The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  From the early 1990s onward, thanks to Slater, the aerial became a near-mandatory skill for the pro surfer, and most world-tour heavies learned to land the entire alphabet-soup’s worth of air moves. Credit the VCR for this. The aerial clips that appeared in virtually every surf video were used as tutorials; moves that had taken Fletcher, Archbold, and Slater months to work out could now be landed—at least in fledgling form—in a matter of weeks, even days. Aerials were still a low-percentage move, so they weren’t used often in competition. But during free-surfs, particularly in broken-up beachbreak waves, the top pros gladly, endlessly took to the air.

  While Slater and the rest of the New Schoolers incorporated aerials into their repertoires, two or three dozen surfers from California, Australia, and Hawaii—plenty of them modeling themselves to one degree or another after Christian Fletcher—found a niche as aerial specialists. They liked doing R&D in an area that was still relatively unexplored. Inversions, rotations, flips, legs-extended “Superman” moves; if it was being done in a half-pipe, it was soon exported to the lineup.

  Post-Fletcher aerialists were commercially motivated, too. The magazines couldn’t get enough aerial photos—by the midnineties, more aerial shots were being published than any other surfing maneuver. This, in turn, created a new strata of pro who made a living mostly through “photo incentive” contracts with their sponsors. A second revenue stream opened in 1996, when Surfing put together the original “Airshow” competition series, with entrants judged solely on aerials. Jason “Ratboy” Collins, Joe Crimo, Josh Sleigh, Josh Kerr, Aaron “Gorkin” Cormican, and Eric McHenry were among the first top-ranked aerial event surfers; in 2002, Randy “Goose” Welch of Hawaii picked up $20,000 for winning the first annual Quiksilver Airshow World Championships.

  Despite the contractual agreements, the arranged photo shoots, and the prize-money checks, everyone involved did their best to ensure that aerial surfing still looked underground and rebellious. Boards were decorated with spray-painted skulls and graffiti, and aerial specialists liked to trash-talk world-tour pros for their conservative surfing. It was an odd, high-revving little world the aerialists created for themselves. By specializing, they managed to come up with all manner of intricate, near-impossible moves, each of which became slightly less impossible over time. But the narrow focus stunted their overall surfing development. Aerialists liked to claim they were riding on a more advanced plane than the ASP pros, which was absurd, and had been since the Fletcher era. They’d just locked into a very specific, very marketable, usually very short career path.

  CHRISTIAN FLETCHER, TRESTLES, 1988.

  MAVERICK’S, 1994.

  Shaun Tomson, in any event, was proven wrong. Aerials themselves weren’t a hoax. In the years to come, the moves just got bigger and more spectacular. The age of the aerial specialist, though, peaked quickly. By 2005, a friendly twenty-year-old regularfooter from Ventura County named Dane Reynolds was spending more time hovering above the curl than any surfer in the world—and he was no more defined by his aerials than LeBron James was by the monster jam.

  Adventures On the New Big-Wave Frontier

  As exciting as the 1980s rediscovery of big-wave surfing was, the whole thing had a slightly retrograde quality. It wasn’t as obvious as longboarding, which wore the sport’s past glory like splashed-on cologne. But plenty of big-wave surfing’s reference points had been established decades earlier: Waimea remained the ultimate break; the point-and-go style ruled; master shaper Dick Brewer, who’d crafted the world’s most expensive boards during the Kennedy era, still turned out the best big-wave equipment; and Eddie Aikau, years after his death, was still revered as the sport’s greatest big-wave surfer. By the end of the 1980s, a big-wave event was like a Rolling Stones comeback tour—as familiar as it was dramatic.

  Then all of a sudden big-wave surfing’s fifty-year-old carapace split open and fell away to reveal a huge, new, terrifying beast. Dozens of previously unsurfed big-wave breaks were charted, most outside of Hawaii. Tow-in surfing, slabs, hundred-foot waves, shark attacks, death, new boards and competitions: by the early 2000s, big-wave surfing would become nearly unrecognizable to what it was in 1990. Just a tiny percentage of the world’s surfers were directly affected by all the changes, but everybody in the sport, and millions outside of it, watched from a distance, flabbergasted.

  The geography of big-wave riding began to shift in the 1980s, with the discovery of a break called Killers, located on Todos Santos, a small uninhabited island just a few miles off the Baja California port town of Ensenada. Marty Hoffman—son of big-wave pioneer Flippy Hoffman, and the older cousin of Christian Fletcher—boated out to Todos Santos regularly during the 1980s and occasionally rode triple-overhead surf at Killers. Following traditional protocol, he kept the break under wraps. Surfer ran a Todos Santos feature in 1982, renaming the island “El Martillo,” to throw people off the scent. Five years later Surfing gave Killers a lavish coming-out party with “Big Time,” a twenty-two-page article in which surfer-author Dave Parmenter described the eighteen-footers he’d ridden there as having more “sheer mass [than] anything outside of Hawaii.”

  Also in 1987, North Shore pro Mark Foo, along with 1965 world champion Felipe Pomar, rode a semi-forgotten deep-water break near Lima called Pico Alto. “I thought big Makaha and the North Shore’s outer reefs were the next step for me as a surfer,” Foo wrote afterward. “I was wrong. There were lessons to be learned at Pico Alto. One of them being: no matter where it’s breaking, a big wave is a big wave. Period.”

  Years later, Foo’s remark would seem obvious, but at the time it verged on radical. It was a given that Hawaii, uniquely positioned as it was to the North Pacific storm track—close enough to bring in the power; distant enough that swells had time to groom themselves—was the only place in the world able to produce huge, clean, rideable waves. This still isn’t wrong. No other coastal region can match Hawaii for big-wave consistency, and only here are big-wave breaks found in clusters. The North Shore alone is home to at least six reefs capable of producing twenty-five-foot waves. Still, Todos Santos and Pico Alto expanded big-wave surfing’s horizons. There were other big waves out there, everybody suddenly realized. Maybe lots of them.

  This point was irrevocably brought home by a California break called Maverick’s, which looked more powerful, and more challenging, than anything in Hawaii. Located next to Pillar Point Harbor, about twenty-five miles south of San Francisco, Maverick’s had long been the private big-wave domain for a terse Half Moon Bay carpenter named Jeff Clark. For nearly fifteen years, beginning in 1975, Clark invited local surfers to paddle out with him, describing Maverick’s as “better than Waimea.” (It was the only comparison he could think of, though he hadn’t actually been to Hawaii.) Everybody declined. Clark was moody and fearless—the kind of guy Northern California surfers had in mind when they half-complimented someone as “psycho.” In 1990, after Clark decided to become a full-time boardmaker, he expanded his search for recruits, driving to Santa Cruz and San Francisco, looking for anyone to join him at Maverick’s. He still wanted company in the lineup, but he also wanted to bring some attention to his new business. Maverick’s, Clark knew, was the ticket.

  A cool-handed pro named Richard Schmidt was one of the newcomers. He was from Santa Cruz, which up to that point had been known as California’s top big-wave region—Steamer Lane and Swift Street, on the northwest side of town, both regularly produce double- and triple-overhead waves. Schmidt had a dozen North Shore winters to his credit, and at thirty he was mainland America’s best big-wave rider. Following his third-place finish in the 1990 Quiksilver/Aikau contest at Waimea, he rushed back to California and drove up the coast to Maverick’s, eager to check out the new big-wave break in Half Moon Bay. Standing on the headland overlooking the reef, he was stunned as he watched twenty-five-footers bomb through—a third again bigger than anything he’d ever ridden in Santa Cruz.

  DARRYL “FLEA” VIROSTKO.

  F
rom above, the Maverick’s reef looks like a huge upside-down check mark: an abrupt left explodes along the short arm, to the north, while a much longer south-running right bowls across the long arm, often passing through two or three distinct sections. Maverick’s can be ridden in either direction, although the right is the better wave by far. Because the reef’s leading edge is so much shallower than the ocean floor immediately beyond, an incoming wave can in a moment’s time shift from canted to vertical and expand by an extra five or ten feet. Unlike Makaha, where the wave finishes in a bowl section, the bowl at Maverick’s comes at the beginning; at twenty-foot or bigger, nearly every incoming peak, right off the bat, lurches out to form a huge abyssal chamber. On the harbor side of the wave you can look through the tube and see the cliffs of nearby Moss Beach. This part of the Maverick’s wave is unrideable, at least by conventional means. At Makaha, and sometimes at Waimea or Killers, it’s possible to launch a ride from what’s known as a “deep” lineup position—where the wave first curls over. On a big day at Maverick’s, a paddle-entry ride almost always begins from the shoulder, twenty yards or so removed from where the curl first pitches down. Even then, it’s touch and go.

  There are added degrees of difficulty. Visibility is often reduced by fog. Winter ocean temperatures can drop to the upper 40s, and the air temperature can go even lower. Some Maverick’s surfers say they feel “armored” in the mandatory head-to-toe wetsuit rig, but in fact it’s a few pounds of dead weight, and even the stretchiest neoprene constricts movement. (Todos Santos is five or six degrees warmer, although full wetsuits are required there as well.) The beach-side of the Maverick’s impact zone ends in a long jagged promontory of rocks, and the surfer who gets caught here has to thread himself into one of the narrow waterways to a lagoon on the far side—or risk getting pinned against a crag.

  For the finishing touch, Half Moon Bay is located on the eastern edge of what has long been referred to as the “red triangle”—a cold, murky nearshore tract of Pacific bordered by Monterey, Tomales Bay, and the Farallon Islands, known to have the world’s highest concentration of white sharks. As of 2009, two attacks on surfers, both nonfatal, had been recorded at Maverick’s. The scarier occurrence happened in late 2000, when a fourteen-foot juvenile white shark clamped onto Santa Barbara surfer Paul Euwer’s board from the side, then breached completely out of the water, with Euwer bent double around the animal’s snout. Upon landing, the shark let go, thrashed the air with its tail, and disappeared.

  Last Ride at Maverick’s

  Surfer gave Maverick’s a public introduction in 1992, with a cover story titled “Cold Sweat.” A kind of second coming-out took place two years later, after a long, photogenic, and ultimately tragic run of winter surf. The Hawaiians by that time had figured out that a big-wave bonus could be picked up by chasing swells east, from Oahu to the West Coast. Brock Little, Mark Foo, and Ken Bradshaw—three of Hawaii’s top Waimea riders—were all in San Francisco at daybreak on Friday, December 23, 1994, heading south to Maverick’s. Foo and Bradshaw had flown in together on the red-eye, their decade-old rivalry put to rest. Both seemed to recognize that as early-middle-aged pro surfers they actually had too much in common to not be friends, and for the past year or so they’d paddled out as a team to ride the North Shore’s distant outer reefs, usually surfing by themselves. Bradshaw had already been to Maverick’s a few times. Foo and Little were both first-timers.

  The big-wave fraternity had been buzzing about Maverick’s for over a week. Waves are rarely big and smooth for more than two days in a row, but as of that Friday it had been pumping without a break for eleven days. On the previous Monday, east winds gusting out of the foothill canyons had run head-on into a new twenty-foot-plus northwest swell. The waves were stunning, with huge prismatic columns of spindrift wafting off each crest. But the takeoffs were nearly impossible. One after another, surfers paddled into the wind, jumped to their feet, hit an updraft, and were pinned in place as the wave hollowed out and exploded around them. The New York Times Magazine would soon run a photograph taken that day of sixteen-year-old Santa Cruz rookie Jay Moriarity, feet still on the deck of his board, thirty feet above the trough, suspended like a puppet in midair just ahead of the gathering curl. Moriarity was unharmed, but it was the gnarliest wipeout anybody had ever seen.

  Maverick’s wasn’t yet crowded, but getting there. Jeff Clark still had seniority and got his pick of waves. Of the other dozen or so regulars, most of the best were from Santa Cruz, including Peter Mel, a rangy big-wave stylist, and a tough little reprobate named Darryl “Flea” Virostko, who was master of both the air-drop takeoff—where the board momentarily lifts off the water—and the casually offensive on-record quote. Getting to the surface after a bad Maverick’s wipeout, Virostko once said, was like “trying to do a sit-up with a fat chick sitting on my face.”

  Bradshaw and Foo were both a little disappointed that Friday morning. Glassy twenty-five-footers had been predicted, and while the conditions were indeed sunny and warm, the sets were averaging fifteen feet, with the occasional eighteen-or twenty-footer. Since word had spread that the Hawaiians were in town, a handful of photographers were on the scene, and a hundred or so spectators had climbed onto the Pillar Point headland overlooking the break. Never before had Mavs been so well-attended.

  Just before noon, about three hours into what Brock Little later described as a “relaxing day” of big-wave surfing, Mark Foo lost his balance while dropping into a steep fifteen-footer, belly-flopped, and vanished as the curl looped over. It wasn’t an especially bad-looking wipeout—nothing like Jay Moriarity’s, four days earlier. Brock Little and Orange County big-wave rider Mike Parsons then took off side-by-side on the wave directly after Foo’s. Parsons fell at the bottom, and Little came unstuck a moment later; both surfers were swept into the rocks and had to struggle mightily for two or three minutes before getting washed through into the lagoon.

  All eyes were on Little and Parsons. Nobody noticed that Foo hadn’t come up. Later that afternoon, a boat full of surfers heading from the Maverick’s channel back to Pillar Point Harbor came upon Foo’s body floating near the breakwater, the back section of his broken board still leashed to his ankle. The surfers tried to revive Foo, as did the harbor paramedics, but he’d been dead for nearly two hours.

  Foo had two small abrasions on his face, but was otherwise unmarked. Because he hadn’t been pushed through the rocks, and because the tail section of his board was smashed in and threaded with sea-grass, it was believed that either his board or leash had gotten snagged on the bottom. Foo may have been disoriented from going over the falls, or may have had the wind knocked out of him. For whatever reason, instead of pulling open the ankle strap of his leash and swimming for the surface, he was held underwater until he drowned. At some point the current shifted. Foo and his board floated up and began drifting southeast toward the breakwater.

  Foo had commented often on the possibility of dying in big surf. He believed the Challenger astronauts had “died happy” and said he’d be honored to go out in similar fashion. Thus, it was posthumously suggested that he had some kind of death wish. Nobody who knew him well believed it. What Foo had was bottomless ambition and a talent for catchy quotes. He wanted to be an extreme sports star, years before that phrase came into existence, and for that to happen big-wave surfing itself needed to take on, as Foo often put it, a “higher profile.”

  By dying so publicly, at a new and terrifying break located next to a famous city, Foo gave the sport its highest profile yet. His story rumbled across the media landscape, first hitting the nightly TV news, then newspapers and magazines—the Times called Foo the “Joe Montana of big waves”; Spin, Paris Match, Rolling Stone, and Outside all ran articles on him—and culminating, years later, in books and documentaries.

  In places, the treatment was overwrought or inaccurate. A two-page Outside photo, for example, was captioned, “Foo, earlier that fateful day at Maverick’s,” but the shot was of Brock L
ittle. Still, the coverage was always respectful and occasionally excellent. Foo came across as talented and complicated. Big-wave surfing, as ever, in print and onscreen, looked spectacular and heroic—and more than a little crazy.

  Shifting Gears: The Advent of Tow Surfing

  After Mark Foo’s death, Dateline researchers uncovered a taped interview with Foo, shot the year before he flew to Maverick’s, in which he again stated that he wasn’t afraid to die in big surf, but he hoped it would be “on a fifty-foot wave.” What Dateline and every other media outlet missed in their coverage of Foo’s death was that fifty-footers were now, for the first time ever, actually being ridden.

  Tow surfing had arrived.

  Thirty-foot waves had long been recognized as big-wave surfing’s top end. Beyond that, the dangers and difficulties were overwhelming. Paddling out was a nightmare. Holding position in the lineup was nearly impossible. The only way to catch a thirty-five-foot wave was to use a long, thick, fast-paddling piece of equipment that looked more like a single scull racing boat than a surfboard; when Ken Bradshaw turned his attention more fully to the North Shore’s outer reefs in 1990, he built himself a flame-orange twelve-footer. Bigger boards, though, were a problem once the surfer was up and riding. Rather than cleave to the face, an oversized board wanted to travel on a straight, water-skimming line. There was no finessing your way out of a tight spot. Hit a surface bump or ruffle, and you were pitched off. Get a pocket of air under that huge prow and the board flipped.