by Susan Casey
Lickle nodded. “I call it eighty because I like to not, you know, stir people up, but it was fifty-foot Hawaiian.” He clarified: “There were hundred-foot waves rolling through that place.”
Shearer stood up and held out his arm, covered in goose bumps. “Look, brah: chicken skin.” He sat down again, and reached for his beer. “All I know is what I saw.”
At Egypt, here was what greeted his eyes next: Hamilton, his left knee and shin swollen twice the size of his right, had picked up his board and was reaching for the tow rope that Emory had tossed into the water. “I gotta get one more,” he explained. Bailing off a wave and almost losing his partner was, in other words, not the way Hamilton intended to finish out December 3: “I can’t leave here whipped.” Shearer, then, found himself solo on the other Ski. Even for a guy whose résumé includes flying into a live volcano to save the people aboard a downed sightseeing chopper from perishing in a caldera of toxic fumes and molten lava—despite keeping his cool in situations like that as a matter of course—looking at Egypt’s waves, Shearer was scared. “But I said, ‘I’ll be fine, brah. I’ll just stay way outside.’ ”
Desperate not to get caught inside the breaking giants but not altogether sure where the giants were breaking, Shearer, who had operated a Jet Ski all of three times before this, proceeded on high alert, driving up forty-degree shoulders as the waves were still building. It was the safest thing to do, if safe was a word that could possibly be applied to any part of the situation. But by staying so far on the shoulder, Shearer realized, he had no chance of actually watching Hamilton ride a wave. Loosening the death grip he had on the wheel, Shearer gathered his courage: “I told myself, ‘I know I can do this. I know where to be. I know I can do this.’ ” After a few rounds of incantations, he caught sight of Emory towing Hamilton onto a second wave—and he began to follow them. “I was on Sierra’s far right,” Shearer said, “and he was going for it. I had a side view and a quartering left view of the wave; I could see to the back and I could see the reef in front. I watched Laird release the rope and then I saw him come down this wave …” His voice trailed off and he focused his eyes on the pineapple fields, fighting back emotion.
After a moment he inhaled briskly and continued. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. The whole reef drained! And the energy that the wave had taken to jack itself up created this trough. It was like … the bottom of the wave was ten feet below sea level! And Laird’s on the face and the reef is drained off and there’s this THING behind him. And I saw it! I saw it. I saw the Big Mother.”
I stayed in Maui, digesting what I had learned. By this time in my reporting I’d been spitting distance from sixty- and seventy-foot faces, and Teahupoo’s grinding barrel, but now I understood that the waves on December 3 had been something altogether different. As the story came into focus, I felt overwhelmed. I wanted to be able to envision the day’s sweeping vistas and tiniest details, down to what the air smelled like. Past experiences had taught me that strange energies can arise in the bull’s-eye center of a storm. Ions zip around, frantically changing polarities, and when the barometer plunges, that pressure change affects the water in potent ways. Memorable violence can spring up in a hurry.
One August at my family’s summer cottage in Canada, my father and I had been caught out on the lake when a tornado descended. I was swimming from one side of the lake to the other. He was driving shotgun to make sure I didn’t meet up with another boat’s propeller. His golden retriever, Bear, surveyed the scene with concern, paws draped over the gunwale. When I’d dived in an hour earlier, the water had been agitated and choppy, its green-black depths illuminated by flashes of sun that poked through the clouds. The afternoon was pretty, kind of lively. In minutes all of that changed. It was as though a great vacuum had come along and sucked the light and breath out of the water and sky. Everything became dark and still. “Get in the boat!” my father shouted, and as he did, a long low breeze swept the lake’s surface like a chill along its spine. The dock was only four hundred yards away, so instead of climbing into the boat I sprinted for land. As the tornado closed in, the waves rose and I became aware of a smell, an odd, moist, chemical scent borne on a current of static electricity. Out of fear I’d been swimming with my eyes shut, but for some reason I opened them as I neared the ladder.
Through my goggles I caught the stealth silhouette of a loon streaking below me. The water was black and the loon was black, but tiny air bubbles streamed off its wings so I could make out its shape and that of a baby riding along on its back, and as they passed beneath me the baby loon twisted its long neck and looked up with glittering red eyes. If I wasn’t rattled then, I was ten minutes later inside the cottage when the tornado hit, uprooting fifty-foot pines, shattering windows, tearing off shingles, flicking cars off the roads, downing power lines, reminding everyone of their essential flimsiness. The electricity stayed out for a week. But despite all the damage what I remembered most was the storm’s eerie vibe—an observation echoed in the stories of December 3—and how an average day had suddenly turned into something truly malevolent.
Later that week Jaws broke. The waves were twenty and thirty feet tall, too small for towing but a challenge for standup paddle surfing, so Hamilton went out, taking Ekolu Kalama with him. It was an evening session. Teddy Casil and I drove to the cliff to watch, the Mule bumping over red dirt paths through silver-green fields. The air was soft, no crisp edges. Clouds lined the horizon, lavender, peach, cornflower, and gold, and the ocean gleamed a six-dimensional navy blue, whitewater spilling to the cliff as the waves broke. Offshore, Jaws’ crest flashed like an enormous smile. The only thing missing from the scene, I thought, was a pod of frolicking dolphins.
We pulled up to the lookout next to Lickle’s golf cart, red with orange flames emblazoned on its flanks. Lickle stood at the cliff brandishing a two-way radio, deep in conversation with Emory. A handful of spectators bunched along the edge; one guy was setting up some camera gear. I walked over to Lickle and Emory, catching the tail end of something Lickle was expressing in a vehement voice: “ … because I’ll never BE there again. I’m not going to be out there on the next Day of Days. I am not. I have no desire whatsoever.”
I’d heard talk of this, that Lickle’s accident had effectively retired him, and I’d wondered if it was true, or even possible, given that riding giant waves seemed to be more of a calling than a choice. “Really?” I asked, wedging myself into the conversation. “That’s it? You’re done?”
“For that, yeah,” Lickle said, and then added: “I am not over riding. I’m just over IT. I’m over the quest for biggest friggin’ waves that man can ride.” He paused for a second, his eyes scanning the lineup at Jaws. “Because where does it stop? Do I need to be the guy who’s towing Laird into Cortes Bank because they’ve got a hundred-twenty-foot swell coming? No.”
“Well, you want to surf a wave,” Emory said. “Not just survive it.”
“That explains where I am,” Lickle said. “Survival takes all the fun out of it—unless you’re Larry.” He smiled. “Of course, there’s a point where he’s surviving too. We were at a whole other level that day—the level where even Laird gets scared, you know what I mean? So all of a sudden the things you take for granted from him, you can’t take for granted anymore. At eighty feet he’s starting to feel the same emotional pressures we feel at forty.” He turned and spoke into the radio: “Okay, two behind this one, Laird.” (Hamilton would hear him, even out in the waves, through the waterproof radio he kept clipped to his surf trunks. With no Jet Skis accompanying him, the radios were a safety measure more than anything, but it didn’t hurt to take advantage of Lickle’s hundred-mile view either, as the swell pumped across the horizon.) I watched the incoming set, trying to figure out how Lickle was calling it, wondering if I could discern why wave number three would be the most desirable. Maybe my wave-reading skills were improving: I thought I could pick out one shadow that was slightly more pronounced than the oth
ers.
I fixed my binoculars on the wave. Paddling in from the side, Hamilton and Kalama showed up as miniature silhouettes in the golden light. Jaws loomed in front of them and then Hamilton began to paddle furiously, leaning forward and digging in the blade with everything he had. Beneath his feet the ocean rose until the wave was ready to break and then Hamilton dropped onto the face, touching his paddle lightly to the surface to make minute balance adjustments. The wave arched above him, but just before the lip closed Hamilton shot out, flirting with being swept into the whitewater but managing to stay just ahead of it.
“Oh, he’s running the rocks,” Lickle said with pride in his voice, watching Hamilton make for the jagged boulders jutting up from the water, weaving through them all the way to the inside. Lickle turned to me. “Just so you know, that was very dangerous.”
“I’m sure after December third it doesn’t feel that way,” I said.
“Listen,” Lickle said. “One of the worst hold-downs I’ve ever seen here was on a ten-foot day. It’s like, when you drop your guard and you think, ‘Ah, this one’s not that big,’ or you act defiant …”
He clicked on the radio: “Come back, nice waves, Laird.” Out on the skyline the whole ocean seemed to be undulating. Lickle continued: “Plus, he’s wearing a leash and no vest. Fall, and you’re gonna do some time. If I wasn’t wearing a vest during my ordeal I wouldn’t be alive right now.”
“Telling war stories? Ninety feet and glassy is what I heard.” The photographer, a well-known local named Erik Aeder, had walked over to join us. Though the Maui papers had briefly covered the incident, everyone was curious to know more. Aeder shot a glance at Lickle’s scar.
“It doesn’t get any bigger or any better, I can promise you that,” Lickle replied.
“That was another one of your nine lives,” I said, trying to be light about it.
“And I’ve got seven or eight of ’em already used up,” Lickle said. “Every time it happens I just go, ‘Wow, man, someone loves me. The Big Guy loves me.’ ” He smiled. “I’m baffled that God loves me to the level that he does.”
“You’ve got work to do here, obviously.”
“I know that.” Lickle reached down and picked up a plastic bottle that someone had thrown in the dirt. He tossed it into the back of his golf cart. “For that board to have hit me the way it did and not killed me, that was destiny. There’s something I’m supposed to do. I don’t know what it is yet, but there’s a reason I’m still here. And that’s a cool feeling.”
“What I still can’t believe,” Casil said, “is that you could hold your breath for that long.”
“I can’t.” Lickle shook his head. “That’s the whole point. You can do a lot of things you don’t know you can do. Once you’re in survival mode there’s no skill. It’s instinctual. And we all have that.”
“A lifetime of preparation doesn’t hurt though,” I said.
“Yeah, but you know, I smoke pot, and I’m not a breath-holding fanatic or anything,” Lickle said, referring to the training that some big-wave surfers did to increase their lung capacity. (Hard-core practitioners run underwater for minutes at a time carrying twenty-pound rocks.) “But I do know there are breathing thresholds you can go through. You hold your breath and you hold it and then all of a sudden you’ll feel this tensing, this panicking, and then it releases. And then you’ll have a whole other period before the next panic. On the first wave I went through about three or four of them. You can get five if you’re lucky.”
“What I still can’t believe is that you and Laird went back out.” I aimed the statement at Emory.
“Yeahhhh,” Emory said, drawing the word out slowly. “I went back out to support them. It was better we had two Skis out there. I didn’t even want to catch any waves at that point. It was a freaky feeling. It was big and scary and I didn’t need any of it. And it had gotten even bigger! I’d already caught the biggest wave I’ve ever been on, and I’m like, ‘No thanks, that’s good. I’m still alive.’ Having Don out there on the second Ski and no one around … It just didn’t feel safe. That left break was over hundred-foot faces. No question.”
Lickle nodded in an exaggerated way, as if to say, No shit. “I couldn’t believe Laird put Don on the Ski,” he said. “Because you have to ask anyone who’s been out there: Can you take it when it goes down? You are in the middle of the friggin’ ocean. And you have nothing. You are at the mercy.” Noting the darkening sky, he gave the surfers a heads-up: “Ten-four, Laird. You only got so much light left.”
Hamilton responded on a crackly connection: “Little tricky on the inside here. It’s Ekolu’s first time so we don’t want to baptize him too hard.”
“Roger that,” Lickle said, laughing. “But he did catch a wave so he’s been baptized. You’d better let him know it’s time to go. There’s a serious set coming in.”
“Yeah, we’re going,” Hamilton said, signing off. “Okay.”
The two men, alone on an expanse of ocean that stretched as far as the eye could see, began to paddle in the direction of the Old Fishing Shack, from where they had launched. The sun slipped below the water, turning the sea to mercury. The waves continued to flow in, like music that had arrived here across an endless continent of water, some waves faint and some loud, all eventually coming to a crescendo on the reef. As they did so, their soft roar was hypnotic. It was impossible to stand at the cliff and feel anything but gratitude. No wonder the Hawaiians had performed their most sacred ceremonies on this bluff. The air was thick with their spirits.
Down below, Hamilton and Kalama suddenly changed direction, U-turning back to the wave. They’d spotted something they couldn’t stand to paddle away from. Casil handed me the binoculars. “Check it out,” he said, pointing to the north. Galloping in, swinging toward the reef at a slightly cockeyed angle, a foreboding lump rose from below as though a colossal hidden object—an island, maybe, or a ski hill—had decided to surface.
“Oh, look at that set!” Emory said, as Kalama began to race for a wave. “Oh, Ekolu! Turn, brah! Paddle! Paddle! Paddle!”
“There he goes,” Lickle said, approvingly. “He’s gonna make it! He wants it! But—oh—baby, look at number four behind it!” As he said it, I saw Hamilton quickly reposition himself. Even in the dusk he had seen the outlier too, or maybe he had felt it in some primordial corner of his senses, the same way the birds at Lituya Bay somehow knew in DNA Morse code: Big. Wave. Coming.
“Whoa!” Emory said, looking at Hamilton on the wave. “Did you see that? Laird leaned forward. He mispaddled. He almost fell!”
“You know what, though?” Lickle said, leaning back against the golf cart and smiling. “He didn’t.”
I’VE SEEN THREE OF MY CLOSEST FRIENDS KILLED BY WAVES. ALMOST BEEN THERE MYSELF.
Big-wave surfer Mike Parsons
ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA
On a sultry spring evening in the long shadow of Disneyland, deep in the neon heart of southern California’s Orange County, the crowds began to arrive at The Grove, a cavernous, tan stucco event space. The building was designed to invoke a golden-age Hollywood movie studio (down to the fake water tower), but instead of the MGM lion or Columbia’s torch-bearing goddess serving as resident icons, on this night The Grove was festooned with banners and video screens sporting the Billabong surf company’s XXL insignia, and the dripping-lime-green M of Monster Energy Drinks. Instead of Errol Flynn and Ava Gardner strolling the grounds there were throngs of big-wave surfers and their sponsors and their girlfriends and their fans; surf photographers and surf glitterati and surf hangers-on. In all, more than two thousand people were expected on this night for the Eighth Annual Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Awards, described by its founder, Bill Sharp, as the sport’s “Oscars.” More than $130,000 in prize money would be doled out, not to mention bragging rights for the year’s Biggest Wave, Monster Paddle, Biggest Tube, Best Wipeout, and the grand prize: Ride of the Year.
Eight years after Sharp (with Billabong�
�s backing) had launched The Odyssey: The Search for the 100-Foot Wave, the event had been renamed, reconfigured, and toned down, less specifically focused on that three-digit grail. In fact, the XXL’s Biggest Wave category now paid out only $15,000 to the winning surfer—along with a new Honda Jet Ski, with an additional $4,000 going to the photographer who shot the ride—cash worth visiting Anaheim for, to be sure, but a far cry from the $500,000 Sharp had originally dangled.
There were a number of reasons for the changes: cost, liability issues, and logistical hurdles among them. In July 2001 Sharp had announced the Odyssey with fanfare, touting it as the “ultimate man-against-the-sea adventure” and saying things like “We’ll invest in the television production to make sure that when the one-hundred-foot wave goes down, it’s shot perfectly from every angle.” His original vision involved shuttling an elite team of riders around the world wherever and whenever a hulking magenta blob popped up, hunting down mysterious, unridden waves in the far corners of the world’s oceans. To that end, Billabong had even purchased an amphibious plane called the Clipper, designed to land in rough seas. “For the first time ever,” the press release read, “a band of surf adventurers will have at their disposal a way to move faster than the weather, unrestricted by scheduled airline flights, paved runways, or even paved roads.”
In interviews Sharp had spoken excitedly about breakthroughs that his competition would bring to tow surfing, establishing new protocols for the sport: “We will, over the course of this entire project, be developing new equipment and new procedures that will make the tow-surfing experience safer and more enjoyable.” What kind of new equipment? “We’re looking at little miniature air tanks, GPS locators, or whatever it’s going to be,” he told TransWorld SURF Business. “We’re going to be delving heavily into the James Bond gadget arena. Maybe there’ll be a mad scientist like Q in the back of the Billabong warehouse creating secret gizmos.”
