by Susan Casey
A couple of years earlier I had spent a month camping and surfing all over the Baja peninsula with two friends. We slept on dunes overlooking the ocean and had amazing waves to ourselves everywhere we went. When a spooky set of headlights advanced on us one night at a remote campsite, it wasn’t a bandito raid but rather the UC Davis Botany Club looking for a place to light a really big bonfire. The only trouble we ran into during the trip was difficulty finding someone to fix our transmission on Christmas Eve (though eventually we did). We drove with our surfboards plainly visible on the roof, and in anticipation of official demands for petty bribes we carried a small cooler full of Monterey jack cheese, which seasoned Baja surfers had told us was an acceptable substitute for cash.
That era of innocence was over apparently, and now Baja was a snakeball of drugs, guns, corruption, and general lawlessness. Two weeks earlier a body had been hung from a highway overpass only a stone’s throw from the border. Decapitation appeared to be the regional specialty; heads were found in trash cans and car trunks and, in one brazen instance, the middle of a nightclub dance floor. Only the previous week at Rosarita Beach, a mangy resort just south of Tijuana, gunmen had stormed the police station in an attempt to assassinate the police chief, killing one of his bodyguards (you know you’re in Mexico when the police chief needs a bodyguard) and injuring four others. The U.S. State Department warned of “increasing violence,” adding that “criminals, armed with an impressive array of weapons, know there is little chance they will be caught and punished. General public should avoid all travel to the Tijuana and Ensenada region for the next 30 days.”
Getting specific, the San Diego Tribune warned: “Surfers have reason to be especially wary about venturing into Baja California after a spate of armed robberies by paramilitary style criminals.” On at least six occasions since Labor Day, surfers had been yanked out of their cars, tents, or RVs by men in ski masks brandishing semiautomatics; their vehicles and everything they contained, taken. Victims had also been handcuffed, kicked over steep embankments, assaulted, raped, abducted, and shot.
And, well, here we were—about to take a nocturnal drive through the bandito hot zone, three rented trucks packed with state-of-the-art photo equipment for a feature film that Prickett was shooting about a Mexican surfer named Coco Nogales, all of Harro’s gear, plus that of another photographer, Larry Haynes. Also traveling with us were the Australian surfers Jamie Mitchell and James “Billy” Watson, with their quiver of boards. In essence, we were a flag-waving bandito motherlode.
As we prepared to leave, Prickett gathered everyone on the sidewalk. “Okay, so we stay together,” he said. “If they pull one of us over, we all get out. We can give them all our money at once and get out of there fast.” Settled on that plan, we jumped into the trucks. Our first stop, the border crossing, did not inspire confidence when a Mexican official leaned through the window wearing a ski mask. But he waved us on, and we passed through the outskirts of Tijuana, land of cheap tequila, cut-rate prescription drugs, and any other brand of trouble one cared to sample. Our headlights illuminated hard-faced men standing around barbed-wire fences and dusty storefronts, someone lying on the ground, the shadowy silhouette of a uniformed policia on a horse.
At first the night was wide open and starry, but then the same smothering fog that had plagued us in Half Moon Bay began to slink in from the sea, as though it were escorting the swell south. The scenery blurred and we slowed to a crawl, which freaked everyone out, not only because people were tired to the point of hallucination but because at this speed we were surely bandito bait. “No Maltrate Los Señales” (Don’t Mistreat Signs) read a sign that was riddled with bullet holes. At one point we came upon a car parked sideways on the highway as though to block it off, but there was no one inside. Near Salsipuedes, site of a wave that The Surfer’s Journal called “the thickest, meanest point break on the west coast,” we stopped at a mist-ghosted Pemex station manned by an attendant who was missing an eye, and we stocked up on bottled water and granola bars for the boat. By the time we arrived at our hotel, it was three o’clock in the morning.
Should The Shining ever be remade with a Mexican theme, the El Coral Hotel in Ensenada would be perfect for the set. It was cavernous and deserted and our footsteps echoed on saltillo tile. My ground-floor room, located in a wing so isolated that the electricity had to be turned on specifically for me, opened onto a patio ringed with yellow crime scene tape. I was exhausted enough that I might not have noticed except someone had left the sliding-glass doors wide open, and the wind rushed through the room, causing the drapes to billow. Trying to close everything up, I discovered that all the locks had been torn off the doors, leaving splintered holes. By the time I trudged the half mile back to the front desk to switch rooms, moved, discovered that the locks had been torn off the doors in my new room too, and decided I was too tired to care anymore—it was ninety minutes before we had to leave for the harbor.
“The Mexican Coast Guard has closed the harbor,” Prickett said. “The military is standing guard. They’re not letting anyone out.” We stood outside the lobby in the pitch-black predawn, wind gusting and palm leaves tossing. Obviously the swell had arrived.
“So we’re on hold,” I said.
“No, we’re going out.” He looked unconcerned.
“But you just said the harbor was closed. That the soldiers—”
“Yeah. That’s why we’re leaving from somewhere else.”
The gear-loading ritual commenced, the photographers moving methodically, without benefit of fresh, rested brain cells. After thirty-six hours of wave-chasing, I felt cotton-headed and nauseous and like a hand was squeezing my kidneys, but I could hardly complain: Prickett and the others were closing in on sixty hours of sleeplessness, a few catnaps at most, and were preparing to spend another day facing off against waves so intimidating that boats weren’t supposed to be out in them, let alone surfboards. Others had it even tougher. Anyone who needed to tow a Jet Ski here had spent the last twelve hours behind the wheel, driving down the coast from Ghost Tree or Mavericks.
I’d noticed early in this project that big waves and extreme behavior went hand in hand, and I knew, anecdotally anyway, that dropping onto the likes of a sixty-foot face was a sensation so potent that nothing else—sleeping or eating, for instance—could compete for a rider’s attention. I was constantly asking them to translate that experience into words, not only the men I’d witnessed in action but the greats from previous eras.
Ricky Grigg, a champion big-wave rider in the 1960s who went on to become an eminent marine scientist, told me that the risks of riding giant waves were dwarfed by the reward: “Ecstasy beyond words. Mentally, physically, spiritually, it’s the highest place I can imagine being.” Feeling oneself connected to the ocean at the apex of its power, Grigg emphasized, was utterly addictive. “You keep pushing the envelope more and more, and the curiosity and the thrill of it get all tangled together,” he said. “That’s why these guys are so driven.”
Grigg spoke poetically about waves, but the analytical side of his brain was never far behind. He believed that a person drawn to this force was genetically predisposed, with a “savage DNA still remnant in his heart and mind.” This kind of surfer was about as likely to spend his time slumbering when giant waves were on tap as a hunter stalking his prey or a soldier in the middle of a siege. No one could live with this intensity all the time, of course, but when a major swell came along, it was as though a switch got flipped. While the average person who stayed up for three days walking a physical knife-edge would blow a gasket, for someone like Garrett McNamara it was a hit of pure oxygen. “These guys have two personalities,” Grigg explained. “One’s gentle, the other’s a madman.”
Grigg’s friend and contemporary Greg Noll, a larger-than-life legend who rewrote the rules of big-wave surfing in the pre-tow era, described the feeling in more physical terms: “That rush! I can’t explain it,” he said. “When you blow down the side of a wave a
nd the thing’s growling at you and snorting and all that power and fury and you don’t know whether you’re gonna be alive ten seconds from now or not, it’s as heavy an experience as sex! If you surf, you know. And all the rest of you poor sons of bitches, I feel sorry for you.” Far from striving for a balanced lifestyle in pursuit of his sport, Noll espoused whatever extremes it took to get the ride: “I would have gotten myself shot out of an elephant’s ass if it would get me on a bigger wave.”
Hamilton, who was not usually at a loss for words, hadn’t said much about what it was like to ride a seventy-foot wave, though I’d asked him many times. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to tell me, but for him the experience defied analogy. Verbalizing what it was like to ride Jaws, he said, was like “trying to describe a color in words.” Another time I had asked the question he answered without speaking, by just touching his heart. For Hamilton these waves were less a singular experience than a basic need, up there with breathing.
The passion that big-wave surfers feel for their sport can be chalked up to a number of factors. Consider, for instance, the potent cocktail of neuropeptides the body manufactures when faced with high-intensity situations such as falling in love or narrowly escaping disaster. These chemicals, which include endorphins (the substance responsible for “runner’s high”) and oxytocin (known as the “cuddle hormone” for its blissful effects), are natural opiates, biological relatives of heroin and morphine. That is to say, one can easily get hooked. And it’s not like the person who wants to ride a hundred-foot wave is looking for low-grade stimulation to begin with.
Add to this the scarcity of their quarry—surfable giants—and I could understand the level of obsession I was witnessing on this trip. Sleeping away a monster swell? The real madness for a big-wave rider lay not in pushing the limits of his endurance but in missing the chance to do so. As Jamie Mitchell and James “Billy” Watson, the two surfers who’d traveled down with us, loaded their boards into the truck yet again, I could see the excited energy that surfers refer to as “stoke” on their faces and in their movements. They showed no sign of wanting to be anywhere other than exactly where they were, shoving off for Killers from this Mexican Bates Motel. Leaving it in the rearview mirror, we drove away.
The marina smelled like fish, and not in a fresh sushi kind of way. A sad little boardwalk fronted the docks, its scruffy tiendas and nacho shacks shut tight until a more reasonable hour. “Prohibido alimentar a los lobos marinos,” a sign warned, adding helpfully in English: “Prohibited to feed to marine wolves.” Watching the production crew for Prickett’s film organizing a breakfast buffet on our boat, laying out platters of sticky buns and a large frosted cake, I wondered if anyone had told them about the twenty-five-foot swell we’d be encountering. Personally, the only thing I was planning to ingest today was Dramamine.
The Mexican Coast Guard presumably occupied elsewhere, we boarded the fifty-foot cabin cruiser that would take us twelve miles offshore to Todos Santos, a one-square-mile island that served as a perch for a decrepit lighthouse, two rare species of snake, and not much else. The waters around the island, however, were anything but dull. Off its northwestern tip, a craggy underwater canyon funneled the swell energy toward a gauntlet of rocks (every big wave needs its impaling obstacles) at the foot of a cliff, creating a break known as Killers. Tall and pretty, brutal despite its lovely appearance, Killers had dispensed some of the largest waves ridden in North America, faces in the seventy-foot range.
Overlooking the docks, a billboard-size Mexican flag waved lazily in the wind. Our boat steered slowly out of the marina and into a lumpy and disorganized sea, but it was three or four miles before we could feel the rolling, straining energy that signaled a long-period swell. Sean Collins had warned that conditions would peak early; we could only hope that we weren’t too late. (To the surfers’ frustration, it wasn’t unusual for the best waves to arrive in the darkness. During the winter, obviously, there was a fifty-fifty chance of this.) Unlike yesterday, the weather looked promising. The sky cast a silvery shine on the water, and overhead the clouds hung soft and hazy, layered thinly enough to hint at sun.
I sat on a cooler on the back deck and listened to Prickett and Mitchell debate their favorite waves. Oregon’s Nelscott Reef, Mitchell declared, was “super-rippable.” This wasn’t much of a distinction, though, because for Mitchell most waves fell into that category. Like many Australians, he had never met a water sport he didn’t like: along with his expertise as a competitive swimmer, canoeist, standup paddle surfer, big-wave surfer, and tow surfer, he was the eight-time winner of Hawaii’s prestigious Molokai Channel paddle race, a five-hour, thirty-two-mile gruel-athon in which competitors kneeling on sixteen-foot, specially designed surfboards stroked their way between Molokai and Oahu. Blond, rugged, and wildly accomplished at thirty, Mitchell had so much going on that you could almost forgive him a bit of arrogance, but there wasn’t any.
Prickett, like others in the big-wave caravan, had hunted down swells all over the globe. He’d filmed in the jewel-colored lagoons of Tahiti, Fiji, and Indonesia and in the waters off South Africa, murky as a haunted basement. There he had run into a great white shark that he estimated to be twenty feet long: “A VW bus is what it looked like.” Thank God, he thought when he saw it, for the electronic shark-repellent device he wore on his ankle. But the shark kept coming closer, showing no signs of repulsion, so Prickett, getting nervous, glanced down at his ankle for reassurance. The battery light was off.
It was a story he could joke about now—the shark, after all, hadn’t attacked him—but there had been other brushes with peril where things hadn’t worked out so happily in the waves. Like the time at Pipeline when he’d been bashed onto the reef and “stuffed into a cave,” his leg pinned between two rocks. As he struggled to free himself, his left knee was wrenched from its socket, and every ligament shredded. A Jet Ski zoomed to the rescue but before Prickett could break loose he took a five-wave set on the head, all with his kneecap somewhere on the back of his leg. Nonetheless, his favorite place for waves, he claimed, was still Oahu’s north shore.
As we neared Todos Santos, the water perked up and the sky became serious. The pretty pastel light gave way to a cranky gray horizon, partially obscured by clumps of fog. The sea surface, a dull green inshore, deepened to a rich navy blue, dark and luminous at the same time. The boat traced the undulating troughs and peaks of the swell, the type of roller-coaster motion that makes people suddenly lunge for the railings. Brief gusts of an offshore wind blew spray in the air.
At most giant wave breaks, the ideal wind is none at all, though that rarely happens. The second-best scenario is a light offshore wind—breezes pushing directly into the wave’s face, making it stand a little taller. The worst thing, a guaranteed surf destroyer, is an onshore wind coming from behind the break and shoving the water forward. This results in a sloppy crumble, a type of wave that surfers call a mushburger, and along with being aesthetically unpleasing it can also be dangerous. There are several places on a big wave where the rider has a split second to make a critical move; the most important one being the drop, the jump over the peak and onto the face. Botching the drop can result in being swept over the falls, a place nobody wants to be. Where the wave’s lip hits the water, it cleaves open the surface like an ax; to be caught in that spot is effectively to plunge down an elevator shaft. Not to mention that if the lip itself somehow lands on a rider, the result can be anything from a broken neck or femur—both have been known to happen—to death. An unfavorable wind heightens these risks. It means the wave will have an ill-defined peak, an unstable takeoff spot from which to attempt the drop. Imagine a skier trying to get traction in an avalanche, or a long jumper digging his toes into quicksand.
I heard the engines slow and went to the bow to scout our surroundings. The captain maneuvered slowly into the channel, trying to find that tricky balance of good angle + closest position + avoiding disaster. Along with the wave, he had to account for win
d, tide, currents, and other boats. Killers was known to shift direction, sixty-foot waves suddenly rearing up in unexpected places. We chugged into a circle of boats and cut the motor. The captain was excited. “¡Olas grandes!” he yelled, pointing at the break. “Tsunamis!”
Sure enough, there were whitewater explosions in front of us and a dozen tow teams zipping around, but despite the captain’s enthusiasm the waves were disappointing. They were smallish, in the twenty- to thirty-foot range, and from the boat, anyway, they looked crummy. “This is shit!” Prickett said, frowning. “I hope it hasn’t peaked already. Maybe it’s still coming up.” Mitchell, Watson, and Harro voiced optimism that conditions would improve. Wherever there were big waves—or the potential that maybe, later, somehow, somewhere, there would be big waves—I expected to hear an endless stream of weather-related hindsight, conjecture, predictions, and musings. It seemed the men often vocalized what they hoped would come true, as though saying something out loud might nudge it closer to happening, less observation than incantation.
“I think it’s still building. For sure.”
“Hmm, well that was a cleanup set. It’s coming up, all right.”
“What’s with this fucking fog? It’s got to lift.”
“This stuff? This stuff will lift for sure.”
Prickett stood at the stern, hands on hips, surveying the water. “Oh, there’s Snips and Gerr,” he said. This was big-wave argot for the team of Mike Parsons and Brad Gerlach, who had ridden at Ghost Tree the previous day. Former competitors on the professional surfing circuit—archrivals, to be exact—the duo had earned their way into the highest echelons of respect. Parsons and Gerlach were early tow-surfing converts, trading competitions in smaller waves for roaming the world in search of the giants. They were among the first men to ride the Cortes Bank, and they regularly scouted the west coast of North and South America, from Washington clear down to Chile, for new and untrammeled waves. Parsons and Gerlach lived in southern California and had cut their big-wave teeth at the foot of this island. But Todos Santos was home base. If anyone could figure out what the ocean was up to on this odd, mercurial day, it was these two.
