The Wave

by Susan Casey

  Further complicating matters, no landmarks existed for the riders to gauge their position; in the lineup there were no lineups to be had. “Every other surf spot you’re looking at land,” Parsons said. “It’s so weird that there’s nothing but you and the ocean. It’s like a spiritual deal.”

  Of course there was a daunting aspect to this total isolation. When something went wrong at Jaws or Mavericks or Ghost Tree, the hospital was a ten-minute helicopter flight away. At Cortes Bank a rider was hours from land, and that’s if he was lucky. Aerial support was far from a given; single-engine aircraft don’t have the fuel capacity to stay one hundred miles offshore for long, and in rough conditions they can’t fly out there at all. If a rider fell on a big day and his partner lost sight of him, there would be no overhead spotter to pick out the tiny head in the churning whitewater and colliding currents, and no way for a Jet Ski to survey the vast expanse of ocean. There were also parts of the bank that were such turbulent impact zones that they could not be entered. “You could easily—easily—be washed out and never seen again,” Parsons said.

  Given the difficulty of getting out to Cortes and the dangers that awaited you when you did, the trip was a serious proposition even in fine weather, and the first week of 2008 had been the opposite of that. Three brutish Aleutian storms were stomping toward the West Coast; the first hit on January 4 with hurricane fury, announcing itself with 150-mile-per-hour winds, flash floods, and mudslides, toppling power lines and flipping eighteen-wheelers, shutting airports, hurling trees across roads, and burying ski resorts under ten feet of snow, killing at least twelve people. And that was only what happened on land. At sea, a merger of cold fronts and subtropical moisture whipped the North Pacific into a frenzy. Harbors were closed from British Columbia to Baja. High surf warnings were issued.

  “It’s a wasted swell,” Collins said when I called him on January 3 to see if anyone was going anywhere to try to ride anything. There was no high-pressure ridge holding the worst weather offshore, he explained. “This storm’s gonna roll right on through and bash the coast. It’s going to happen right on top of us.” There would definitely be giant waves, “but they’ll be all sloppy and weird.” This was a tempest to sit out entirely, it appeared, and staying onshore did not seem voluntary: the coast guard had raised its storm flag, signifying peril to anyone who ventured into the ocean.

  Down in San Clemente, Mike Parsons and Greg Long hunched over their computers, poring over weather data as rain thundered down and gale winds rattled their windows. Despite the dire forecasts, they believed there might be a sliver of calm between the first storm on January 4 and the second, expected to hit in the wee hours of January 6, during which they could make a stealth dash to Cortes. If they were lucky, there would be a half-day gap between the retreat of one cold front and the advance of another. That respite, if it occurred, would contain all of the waves and none of the ruining winds. It was a dicey call, however, because no one could guarantee the speed at which the storms were moving. If the second storm arrived sooner than expected, the last place a person wanted to meet it was out on the Cortes Bank.

  Certainly things had looked unpromising on the night of January 4. “It was blowing thirty-five knots out of the south,” Long recalled. “I was getting up every half hour and hearing branches being torn off trees.” “Even in the morning,” Gerlach said, “we didn’t know what we were actually doing. There was lightning. I was thinking, ‘There’s no way.’ ” While Collins helped the men plot the timing they’d need to pull off the trip, even he had been skeptical. “It was really a tight little schedule when all this could’ve come together,” he said. “There were only a few surfable hours.”

  In the end, Long said, “we thought, ‘Hey, we’ve gotta try. If we can pull it off these will be the biggest waves we’ve ever surfed in our entire lives.’ ” So at dawn on January 5 they left Dana Point Harbor in photographer Rob Brown’s boat, a thirty-six-foot power catamaran customized for shooting in rough ocean conditions, with a mount to carry a Jet Ski. From the start, the trip was a battle. There was too much chop and surge to tow the second Jet Ski, so they had to ride it, trading off in the frigid, stormy water, all of them fighting seasickness. “The sea was a raging mess,” Long said, describing his first shift. “Driving rain and squalls.” When they realized they had gone only fourteen miles in the first hour and a half, they knew they needed to pick it up. If they couldn’t travel at twenty-five knots per hour, they would never outrun the storm—and there was a chance they’d arrive at Cortes too late in the day to ride a single wave. “We realized, ‘We have to put our heads down and do this,’ ” Long said. “Outside San Clemente Island things finally started to calm down.”

  As they approached Cortes Bank they could see huge plumes of whitewater shooting up in the air, more than five miles in the distance. “When you can see it from that far away, you know it’s big,” Long said. At one p.m. they arrived.

  “We were humbled fast,” Parsons said, wincing, the vision of what greeted them still fresh in his mind. Cortes Bank was a swirling, furious expanse, a riot of water, a coliseum of giant waves. But they were right in the window of time they had hoped for, suspended between storms as a minus tide crept in, making the waves even more powerful. “All the elements were there,” he continued. “But there was a super-raw component because the storm was so close. There was no easy ride.” He paused and drank some of his ice tea. “The water just gave off this angry feeling, like ‘Don’t mess with me right now.’ Waves were hitting together and jacking up really high and bouncy and turbulent, and we all looked at each other like, ‘Uh, we’d better reevaluate this.’ ” He laughed.

  When I’d spoken to Long over the phone, he too stressed how vulnerable they had felt, alone in the middle of an aquatic maelstrom. “We spent the first hour just looking at it because it was still really messed up from the wind the night before. We had to actually get up the nerve to surf. And those first waves we rode were the biggest, windiest, scariest things ever. It was one of those days when you just could not make a mistake. Everything was on the line.”

  They were also uneasy in the knowledge that due to the last-minute decision to go and the beat-the-clock urgency of the trip, they were woefully underequipped for emergencies. “I would’ve liked to have had extra boats and extra Skis. It wasn’t what you’d call a smart expedition,” Long said. “It was pretty rudimentary.” As at least one added precaution the men had doubled up on their flotation vests. “You’re a bobbing top,” Parsons said, chuckling. “And you need to be. The forces that are pressing you down …”

  In the event of a fall they had to hope for the best, and thankfully that’s what they got. “I had a pretty good wipeout,” Parsons said, “and I probably went, I don’t know, half a football field underwater. Just rolling and tumbling. It wasn’t the worst pounding I’ve taken—I wasn’t that deep—but it was the most interesting because I went so far.” When Parsons emerged from the rinse cycle, he was relieved to find Gerlach right there to scoop him up. “But what if he hadn’t seen where I fell or the direction I went?” Parsons said with a frown. “I lost a surfboard on my first trip to Cortes and it was just gone. I never saw that board again.”

  In the realm of accidents, he added, another potential nightmare was to get hit by Cortes’s lip: that was how spines and femurs got snapped. “The worst thing is if it lands directly on you,” Parsons emphasized. “You want to be inside it, getting barreled, or out in front of it and get blasted.” As the lip came roaring from behind, he continued, a rider’s every survival mechanism went on red alert. “Your senses tell you where it is. I guess noise plays a role but it’s more feeling. You know the second it’s gonna hit. It’s all timing.”

  On the boat, Rob Brown struggled to maneuver in the current without drifting into any impact zones, and to maintain visual contact with the men while wrangling his camera gear and documenting the rides. He shot stills; video was out of the question. “There were weird, rogu
e sets coming in,” Brown said. “You had to know exactly where to sit.” The vessel dropped into troughs and pitched on swells and tossed in the whitewater, and nothing about any part of the process was easy, but he managed to photograph Parsons on an enormous face, his tiny figure silhouetted against a hulking mountain of surf. A thick lip with an odd kink in it folded above him.

  By all accounts, Long managed to catch a similar monster, but the ride had gone unrecorded. “I just felt the thing growing behind me,” Long said. “You’re not making any progress because the plane just keeps growing. You just have to point it straight.” He knew he was running for his life because he could feel the lip behind him, closing in. “It broke and I was completely engulfed in whitewater. When I came out the other end my heart was in my throat.”

  The session ended with bodies, surfboards, and luck intact, and as darkness engulfed the bank they turned east for the long drive home. Looking back while a trace of light remained, they could see the next storm front skulking on the horizon, a menacing lead gray wall. A south wind swept across the water; rain began to fall. “You could see on everyone’s faces,” Long said. “We’d just pulled off the impossible.” Though the men should have been exhausted to the point of collapse, adrenaline kept them alert. Wearing headlamps for vision, once again they took turns piloting the second Jet Ski home through the battering surf. “We got pounded,” Parsons said, shaking his head. “The bumps come heavy at night when you can’t see them. Every once in a while your face hits the handlebars. Chasing the boat I was thinking, ‘Man, what if I hit a whale at this speed? Or what if I just fly off? There’s no way they would see me.’ ” Then he brightened. “But you just feel so alive. So it was fun.”

  Greg Long stood at the podium as the cheers grew louder. The five finalists for Biggest Wave had been announced, and now it was only a matter of opening the envelope. Because he had won the award the previous year for a sixty-foot wave at a place called Dungeons in South Africa, Long was doing the honors. When he looked down at the name of the winner, there was no trace of surprise on his face: “Mike Parsons—January 5, Cortes Bank!” Brown’s photograph, somewhat grainy but still astonishing, splashed onto the screens and Parsons stood up, kissed his eight-months-pregnant wife, Tara, clapped Gerlach on the back, and headed for the stage. He stood there for a moment looking happy in his understated way, neat in a brown short-sleeved dress shirt and khakis.

  “Wow, incredible,” he said. “I’m really honored. That day was special. It was a bit of a mission.” He thanked Billabong and Sean Collins and his family; he thanked Brown, and Gerlach—“My partner in crime for ten years now”—and he thanked Larry Moore, to whom he dedicated the award, for discovering the Cortes wave in the first place. “It’s amazing how far we’ve come in ten years,” he said. “And we’re just getting started at this game. We’re just getting the hang of it now.” A cardboard check for $15,000 appeared at his side; someone wheeled a new Honda Jet Ski onto the stage. Then Bill Sharp came out and informed the audience that Parsons’s wave was officially deemed to be seventy-feet-plus, “which would make it a new Guinness World Record!”

  As the applause died down, Occy reappeared at the microphone. Festivities had been under way for several hours, and his voice had begun to slur. He looked up at the Cortes wave on the screen and turned to the audience. “These guys risk their lives to ride big waves,” he said, with a nod of respect. “And that is jus’ what they do.”

  Blinded by the glare of the spotlights, blurred by booze, and deafened by the din of the screaming logos, it was easy to lose sight of the real deal: the moment between the rider and the wave. Watching Greg Long up onstage applauding Parsons’s world-record ride, I remembered something he’d said once, about what that moment was like. “You’re just caught up in those few seconds and nothing else matters,” Long had told me. “Sound, smell, everything just totally goes out the window. It’s what’s directly in front of you, what you need to do to make that wave, and nothing else.” In giant waves, he’d added, “you’re dealing with energies that are so much greater than you, or anything you’ve ever dealt with.” That shared experience was what brought this group together once a year, to celebrate the rush of that moment—having had it, and having survived it. That was the bond, and yes, it was worth the next morning’s hangover.

  Standing on the sidelines, two of the event hostesses, charged with toting the blown-up cardboard checks for the winners onto the stage and adding a dash of sex appeal to the proceedings, watched the celebrating men. “I think the idea of surfing a one-hundred-foot wave is insane,” said one, a blonde in a black miniskirt. “It is insane that they want to do it. They are insane.”

  “Yeah,” said the other, a brunette, smiling slowly and shaking her hair. “But I’ve been doing this event now for three years, and each year the event gets bigger—and so do the waves.”

  AS WE WATCHED THE MOUNTAINOUS WAVES AND FELT THEM BATTERING THE SHIP AND SAW THE IMPACT OF THE GALE-FORCE WIND, WE REALIZED THE GREAT STRENGTH OF THE ELEMENTS—SO STRONG AND CRUEL THEY ARE AND WHAT LITTLE HOPE WE HUMANS HAVE WHEN WE ARE IN THEM.

  Merlyn Wright, passenger aboard the doomed ship Oceanos

  CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

  When a 120-foot rogue wave rears up in front of a 300,000-ton oil tanker, sucking the ship down into a black hole as it explodes on the bow, crushing the hydraulics and snapping the rudder so that steering is no longer an option, knocking out the engine and crumpling the deck like a tin can while gale winds drag it across the unforgiving shallows—well, the crew will want to get Captain Nicholas Sloane on its radio, or someone very much like him. And they will want to do it fast.

  Sloane, a marine salvage expert, is based in Cape Town, South Africa. In his line of work—saving foundering ships from disaster—this is an excellent place to be. Right out Sloane’s back door lies the Transkei, or Wild Coast, a five-hundred-mile stretch of Indian Ocean that runs from Durban down to the Cape. The area’s distinguishing feature is the Agulhas Current, a fast-flowing pulse of water that streams south from the tip of Madagascar. Like the Gulf Stream off the U.S. East Coast, the Agulhas is a mighty and treacherous western boundary current, more than ten degrees warmer than the surrounding seas. It ranges from sixty to one hundred miles wide, its five-knot average velocity tempting ships to speed their journeys by riding along in its core. This can be a smart tactic or (as many boats have discovered) a highly ill-advised one. It all comes down to the weather: under certain conditions the Agulhas Current can be counted on to kick up the weirdest, wildest, most destructive waves in the world.

  A number of factors conspire to make this happen. The current runs along the edge of the continental shelf, the land that slopes gradually beneath the ocean before dropping off into the deep abyssal plain. In South Africa that shelf happens to be narrow as well as steeply banked, slashed with canyons, and booby-trapped with shoals and shifting underwater sand dunes—all of which create whorls and eddies and assorted pockets of trouble. The Agulhas contains so many odd vortices, one oceanographer told me, that if you were to dump red dye into the water and view the current from space, it would look less like a purposeful river and more like the spinning teacup ride at Disneyland.

  Cape Agulhas, the continent’s southernmost point, has the added nastiness of two oceans colliding: the Indian and the South Atlantic. Fifteenth-century Portuguese explorers referred to this area as the Graveyard of Ships, and the name stuck for good reason. It is here that the hot-blooded Agulhas Current smacks directly into the cold, dense southern swells that have stomped north from Antarctica, fueled by relentless winds. This oceanic clash of the titans creates enormous waves that are angry, unstable, and steep; a rogue-wave factory in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. I had seen the pictures: tankers with their bows bashed in and their hulls punched open, as if by a massive fist. And those were the lucky ones. Hundreds more simply disappeared. Ships need rescuing from these waves constantly, and as a result many highly experienc
ed marine salvagers hail from South Africa. For Sloane and his company, Svitzer, there is never any shortage of work.

  I met Sloane in his office near the Cape Town Harbor one morning, catching him in the building’s lobby on his way back from a court appearance. Even in a suit and tie he looked rugged, as though carved from some kind of igneous rock. Sloane had dark blond hair, pale hazel eyes, and a dry sense of humor. As we stepped onto the elevator he explained that marine salvage companies spent as much time in courtrooms as they did in the waves. Legal wrangling was standard, he said, because ship rescue was such a costly affair. Once a ship’s Mayday had been broadcast, the ensuing salvage operation required serious up-front expense; the shuttling of heavy machinery and manpower was almost military in scope. They needed helicopters and tugboats, along with dredges, oil-containment booms, forklifts, pumps, hoses, cables, Zodiacs, Jet Skis, and decompression chambers. The salvage crew included hazmat specialists, chemists, pilots, mariners, ecologists, engineers, mechanics, meteorologists, wave forecasters, fire-risk experts, welders, medics, and immersion divers, among others.

  Before a salvage company would even consider a job, the imperiled vessel’s captain had to submit to an insurance agreement known as Lloyd’s Open Form. Basically, the form stated that the salvager, having rescued the ship, was entitled to a portion of its value. The only question was the size of the claim. To determine this, facts were hashed out in the aftermath: How desperate had the situation been? How big were the waves? How likely was the ship to have gone down? How many lives were in jeopardy? How many gallons of oil had been safely corralled? Months and even years of tussling, in and out of courtrooms, could pass before an agreement was reached.