same destination, to Tahiti or Hawaii or Australia or South Africa or wherever the next wave frontier materialized, the photographers reunited at the scene of the swells. Pushing off from the concrete pier, Labaste took a last sip of his coffee and steered us toward Teahupoo.
I heard it before I saw it, the exploding curtain o
f glass that hammered onto the reef, the lip of a thirty-foot barrel hitting the earth like a liquid apocalypse. From a visual standpoint, Teahupoo was a looker. Rich lapis, deep emerald, pale aquamarine—its waters were the color of jewels, and its heavy white crest glittered in the sun. But even though the wave was gorgeous, it had the personality of a buzz saw. As Teahupoo reared up it drained the water from the reef, turning the impact zone—a lagoon that was mercilessly shallow to begin with—into a barely covered expanse of sharp coral, spiky sea urchins, and volcanic rock. This happened in seconds, in an area maybe three hundred feet long. I stared. I had never seen a wave behave like this one. “Yeah, it’s different,” Miller said, seeing my stunned expression. “Kind of like a shotgun unloading.”
Though I could barely tear my eyes from the wave, I forced myself to pull back and take in my surroundings. It was bizarre, really, how close you could get to the ferocity. Because Teahupoo is created by a swell hitting a protruding knuckle on the barrier reef, there is—theoretically—a safe channel right next to it where the water is deeper. Our boat and a handful of others sat on the shoulder, so near to the edge that when a surfer kicked out of a ride, he had to watch where he landed. Hamilton had once torn his knee apart here when he exited a wave, trying to avoid ramming into one observer’s outboard motor.
Even in this so-called safe zone, however, the most experienced boat captains stayed on their toes. They knew that the channel wasn’t a permanent fixture. It could suddenly vanish if the swell direction shifted slightly, or if an especially huge set came shrieking in. Over the years boats had been hit by the wave, flipped, and destroyed. And one time, Van Bastolaer had been deep in Teahupoo’s barrel and seen a hulking black object whiz by only inches above his head; it was a Jet Ski that had been catapulted over the falls when its driver ventured a little too close to the edge.
