by Susan Casey
Still, there were waves on the West Coast that intrigued him, notably the Cortes Bank, an offshore break located one hundred miles out in the Pacific, due west from San Diego. The waves at Cortes were created by an underwater mountain range that rose five thousand feet from the ocean floor to within six feet of the surface, in spots. Many people believed Cortes was the likeliest bet to produce a rideable hundred-foot (or even hundred-fifty-foot) face, although given how exposed the place was, its optimal weather conditions required the wind, ocean, sun, moon, and stars to align. Even then, you weren’t just going surfing at Cortes, you were going on an expedition. Hamilton had also expressed interest in Mavericks, a foreboding wave just thirty miles south of San Francisco. In any case, I doubted that Ghost Tree would be much of a draw. One time I asked him what he thought of the place. “Big waves are all beautiful in their own way,” he said. “But I’ll tell you one thing, it ain’t Pe’ahi.”
After I landed in San Francisco, I called Sean Collins. He was already down in Carmel. “Ghost Tree should be huge,” he said. “It’s a really, really big swell. I think Mavericks is going to be big too, but it might have south wind problems. Considering the weather, Ghost Tree will be cleaner.” He gave me directions to the best vantage point, which happened to be on private property and was thus a closely guarded secret. While we were speaking, another call beeped on my phone. I finished talking to Collins, and then listened to my voice mail. The message was from Mike Prickett, a filmmaker who was flying in from Oahu for the swell, along with a contingent of tow surfers and photographers. They were going to Mavericks, Prickett said, and they had arranged for a boat. If I wanted to watch the action from a wave-side seat, there was plenty of room. It was an easy decision: the promise of getting out on the water trumped Ghost Tree’s better wind forecast. I called Prickett back and accepted his invitation.
“Thirty-two feet at twenty seconds!”
Garrett McNamara, yelling like a stockbroker, twisted around in the passenger seat of my rental truck and thrust his iPhone at Kealii Mamala, his tow partner, sitting in the backseat. Mamala, a striking Hawaiian with a nimbus of curly brown hair, looked at the buoy reading on the screen, and smiled. “Oh, yeah,” he said. A thirty-two-foot swell with a period that long meant sixty- and seventy-foot waves and beyond; it was a deep-reaching blast of power, an emissary sent to deliver the ocean’s most humbling message: today the riders would be playing a role that Hamilton liked to describe as “Ant Man.”
We were ten miles north of Half Moon Bay, a quiet fishing town that was the launch point for Mavericks. The skies enclosed us in a shroud of gray drizzle, turning everything dark despite the fact that it was seven-thirty in the morning. Fog slunk along the edges of the road. Though I couldn’t see it, I knew the ocean was close by and that somewhere beyond the gloomy curtain, the swell was marching toward us. I flicked the windshield wipers on and wished that the word ominous didn’t keep popping into my head. “I think it’s clearing up,” McNamara said hopefully, pointing to a slightly less glowering sliver of sky.
At five o’clock that morning I had gone to the San Francisco airport to meet the night flight from Hawaii. I caught up with Prickett in the baggage claim, where, like all the photographers, he was wrangling heavy cases of gear and still half-asleep. His light brown hair stuck up at the back where it had been plastered against the airplane seat. If you didn’t know he was one of the top ocean cinematographers, you’d take Prickett for one of the surfers. He had the same disheveled cool, a hint of a hell-raising look in his eyes, and a movie star smile. Standing with him was Tony Harrington, an Australian photographer whom I had met in Tahiti. Harro, as he was known, was another celebrated name behind the lens. He specialized in dropping in on the wildest weather—in the mountains as well as the ocean—and his more extreme exploits had been made into a TV series called Storm Hunter. He was a tallish guy with a rugby player’s heft, blond-haired and round-cheeked and friendly as a golden retriever, but when the situation turned intense, so did Harro. I saw Garrett McNamara gathering his boards and went over to say hello. He was wearing a green hoodie and the same intense expression I remembered from Teahupoo. Due to some mix-up, he and his tow partner, Mamala, needed a lift to the wave, so I’d volunteered. It seemed like a small favor. They had spent the previous day paddle-surfing twenty-five-foot faces at Waimea Bay, traveled through the night to get here, and now, on maybe two hours of sleep, they were about to launch themselves into the heart of the magenta blob.
As we drove I asked why they’d chosen Mavericks, given Collins’s recommendation of Ghost Tree. In Tahiti Collins had called the swell down to the hour, so I was somewhat nervous about bucking his advice. On the other hand, I knew that McNamara and Mamala had their own antennas up. They hadn’t flown all night to come to Mavericks because they thought the waves might be better somewhere else.
“Ghost Tree is a shitty wave,” McNamara said. “It’s this big rolling thing and then you end up on the rocks if you screw up. And it’s not like Mavericks’ rocks, where you can escape through a hole. You’re pounding right on the cliff.”
“That’s a wave you don’t want to fuck around with, man,” Mamala agreed. “It’s basically all chop down the face: cha-cha-cha-cha-cha.” He made a noise like a machine gun, like teeth rattling. Mavericks, he added, was his favorite wave, “because of the dangers. When you go to Mavericks you’re like, ‘My God—sharks, cold, this, that.’ And my first time there I got worked. But now I love it.”
If, as the surfers claimed, every big wave has a distinct personality, Mavericks was an assassin. While other waves glimmer in the tropical sun, Mavericks seethes above a black chasm. Perched just north of Monterey Bay’s abyssal canyons, its surface is as impenetrable as one-way glass. The Aleutian swells thunder three thousand miles across the North Pacific, barging past the continental shelf until their progress is rudely halted by a thick rock ledge that juts offshore about a mile from Pillar Point, near Half Moon Bay’s harbor. When it hits this shallower depth, the wave energy rears up, shrieking and screaming, forming the clawed hand that is Mavericks. Around here the water temperatures hover in the low fifties, making everything harder—literally. Cold water has a higher viscosity. It is thicker, like liquid pavement, compounding the brutality of a fall. Frigid temperatures also make it tougher for surfers to relax, to paddle, to hold their breath underwater, to keep their senses from numbing over in general. The year-round uniform at Mavericks is head-to-toe neoprene, including hoods, boots, and gloves, which restrict the riders’ movements and make it harder to feel the wave’s gyrations. “I think of my feet the way other people think of their hands,” Hamilton had told me, explaining how important that was for control. But that kind of sensitivity wasn’t possible when there were five millimeters of rubber between a rider and his board.
If all this weren’t daunting enough, Mavericks was located at the southern end of a region known as the Red Triangle because more attacks by great white sharks had occurred there than anywhere else on earth. Surfers had been bumped, bitten, and killed in nearby waters; sitting or paddling on their boards, clad in their black wetsuits, they resembled nothing so much as seals, the white shark’s main prey. On at least two occasions at Mavericks, surfers had been catapulted into the air on their surfboards when sharks charged them from below. Down by Ghost Tree a rider had disappeared, never to be seen again. Later his board washed up onshore; it was punctured with bite marks that matched the jaws of a twenty-foot shark. But while great whites hadn’t taken the life of any surfer at Mavericks, the wave itself had.
On December 23, 1994, one of Hawaii’s best-known big-wave riders, Mark Foo, had flown over to Mavericks for a swell, made what appeared to be a fairly standard fall on a thirty-foot face, and failed to surface—for an hour. Other riders saw the tumble, during which Foo’s board snapped into three pieces, but in the frenzy of the day nobody registered his absence until it was too late. The surfers were paddling into the waves, not towing, so Foo had no
partner focused on his safety. When he didn’t reappear in the lineup, everyone presumed he had gone back to shore to get another board; it was only when his body was found floating near the harbor that the truth became clear. Afterward people speculated that Foo had hit his head on the bottom and blacked out, or that his leash snagged in the rocks, trapping him underwater. But it was also possible that he drowned in a merciless set-long hold-down, the wave simply refusing to release him.
His death was a tragic validation of Brett Lickle’s theory that every so often a wave came along that was meaner than others, and that fate was part of the equation: Foo was an ace who had surfed many waves far larger than the one that killed him. But he was from another quadrant of the Pacific; uneasy, perhaps, in his full-body wetsuit, jet-lagged from his flight, and facing Mavericks’ wolfish pit for the first—and last—time. Other surfers were unnerved by a saying that Foo had recited so often it became one of his hallmarks: “If you want to ride the ultimate wave, you have to be willing to pay the ultimate price.” Horribly, he did.
Along with the wave itself, Mavericks’ surrounding waters were tricky and shifty and given to evil behavior. During storms in this neighborhood, the ocean’s energy could flare. McNamara and Mamala recounted the story of their friend Shawn Alladio, a water-safety expert who had encountered a series of surreal waves outside Mavericks on November 21, 2001, a day that became known as “Hundred-Foot Wednesday.”
The day had started out imposingly enough, but it intensified dramatically as multiple storms moved in. Patrolling on Jet Skis, Alladio and her colleague Jonathan Cahill spent the morning gathering lost boards, helping stranded surfers, and performing rescues. By early afternoon the conditions had become too nuts for anyone to be out, and even the tow surfers went back to shore. About four hundred yards beyond where Mavericks usually broke, Alladio and Cahill noticed an odd gray bank on the horizon, like a wall of low-lying clouds or a storm front. It was only when the horizon started feathering at the top, white spray spuming in the air, that they realized: This is a wave. Whatever size it was, it dwarfed the sixty- and seventy-footers they’d been dodging all day. There was a split second of terror and confusion and then Alladio motioned desperately to Cahill: they couldn’t outrun the wave, so their only hope was to race straight at it and make it over the top before it broke. They managed that, barely, and were rewarded with a fifty-foot free fall on the backside, dropping into the steep trough. Plunging that far on a half-ton machine was as bone-jarring as jumping out a third-story window. But worse, in front of them, bearing down like hell’s freight train, was another colossal wave. This one was even bigger.
Again they gunned for the peak, squeaking over the top before the crest started its avalanche, and once again they air-dropped into the trough. But they had to keep going; Alladio could see at least three more waves in the set. By the time they had faced down the last one they were miles offshore, the land behind them obscured by a white scrim of spray.
In the waves’ aftermath, Cahill noted to the San Francisco Chronicle later, there was an eerie stillness on the water. Oceanic roadkill—dead fish, torn strands of kelp, and broken bits of reef—swirled around them. “Each time we went up [the faces of the waves] I could see all these fissures or ravines in the surface, and there was some kind of crazy light energy vibrating inside the wave,” Alladio recalled in the same interview. The whole experience sounded outrageous, like a bad dream or a scene from a disaster movie, something that couldn’t possibly have happened in real life. But there were witnesses, and they included veteran Mavericks surfer and documentarian Grant Washburn, who was filming from a nearby cliff when the set broke. Washburn knew these waters inside and out, and he had never seen anything like those waves. He believed they had easily topped one hundred feet.
“The whole hundred-foot-wave thing,” I said to McNamara. “What do you think about it?”
“Ah,” he said, shaking his head. “We don’t have no interest in a hundred-footer.” McNamara had an unusual accent, a mix of California dude and Hawaiian heavy. As he spoke, he drew out certain words and clipped off others. “He’s got kids, I got kids …” He paused so I could take in this mature and cautious stance, and then he delivered the kicker: “Gotta be 120!” He and Mamala roared with laughter.
Outside, things still looked nasty. As we approached Half Moon Bay I turned off the highway and into the Harbor View Inn, a two-story motor lodge painted a sickly pale green. Its red neon “vacancy” sign glowed weakly in the mist. I pulled into what appeared to be a Jet Ski dealership but was, in fact, the motel parking lot. Instantly McNamara and Mamala were out of the truck, circulating among the knot of men gathered there, swapping buoy readings and plans of attack. Judging by the crowd, Mavericks had held its own. Jamie Sterling was here, as were big-wave prodigies Greg Long, Mark Healey, and Nathan Fletcher. I saw Dan and Keith Malloy, two of a celebrated trio of brothers from southern California, and a talented pair of Australians, Jamie Mitchell and James “Billy” Watson. Another Australian star, Ross Clarke-Jones, had flown in from Europe, fresh from chasing that continent’s storms a few days earlier. John John Florence, a fifteen-year-old wunderkind from Oahu, had come, along with his mother, Alexandra, and his younger brothers Nathan and Ivan. (Note to casting directors: the search for the perfect surfing family need go no further.)
“Who tows John John?” I heard someone ask.
“His mother.”
But John John wasn’t here to ride. He didn’t think he was ready for Mavericks quite yet and had come purely to watch and learn. Hearing this, I was impressed. After all, here was a kid whom nine-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater had pointed to as the future of the north shore, who ripped Pipeline at age eight, and who, at fourteen, had competed in the Triple Crown, one of the sport’s most elite contests. In tow surfing there was such a surplus of stories about ill-prepared bumblers getting flung onto giant waves that when someone actually took a smart approach, their actions stood out in sharp relief.
Prickett and Harro arrived and began to unload their gear into a motel room. I circulated in the parking lot, listening to the harbor foghorn’s baleful blare, and to conversations that played like endless loops, everyone trying to figure out the day, the wave, the best move, the next move. Nobody knew anything for sure, squinting into the dull light at the unseeable ocean. The Waves of the Gods could be out there, but until the fog lifted it was a closed set. Charging down a seventy-foot face was dangerous enough when you could see it; when you couldn’t, it would be safer to drive blindfolded down Highway 1. And Mavericks, they all knew, would be at its craftiest on a west swell. Its currents could change direction, running north rather than south, working against the surfer as he tried to outrun the lip, and then if he fell, dragging him deeper into the impact zone. West swells also made the waves thicker, so when they hit the reef they jacked up like an ambush, tripling and quadrupling in size.
“The fog’s gonna lift. In the next hour.”
“How long’s the drive down to Ghost Tree? Three hours?”
“If the fog doesn’t lift, we’re gonna go down there. In the next hour we’ll make the call.”
“Well, hopefully this fog’s gonna …”
“What we need here is a bit of northwest wind. Clear this shit right out.”
“At some point the fog has to lift. Um, doesn’t it?”
When the fog was still hunkered down at noon, the riders’ agitation levels spiraled. Reports of sunny, sixty-foot Ghost Tree sent two carloads back out on the road, pointing themselves south and hoping some of those waves and a whiff of daylight would still be there upon arrival. Garrett McNamara brushed past the crowd, wearing his wetsuit. Tired of the curbside guessing, he was headed across the road to Mavericks’ Jet Ski launch. “I’m gonna go out and take a look,” he said. John John, also suited up, followed him.
Prickett emerged from the motel. “Everyone’s getting into full panic froth mode,” he said. “They’re afraid they might get blanked.
But we are going out.” The camera cases were ready to load onto the boat; we’d wait for McNamara’s scouting report and then we’d leave. Prickett, I’d noticed, had the admirable habit of laughing off stress, even as he reckoned with it. Despite his determination to go out in the ornery conditions, he was well aware of how treacherous Mavericks could be. “I was here a couple years ago on a big day,” he told me. “I almost died because I got washed through the rocks. I was swimming [shooting from the water] and the next thing I knew these waves were on me. I got mowed.” He exhaled, remembering. “So we’re gonna charge it, but we’ll just take a moment to … check. We’ll hear what Garrett has to say.”
“Hey Prickett, your phone is ringing,” someone yelled from the room.
He turned to go back inside, shooting a quick glance at the sky. “Is it me, or is it getting lighter?”
Twenty minutes later McNamara returned, storming through the parking lot, his eyes twice their normal size. “GIGANTIC!” he yelled to the people milling around. “You gotta get out there. ’Cause some guys ain’t gonna want it pretty soon.” The place went into high gear, everyone suddenly preparing to leave. It was, however, still foggy.
Prickett leaned out of his door and motioned for me to come over. “Our boat captain’s kind of freaking out,” he said. “He doesn’t want to do it.” He shook his head. “That guy was sketchy from the start. He’s a worrier: Yap yap yap yap yap.” He imitated a frantic chihuahua.
I stared at him. “Can we get another boat?”
“Yeah.” Another captain had stepped up, he explained, but wouldn’t allow photographers to jump on and off the vessel once we were out there. For Prickett, this wouldn’t do; he needed to move around on the water. Therefore he would ride out on a Jet Ski instead. I would carry the extra film gear on board the boat and pass it over the side when required. It was a less-than-perfect plan, but still it was a plan. We headed for the launch.
