The Wave

by Susan Casey

  In general, I wondered, did they agree with Penny Holliday that these exceptional waves—in the ninety-foot range and beyond—were more common than people realized?

  “Okay,” Challenor said in a brisk voice, as if we were finally getting down to business. He hunched over in his chair, nodded soberly, and crossed his arms. “That’s a good question. Yes, I do. There are a lot of high sea states. You don’t hear about them, because people don’t go out into them. Very sensibly.” Adding to the waves’ elusiveness, the instruments deployed at sea to measure the giants were usually pulverized in the line of duty. Oil platforms took some heavy abuse that could yield clues to maximum wave heights, but the oil companies tended not to report it. Challenor, who began his career as a wave statistician working on North Sea rigs, had experienced this firsthand. “I would ask them if there had been any damage, you know, trying to get some feel for it. And they’d never tell you. But if you looked in the industry papers, and at the insurance claims … things were getting smashed off.” He chuckled at the memory. “There was an awful lot of commercial secrecy back then. That’s changing.”

  For wave scientists, these were bullish times. “In the last few years studying waves has suddenly become fashionable,” Challenor said, looking bemused. “Used to be we were considered quite odd.”

  “Yes,” Gommenginger agreed. “Until two years ago we were laughed at because we did waves.” The ability to measure the ocean from space had attracted interest, she thought, and that new information had increased demand for improved climate models and forecasts. “It’s a combination of factors all coming together.”

  “And this whole climate change thing,” Challenor added in a serious tone. “My betting is that the waves will get worse. But it will vary from year to year. It’s not a simple relationship.” An atmospheric pattern known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) was predicted to rise, he noted, heralding stormier days ahead: “The waves are driven by this.” (From 1963 to 1993 a strong NAO increased wave heights in that ocean by 25 percent.) Going forward, if the seas responded the way many scientists feared they would, Challenor said, “we do have to do something about ships and oil rigs. Topping off dikes. Coastal erosions.”

  “There are still fundamental things we don’t understand,” he added, pointing out that a certain kind of freak wave—a mutant that was three or four times taller than its surrounding seas, without any obvious cause—still could not be explained by science: “We don’t have the math.” It was all very well to make freak waves pop out of a laboratory tank, “but what happens in the real world where everything is random and messy?” He stood and turned to the whiteboard. With a red marker he sketched a diagram of a giant wave spiking out of a much smaller group. “We don’t have that random messy theory for nonlinear waves. At all. We don’t even have the start of a theory!” He put down the marker. “People have been working very actively on this for the past fifty years at least.”

  “What is it we’re not understanding?” I asked.

  “We don’t know!” Gommenginger said. The two scientists laughed.

  “My suspicion is the nonlinear part,” Challenor said, his voice revving faster. “Which is what the real waves out there are! You don’t just get one wave interacting with another wave, which would be hard enough. There are three-way interactions—and I suspect there are four- and five-way interactions. Bits of wind, odd waves coming in from other directions, things bumping into it … So you’ve got this whole messy random field that’s just talking to each other in this horrible way that we don’t understand.”

  “We might need a different tack,” Gommenginger said. “Someone from a completely different discipline to come.”

  “Maybe some other area of physics,” Challenor agreed.

  Gommenginger smiled. “But as we said, until a few years ago there wasn’t much interest in waves at all. We’re just coming up.” She looked around at the room, a colonnade of papers, books, and computer printouts stacked on every available surface. “Watch this space.”

  Andy Louch sat in his office on NOC’s ground floor, overlooking the research ships and the commercial port beyond. Hefty binoculars stood propped against the window, alongside a satellite phone. Maps and boat pictures lined the walls. Louch was solidly built, with fine chestnut hair and a broad, friendly face. A veteran seaman for twenty-seven years, the former captain of the Discovery, and now the center’s operations manager, he knew the perilous shipping landscape inside and out. Louch logged countless hours in the North Atlantic in his day; he had traversed the Southern Ocean off Antarctica, thousands of miles from land, with only “growlies,” piano-size slabs of ice, to look at while the lunatic winds and the bunker swells rolled by. He understood the wave misbehavior Avery and Holliday had faced; he too had witnessed the angriest seas with their hundred-foot soldiers, the kind of immemorial fury that inspired author (and former ship officer) Joseph Conrad to write, “If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a storm.”

  Even so, Louch lacked the slightest hint of swagger. His descriptions were factual, understated. His voice was so calm that listening to him describe the Discovery’s ordeal was almost a soothing experience. “That cruise was exceptional,” he said. “It really was. They just had so much bad weather.”

  Getting caught out in a hoary North Atlantic storm is nobody’s idea of fun, but Louch maintained that with proper safety procedures—as demonstrated by Captain Avery—ships could hold their own. The trick was not to get impatient, not to budge from that hove-to position. “We’ve always been very pragmatic about that,” he said. “You just sit it out. It’s too rough to do any science anyway. The ship’s moving around quite violently, it’s fairly uncomfortable, but you’re relatively safe.” He gave a half shrug and grinned. “And yeah, okay, it can be a bit worrying at times. You see the big waves coming toward the ship and everything else.”

  In general, Louch emphasized, the ships that ran into problems were those that decided to press on during a storm. One advantage of a research cruise was that it wasn’t on a tight timetable, where millions of dollars would be lost if the ship was delayed. “For a captain on a commercial ship, the pressure is enormous,” he said. “Obviously, you want to be in Quebec, or wherever, on whatever day it is you’ve got to be there. But you also don’t want to burn too much fuel, and you don’t want to damage the ship or, primarily, the cargo.” He gestured toward the port. “Whatever you do, you don’t want to lose your batch of expensive cars.”

  “The cars fall off?” I’d heard stories about thousands of tennis sneakers and rubber toys bobbing around out there after toppling from ships, but somehow I hadn’t imagined a mass graveyard of Porsches.

  “Oh, absolutely. It’s not uncommon.”

  Despite the obvious terrors of hundred-foot waves, Louch maintained that some of the fiercest conditions involved stretches of shorter, choppier waves, in places like the Baltic Sea. “You might only have five- to ten-meter seas but the period is every ten seconds, so it’s constantly battering, really quite vicious,” he said. “It’s easy to underestimate them.”

  In every corner of every ocean there were hazards that demanded more precaution, an extra dollop of respect. In the Southern Ocean, it was the isolation—“If you do have a problem you’ve got no one to call on”—along with floating ice, an ever-present concern. “The rule of thumb for ice, basically, is that bergs the size of a house and upward are not a problem,” Louch said. “You can pick those up on radar. The smaller bits are more dangerous. It’s like hitting solid rock.” In the North Atlantic it was the potential for extreme wave heights: “If you get a bad wave it can actually roll you over. Turn you turtle.” Any captain who made the mistake of pointing his stern into a big swell would find little mercy.

  “The bottom line is that a ship is a big steel box,” Louch said. “As long as you keep the air inside it—you keep your hatches secured and battened down and your doors shut, you’re okay, generally. It’s when the
weather is so severe that you actually break things—knock the hatch covers off or get fractures in steelwork or have structural failure …” He left his sentence unfinished.

  There was one storm from decades past that seemed to haunt Louch, “a big, midwinter Atlantic depression” that had threatened a research ship he was commanding, the Shackleton. “We sailed out of Gibraltar,” he said, “to do some work on the mid-Atlantic ridge. Put some oceanographic moorings down.” Even then, back in 1978, the weather radar was able to pick up a storm of this size. “But sometimes you can’t get out of the way. It may be four, five hundred miles across.” Like the Discovery, there was only one thing the Shackleton could do: brace itself. “We had three, four days when we were stuck out there,” Louch said. “But there was another ship sank, only two hundred miles from us.” A stricken look came over his face. “A big containership. She was ten times bigger than we were. We never knew what happened to her, but I assume she was trying to push along, probably doing seven or eight knots, and really crashing into the waves.” He shook his head sadly. “They lost her with all hands. We never heard any distress signal. We couldn’t get near to where her last position was. The weather was too bad for us to even head two hundred miles to get to her.”

  It was the kind of story that didn’t go away, especially if you’d been in those shoes yourself, scared in the dark, powerless in the waves, overwhelmed by the screaming wind and the ceaseless pitching and rolling. “What was the ship’s name?” I asked, almost as an afterthought.

  “She was the München.”

  I stared at him, remembering the nightmarish things I’d read about that vessel’s demise. The desperate search. The empty lifeboat, drifting. The torn and twisted metal that spoke of forces beyond comprehension. “Something extraordinary” had destroyed the ship: that verdict had haunted me too. With Louch’s words freshly stamped on my imagination, I found it unsettling to leave the building and see the crowded docks, the autumn-colored city of containers, ocher and rust and dull blood red. The containers bore the names of faraway ports as well as the companies that plied them—Maersk and Hyundai and Hapag Lloyd—the modern world sharing space with the ghosts of the München, the Titanic, and the countless other ships that left from this place, turned into the waves, and never came back.

  TOW-IN SURFERS BRETT LICKLE AND LAIRD HAMILTON WERE CATCHING SOME OF THE BIGGEST WAVES EVER RIDDEN MONDAY … HISTORY WAS IN THE MAKING. AND THAT’S WHEN THINGS WENT WRONG.

  Honolulu Star-Bulletin, December 6, 2007

  HAIKU, MAUI

  It was completely unforecast,” Hamilton said, taking a seat at the picnic table outside his garage. He set down two cups of espresso and slid one over to me, a little midafternoon jolt. “I went and looked at Pe’ahi first thing—and I could tell that the angle was shitty. Jaws doesn’t like a north swell. That’s when we made the call to go to Sprecks.” He looked at Brett Lickle, sitting across from him. “Egypt,” Lickle said, remembering. Lickle took off his baseball cap and pushed his hair back. His pale blue eyes, I noticed, had taken on a wary, haunted look. From what I was hearing, there was very good reason for that.

  As it happened, the early December storm hadn’t bypassed this island at all. In fact, though the storm’s waves had been impressive at Mavericks and Ghost Tree and Todos Santos, the true measure of its power hadn’t been felt on the far side of the Pacific—it had been unleashed eight miles from where we were sitting. On December 3, not only did the swell rampage over Maui, it hit here hardest of all. When it did, Hamilton and Lickle had been squarely in its crosshairs. I could get only the basics of the story out of Hamilton by phone, so I’d returned to Maui to fill in the details. That day he and Lickle had experienced the closest call of their careers.

  “It wasn’t real big in the morning,” Hamilton recalled. “And I don’t remember it as being very stormy. It was nice, actually.”

  “Nobody had any idea,” Lickle said.

  “It got more and more ominous as the day went on,” Hamilton continued, “as the front came in with the surf. As the surf grew it became dark. The clouds got thicker and denser. And denser. And darker.”

  At nine-thirty that morning the pair had launched from Ilima Kalama’s place (Dave Kalama’s father) on Baldwin Beach. Dave himself was out with a torn calf muscle, hobbling around in a leg brace. Nothing dramatic was expected, so no photographers had been called to the scene. It was simply an average tow day, better than nothing. As Hamilton and Lickle motored out toward Spreckelsville, they encountered only one other tow team, their friends Sierra Emory and John Denny.

  Emory, a world-cup windsurfer and big-wave prodigy, lived next door to Hamilton. He too had been on the scene at Jaws during the early experimental days. Denny was a local, and he often towed with Lickle. The four men were surprised to find themselves alone on what looked like a solid forty-foot day, but they chalked it up to the fact that nothing had been broadcast; there had been no alerts on Surfline or any of the other forecasting sites. Also, the swell’s unusual direction favored those who knew the idiosyncrasies of Maui’s outer reefs.

  “And at that point you had no clue?” I said.

  “Did I know what was coming in the afternoon?” Hamilton said, shaking his head. “No way. Had I known I would have gone straight home and rested to get ready. I wouldn’t have been out using energy.”

  For the first two hours he and Lickle traded off driving and surfing. Although he’d felt sick in the morning and was less than enthusiastic about being out there, Lickle rode a few waves and began to perk up. “Then all of a sudden it started building,” Hamilton said.

  “It just kept coming up,” Lickle added, in an emphatic tone. “It got bigger and bigger and bigger.”

  The waves were growing so radically that they sped back to shore to change their equipment. “I needed a different board,” Hamilton said. “I wanted my gun.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice had lowered an octave: “Then when we got back out there, we were like, ‘Ohhhh, shit.’ ”

  The phone rang, and with that Hamilton tipped back the last of his espresso and went into the garage to answer it. Lickle and I stayed outside. A few minutes later we were joined by Teddy Casil, who drove up on the Mule, one of Hamilton’s beat-up off-road Jeeps. Speedy and Buster leaped from the backseat and ran to us with the joyous, pogo-stick energy that only dogs possess. Herded up the hill by Casil, Ginger and Marianne, all six hundred pounds of them, ambled over the ridge and plunked themselves down in a mound of red mud where they promptly fell asleep, side by side.

  It was a gusty, sunny Wednesday, the wind having blown the surf to chop. When there were no waves there was a need to talk about waves, and as Hamilton continued working in the garage and the afternoon dwindled and nature’s alchemy turned the light over the pineapple fields to gold, the picnic table filled up. Emory, sweat-encrusted from a day of landscaping, came over from next door. He was a friendly, scruffily handsome guy, dark haired and brown eyed, with the laid-back calm of someone who’d spent his entire life in Hawaii.

  On Emory’s heels, Don Shearer pulled up in his four-ton truck. Shearer was a helicopter pilot of such renown that a six-part TV series and a BBC documentary had been made about his exploits. For twenty-five years and counting he had rescued stranded hikers from the Hawaiian backcountry wilds, plucked people out of flash floods and riptides and gulleys. He’d recovered more than eighty bodies, victims of drownings, suicides, shark attacks, plane crashes, boat accidents, all manner of random mishaps and tragedies. From the cockpit of his canary yellow MD-500 helicopter (which, terrifyingly to a civilian, has no doors), Shearer had eradicated major swaths of Hawaii’s marijuana crop and dumped buckets of water on raging fires. On the outsize days at Jaws he always flew safety, hovering low over the water to give the cameramen an ideal vantage point and poised to lower a medevac sling, should it come to that (and it usually did).

  Shearer sat down and loosened his heavy work boots, reaching to take an icy Coors Light from C
asil. Powerfully built with a shaved head and a no-bullshit commando look in his eyes, Shearer could be intimidating—until he smiled or talked sweetly about how crazy he was for his wife, Donna, or called you bruddah, which he eventually did to everyone he liked.

  I had barely started in with my questions about December 3 but I knew that the full story would come to light only over time. Lickle was clearly still shell-shocked, and Hamilton was always monosyllabic when it came to his own feats. But I was heartened by Emory’s appearance at the picnic table, knowing that on December 3 he’d been out at Egypt too. Just as I was about to steer the conversation back to that day, Shearer did it for me: “Let’s see it, bruddah,” he said to Lickle. “How’s the wound?”

  Lickle leaned over and hoisted his left leg to reveal an angry red railroad track that zippered down the back, clear from his knee to his heel. The scar was an inch thick, still swollen, peppered with divots from where fifty-eight medical staples had gone in and then—two days later—come out again due to staph and strep infections that had threatened to cost Lickle his entire limb. He’d then spent a week in the hospital, pumped full of antibiotics with his leg flayed open so it could be properly cleaned out before being stapled up again. As far as gnarly scars went, this one was a Hall of Famer. But when I looked at it, I didn’t think of how bad it must have hurt or what a drag it was or feel sorry for Lickle. All I could think about was how lucky he was to have survived the wave that caused it.

  By the time Hamilton retrieved his big-wave gun and he and Lickle made it back to Egypt for their second session, conditions had amplified drastically. It took them thirty minutes to drive the Jet Ski a mile and a half, jockeying with forty-foot waves breaking across the inner reefs in a solid wall. A boom of dark clouds had lowered and the air was saturated with salt and drizzle. Hamilton described it as the “worst visibility I’ve ever seen on Maui.”