by Susan Casey
“NO ONE is getting off the boat when we’re out there. Is that clear? I am not covered for people getting on and off the boat. One incident and that’s my whole livelihood. This is the most, uh, probably one of the most …This is a high-risk adventure. So we are gonna have an extensive safety speech. I need everybody to LISTEN.”
The captain was a heavyset guy in a survival suit, pale blond with watery blue eyes. He looked like he wished he had never heard of Mavericks and its tow surfers and its photographers and its sponsors and anyone else who wanted to leave the dock in a thirty-foot west swell in blackout fog. Sweat beaded on his forehead as he spoke, though the air was chilling. All twelve of us—his passengers—and both of his deckhands were bundled in ski jackets and heavy weather gear. I wasn’t sure how much we had agreed to pay him to take us out to the wave, but clearly it wasn’t enough.
“When we go up over that swell, we will pivot off the back of the boat. You need to STAY OFF THE FRONT OF THE BOAT. You don’t, you’ll get tossed. And that is not happening today. That is not. Seriously, it is dangerous out there. The wear and tear on my ticker for this kinda stuff …”
The guy next to me, a photographer, leaned over and whispered: “When we hit that breakwater, I’m taking bets on who’s gonna puke.”
The harbor was a wash of gray. Fishing boats bobbed in their slips, their owners having no intention of venturing out in this ugliness. At the docks the water was glassy and still, but that would change in five minutes when we arrived at the harbor mouth. Beyond the long L-shaped breakwater, the Pacific was on a rampage. I tucked myself behind a wooden table, braced on all sides. The engines chugged, and we motored out at a crawl. Everyone sat inside the cabin, trying not to look as panicked as the captain. The most self-possessed passenger, by far, was John John Florence, sitting quietly in the corner, a navy hoodie pulled up over his mop of white-blond hair. He stayed out of the nervous chatter.
“This is sick.”
“Yeah, this is gnarly.”
“I heard it closed out in the channel. Mike got rolled on his Jet Ski, and then they couldn’t even find it. You can’t see shit out there.”
“If we end up in fifty-one-degree water, how long do we have? About fifty minutes? Forty-five?”
“Dude, if you’re in the water, you’re dead.”
“You’ve got to think the captain’s done this before. That he knows what he’s doing.”
“Well, he hasn’t done it like this. At low tide, across the reef, with fifty-foot surf.”
I looked out the window at the raw cement seascape, the fifty-five-foot boat now starting to buck. A loud roaring noise could be heard in the background. It was an unpleasant combination of effects, made worse a second later when we hit the edge of the swell. The boat reared straight up on a wave, then heeled hard to the side. Camera cases and anything else in the cabin that wasn’t strapped down flew into the air. My elbow slammed on the edge of the table. Everyone gasped. We weren’t even at the breakwater yet.
The boat idled in place for a moment, as though gathering its bearings before continuing into the barrage. Waves charged us from all directions. “These aren’t even the breaking waves,” the photographer said. “Wait until you see the breaking waves. We’ll have to negotiate those. But if he can’t see them …”
One of the deckhands stuck his head into the cabin. “Uh, the captain is having some reservations.”
“Ah, no way!” A lanky guy who’d been champing at the bit shied back in his seat. “Fucking tour of the harbor!” he said. “That’s bullshit!”
“Listen,” the deckhand said in a stern tone. He looked as though he would very much like to crush the lanky guy like an empty beer can. “People are coming back in because they’re getting rolled. Is it worth it? Someone drowns—is it worth it? To see a wave?”
“I’m the wrong person to ask,” the lanky guy said, crossing his arms defiantly. “I’m a waterman.”
Broncoing in the chop, the boat made a U-turn and headed back to its slip. “When you can’t see you never know when the big one’s coming,” the captain said, herding us onto the pier with obvious relief. “The amount of liability involved and the risk of the prevailing conditions—it’s too hairball for me.”
I stood on the dock, figuring I’d go back to the Jet Ski launch or maybe get up on the cliff, an observation point from where, if the sky cleared, one would see the wave. Lugging Prickett’s lead-filled camera case, I began to walk down the dock, stopping often to switch hands. Standing at the stern of his boat, a potbellied fisherman who looked a little like Jerry Garcia scowled at me. He had watched our retreat. “Zero visibility,” he said, shaking his head. “Shitty conditions. The ocean’s closed. Get it? Want to kill yourself? Is that what you want? You. Can’t. Go. Out. Don’t you think we would if we could?” He pointed to a boat that was leaving the harbor: “There goes the coast guard.” His voice was smug. Somebody was in trouble and he, the Angry Oracle of the Docks, had predicted it.
At the edge of the parking lot the harbormaster’s office glowed in the flat, gauzy light. I stepped in to see if I could get a map of the jetty and interrupted an emergency meeting. Three uniformed men were hunched over a nautical chart, looking grave. One of them glanced up with a furrowed brow. “We can’t help you right now,” he said briskly. “We lost a boat. Now we’re trying to find the people.”
“I’ve never been run over by waves this big,” Jeff Clark said, tying off his Jet Ski to the launch ramp. “It’s the swell direction. As fast as you can go, it’s gonna go faster. Pretty radical.” Clark wore a fluorescent orange rash guard on top of his flotation vest and wetsuit, a beacon of color in an ocean of gloom. He had returned to shore for a breather, and was surrounded by a local news crew that had been lurking in the socked-in parking lot, hoping for some kind of visual. Their wait was worthwhile: Clark was Mavericks’ resident legend.
Growing up within sight of the wave, he began to surf it in the early 1970s despite its heavy roster of dangers; when he couldn’t convince anyone else to join him, he paddled out alone. On north swells and west swells and weird jumbled-up swells, frontside and backside, going right and going, outrageously, left, under bright skies and dreary cloud canopies, in the fathomless, haunting waters of Half Moon Bay—for fifteen years Jeff Clark was the only man riding Mavericks. In the early 1990s people finally started paying attention to Clark’s entreaties to check out his wave, and by 1994, when Mark Foo jetted over for that fateful swell, Mavericks was no longer a local secret. And the more people learned about the wave’s treacheries, the more astonishing Clark’s years of solo excursions seemed in retrospect. Even now you’d have a hard time finding anyone who liked the idea of spending a single session out there alone. In a sport where respect is the currency, Clark was a zillionaire.
So when I heard him tell the news crew he had just suffered one of his worst wipeouts ever, I was curious to hear more. Ever, for Jeff Clark, was a distinction from within a hefty inventory, thirty-five years of familiarity with Mavericks’ bad moods. He leaned against a concrete piling, recalling what happened. Clark spoke with a laid-back California drawl, his words telling a white-knuckle story while his demeanor signaled that however menacing the situation had been, he could handle it.
At fifty-one, his black hair was tinged with silver, but Clark had the powerful physique of a younger man. His eyes, I noticed, were the same ice blue color as a Siberian husky’s, a dog known for its single-minded intensity. “It’s the nature of this swell,” he explained. “It’s very dangerous. You could do all the right things and still not make it.” The waves, he said, were closing out in a strange way, hooking around at the end of the reef and snapping shut. “It pinches you, like being cut off at the pass. Almost everybody has been caught today.” Clark had been squeezed, had to straighten out on a fifty-footer, unpleasant enough, but when his partner, Brazilian Rodrigo Resende, sped in to get him, Clark’s glove had slipped off the rescue sled during the pickup and then he was out of
time. The next wave in the set, a meaty, nasty affair, not only spun Clark down into the depths but took out Resende and the Jet Ski too.
“It’s like a train hitting you, this explosion,” Clark said, smiling grimly. “And I’m down. It’s so black and violent. I mean you can tell even with your eyes closed, it’s black black. It is so dark. And then it’s not letting me up. And I’m thinking, ‘Well, hold out, hold out,’ but my limbs are trying to be torn off. I finally got flushed to the surface—whoosh—got a breath, and all I could see was another twenty-five feet of whitewater coming. Drilled again.” He shook his head with resignation. “It’s amazing, you know, sometimes you can actually check out of that kind of abuse to your body. It’s like shutting down your computer, logging off. But if you start having two-wave hold-downs, you’re playing with the edge.” He let out a sharp laugh. “As opposed to … playing with the edge.”
Along with his own ordeal, Clark described watching Darryl Virostko, a surfer known as Flea, go over the falls on a wave so massive and so deranged that the entire lineup froze when they saw it, fearing the worst. The wave slammed Virostko down smack in the apex of the pit, where the water was at its most frenzied. The fall did not seem survivable. But amazingly Virostko, one of a tight-knit group of elite riders from nearby Santa Cruz, managed to escape more or less unscathed. It was a bit of leniency from a wave that didn’t usually bestow such things; the blackness of which Clark spoke was far more representative of the realm.
Clark turned and began to pull on his gloves. “Well, I’m gonna jam,” he said, flashing an electric smile. “I’m going back out to get another one.”
Right before Clark came ashore I had scouted the cliff at Pillar Point, where I caught a brief and abstract glimpse of what was unfolding in the ocean; for a moment the fog had partially dropped its guard. I saw enormous washes of whitewater that were hard to place into scale, until a darker speck appeared: a Jet Ski. I felt like I was watching a silent movie through a cataract-clouded lens. Mavericks looked towering and brutal, but the distance and the muffled quality of the view made for shadow ferocity. To feel the swell’s power you had to be down there. But though I didn’t know it as I stood there, wishing I was out on the water, the Angry Oracle had been right: the price of admission today was too high. By midafternoon three people who had ventured into these waves were already dead.
At four-thirty what little light there was in the sky had begun to drain rapidly, northern dusk under a thick cloak. Almost en masse, the riders and photographers returned to the launch. Trailers backed up to the waterline, ready to scoop up the Jet Skis and secure them for the long drive ahead: many of the men planned to travel through the night, chasing the swell as it moved south to Todos Santos, an island twelve miles off the coast of Ensenada, Mexico, to meet the waves at daybreak.
A small crowd had gathered around the ramp, anxious to hear the stories firsthand. There was a sense of relief and triumph and more relief, and while some people seemed wiped out and subdued, others were flying high on remnant adrenaline. McNamara in particular seemed lit from within, wired with energy, his voice raised to a shout. “Gnarliest EVER,” he yelled. “I rode one from about a mile out, I don’t know how, and I couldn’t see anybody for like, at least five hundred yards. And finally, WHOOOOMP!” He laughed maniacally. “Ha ha ha! I love to get pounded!”
Beside me, a smallish guy stood silently amid the hollering and the high fives. Suddenly he turned and said: “I almost died out there today.” His face looked tense. Whatever had gone down in the waves, he needed to talk about it.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I came really close,” he said in a low, morose voice.
“Were you surfing?”
“I was taking a cameraman out.” He shook his head impatiently as though I should know this already. “I lost a Jet Ski and I got caught in a weird place and I took about ten waves in a row on the head. I was stuck over there where they found Mark Foo. I was stuck there, getting pounded, one wave after another after another.” He delivered the skeleton outline of his story with a shrill note of panic. “And the fog was in, so I couldn’t see. I thought I was going out to sea! And seals were popping up next to me! Yeah, I came really, really close.”
A stout man standing on my other side heard this story and leaned in. “Someone did die at Ghost Tree,” he said.
“What?!” I said. “Who? When? Today?”
“A surfer,” he said. “I’m not sure who it is. He drowned.”
“Did he hit the rocks?”
“Yeah, I think so. Sad.”
Looking around at the launch, it was clear that none of the riders here had received this news. Who had died? And how? In the background I heard McNamara’s voice rise above the others’: “Yeah, I put him on a giant wave! It was just so perfect and so big and I watched him ride it and he just killed it like crazy. Two big ole snaps. Fucking gnarly bottom turn!”
“It was scary out there,” Mamala said. “Biggest barrels I’ve seen in a long time. Just tall and mutated.” He drew out the last word for emphasis.
“We’ve never surfed it this big,” McNamara said. “Very rare.”
I saw Prickett standing off to the side, checking something on his camera. He looked spent. “Big black gray muddy water,” he said, describing what he’d seen through the lens. “Dark, dark, dark. But there were moments.” On the way out there, he told me, the Jet Ski had punched through a wave, flipped upside down, and tossed him into the whitewater with all his gear. “It was a big ordeal,” he said. “So we had to get through that.”
“Okay boys, come on, let’s go!” someone yelled. “We’re going right now. We need to get driving!”
“Did you see the wave?” Prickett asked me.
“Sort of,” I said. I told him about the aborted boat ride and my visit to the cliff. “Hey,” I added, “did you hear about what happened—”
“Well, you’ll just have to come down to Todos with us then,” Prickett said before I could finish. “It’s gonna be just as big. We’re on a flight to San Diego at ten.”
Just then my phone vibrated. Sean Collins had left me a voice mail. “Yeah, we had a pretty good day,” he said in his quiet, low-key way. “Not fog but mist. And it got big. Fifty-five feet, probably. The only bummer is a guy died here today. His name is Peter Davi.”
Peter Davi was a surfer from Monterey. He was accomplished in big waves, a well-known and much-liked presence on the northern California coast. A third-generation fisherman whose Sicilian grandfather had worked on the Cannery Row of Steinbeck’s day, Davi was also a regular on Oahu’s north shore, making for Pipeline when the herring weren’t running. In that hard-core arena he earned respect from—and a place among—the locals, a group not known for their easy inclusivity. Like the Hawaiians, Davi appreciated elemental things—the beauty of rocks, for instance, or the way morning light glinted on the ocean.
But along with this sensitivity, at six feet three and 265 pounds, Davi—also like the Hawaiians, and for that matter his Sicilian forebears—could be awfully intimidating if the need arose. Yet no one was strong enough to accomplish the task he set for himself when he had shown up at Ghost Tree this morning: rather than towing, he intended to paddle into the waves. On a swell this powerful, that was not only a futile decision but also, it seems, a fatal one.
Pieced together from riders who encountered Davi on the water, a blurry picture of his last moments emerged. After unsuccessfully trying to paddle into waves on his eight-foot gun, Davi sat on the back of his friend Anthony Ruffo’s Jet Ski and watched the five-story office buildings roll in. Some of the last words anyone heard him say were “I’m forty-five years old and I want one of those fucking waves.” Realizing the only way he was going to get one was by towing in, Davi accepted a ride and surfed what was his final big wave, exiting with a full-face smile. And then he headed in, declining the offer of a lift back to shore. He would get there under his own steam, as he had done countless times before.
But Davi never made it. Somewhere along the way he lost his board, knocked off by the heaving seas, a sneaker wave, or a spasm of whitewater. A spectator glimpsed him swimming near the rocks, but then Davi was swept from sight. Right around that time, Ruffo and his partner, Randy Reyes, had also turned back for shore, motoring in on their Ski. Instead of finding Davi waiting for them, they discovered his body floating near the wharf, facedown in a patch of kelp. Paramedics arrived quickly and tried to revive him, but it was too late. By the time Davi was found he had been dead, they estimated, for twenty minutes.
I soon learned that Davi wasn’t the day’s only casualty. A crab fishing boat called the Good Guys had capsized just outside the harbor mouth—only one hundred yards from where our boat had turned around. The two local fishermen, Benjamin Hannaberg and James Davis, had radioed their intention to come into the harbor, but they never arrived; instead they set off their emergency beacon. The coast guard searched extensively for the men, both in their late fifties, but at the site of Good Guys’ distress call they found only two scraps of the hull. “A twenty-five-foot fiberglass boat—that’s like an eggshell in those conditions,” the harbormaster said later. (A week later Hannaberg’s body would wash up on shore; Davis’s was never found.)
Looking back on the day, Peter Mel, an exceptionally experienced big-wave rider, said the surfers would always remember December 4, “but not for the epic rides, more for the carnage.” The low, lightless ceiling, the sight of his friend Flea upside down in the lip of a monster, the loss of Peter Davi and the two fishermen, all of these were images that no one wanted to linger on. “It was about riding to survive,” Mel said. “It wasn’t about riding to enjoy it. And you could see it on everybody’s faces. It was all about ‘Get me to the channel, I need to get off this wave as soon as possible.’ ”
Like Clark and Washburn, Mel lived nearby and had seen deep into Mavericks’ bag of tricks. Many times the wave had punished him in the fearsome rock-strewn areas known as the Cauldron, the Pit, and the Boneyard. But on this day even Mel had been floored by the wicked vibe in the water. “It looked like the ocean was folding over itself,” he said, describing how the waves rose so sharply that they basically had no backs, while their faces were “like Niagara Falls or something.” His voice was somber. “It was one of those swells,” he said, “that didn’t seem like it was meant to be ridden.”
