Quotes of the Day
Pete Cabrinha had ridden killer waves before, but this time, as he surfed down the face of a giant swell rolling in over the notorious Jaws reef off Maui, Hawaii, last January, he couldn't find the bottom. "It was growing in front of me and growing behind me, so it felt like I wasn't getting anywhere," recalls Cabrinha, 42, a veteran surfer from Hawaii. There had already been 10 "horrific wipeouts" that morning. As Cabrinha was gaining speed going down the wave, its breaking lip was closing in fast from behind. People watching from the shore began shouting, "Go, Pete, go!" as he raced ahead of the white water. He hit a few bumps but kept his balance and triumphantly finished his journey. When he reached the calm water outside the reef, his partner Rush Randle told him, wide-eyed, that it was the biggest wave he had ever seen. After the pictures of Cabrinha's ride were analyzed, they proved Randle right. The wave measured 70 ft., the highest wave ever surfed and recorded.
That record may not stand long. In this era of extreme sports — when even an 80-year-old former President dons a skydiving suit and jumps out of a plane to celebrate his birthday — big-wave surfers have set their sights on a loftier, more hubris-laden goal: a 100-ft. wave. "Twenty years ago, no one would ever have conceived of [riding] a 100-ft. wave," says Sam George, editor of Surfer magazine. "But the surfers that are really at the vanguard today are confident they can ride [one]." In 2001 they were further emboldened in their quest when Billabong, an Australian surfwear company, set up the Billabong Odyssey, a fund to pay for surfers to travel anywhere in the world in pursuit of a 100-ft. wave. Billabong will award $250,000 to the first surfer who conquers one. Generated by a perfect storm far out at sea, traveling faster than 40 m.p.h. and breaking with an earthshaking force that would be heard several miles back from the beach, a 100-ft. wave would probably kill anyone who fell off it. But Billabong has 64 volunteers on its list ready to give it a try.
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"It is like running and tapping the dragon on the tail and getting away with the flames all around you," says Jeff Clark, a longtime big-wave surfer at Maverick's reef, south of San Francisco. But not everyone escapes the dragon: three big-wave surfers have lost their lives in the past decade. Nevertheless, chasing the big wave has been embraced by the $4.5 billion surfing industry, which uses dramatic photographs to promote the extreme image of the sport to younger consumers.
The history of big-wave surfing, documented in Riding Giants, a film directed by Stacy Peralta that opened nationwide last week, goes back a half-century. Its pioneer is Greg Noll, a stocky Californian nicknamed the Bull, who, with a small group of friends, began surfing big swells off the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, in the 1950s and '60s, riding waves up to 30 ft. high. But with the boards and techniques available then, it was not possible to go much higher. In the '70s and '80s surfers instead sought to conquer challenges on smaller waves with a range of turning and tube-riding maneuvers. Then in the early '90s came Laird Hamilton, a blond, 6-ft. 3-in., 220-lb. former model and surfing prodigy, who brought big-wave surfing crashing back onto center stage.
Born in California but raised in Hawaii from age 2, Hamilton, 40, became the acknowledged dragon slayer of surf — a glamorous outsize personality who tested the limits in everything he did, often as camera shutters whirred. A thrill junkie, he surfed the highest waves, bungee jumped from a 700-ft. bridge and broke the European speed record for windsurfing. He even stunt surfed in the opening sequence of the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day. But since childhood Hamilton had been mesmerized by the huge outer reef breaks that appeared after some Pacific winter storms. He regularly surfed the biggest waves he could catch: "It is as if you are on a racetrack, and it is moving too, [and] all of a sudden turns pop up and bumps are flying at you ... and that is part of the excitement," he says. But as the swells got bigger, their speed increased, and even Hamilton's pumped-up arms couldn't paddle fast enough to launch him onto the fiercest waves before they passed underneath him.
In the summer of 1992 Hamilton and some surf buddies were taking turns dragging one another on surfboards behind a boat, "and a little light went on in our heads. We thought this might be an incredible way to surf big waves," he says. They tried it out that winter when the surf got up, and suddenly they were gliding onto big waves with ease. Then they started using shorter boards, which are more maneuverable. Foot straps held the surfers in place as they were towed onto waves by jet skis at speeds of about 40 m.p.h., with top speeds reaching 65 m.p.h. "That just pushed it over the top, allowing us to virtually ride anything the ocean could produce," says Hamilton. Soon other surfers began copying his tow-in technique. "The advent of tow-in surfing has expanded everyone's concept of what is possible, to the point now where big-wave surfing is almost unrecognizable compared to 10 years ago," says Surfer magazine's George.
But it wasn't enough for surfers to know how to mount and ride a 100-ft. wave. They needed to know where and when to find the giant swells. Enter Sean Collins, a college dropout and son of a Navy navigator, who began compiling surf forecasts while riding the waves of Baja California in Mexico in the 1980s. Using data from ships at sea, weather reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, satellite photos and readings from ocean buoys, he began predicting with remarkable accuracy where and when the big swells would hit. In 1985 he launched Surfline, a pay-per-call surf-forecast service and 10 years later put it online. It is now the standard guide for surfers around the world, getting more than 1 million hits a month.
No one monitors Surfline more closely than Bill Sharp, who conceived the Billabong Odyssey 100-ft.-wave project and runs it from his office in Newport Beach, Calif. If conditions look right, Sharp, 43, is ready to fly a team of the four best surfers available at the time along with four support personnel wherever in the world big waves are developing. "Big waves need a big storm with winds preferably over 70 m.p.h., and you want it to last two to three days, ideally blowing toward you," he says. The best waves come from fierce winter storms in the north Pacific that can cover thousands of square miles. Hurricanes in the Atlantic can pack much faster winds, but they cover only a couple of hundred square miles and blow in a circle, generating short, choppy waves, not the long, sustained swells that surfers need.
With surf forecasting in place and the new tow-in technique being steadily refined, the records have started to pile up: in 1998 Ken Bradshaw from Sunset Beach in Hawaii rode the first wave over 60 ft.; in 2002 Brazilian Carlos Burle surfed a 68-ft. swell; and this year Cabrinha reached the 70-ft. threshold. Sharp says storm patterns have been relatively subdued in the past few years, but he thinks that when the next El Nino warming of the Pacific happens, adding 20% to 30% to the power of storms likely to impact prime surfing sites, surfers will have a chance at 100-ft. swells. Two jet skiers claim they saw 100-ft. waves breaking several miles outside San Francisco's Maverick's reef in 2002, and Hamilton says he has seen 100-ft. waves on the outer reefs between Hawaii's Oahu and Kauai islands. "Using these machines and the little boards, we're going into outer space," says Clark, pioneer of the big swells of Maverick's reef. "We don't know where it's going. It is the new frontier."
Not everyone is happy with this ever expanding frontier. Critics say the jet skis, which can dump up to one-third of their unburned fuel into the water, are major polluters. Environmentalists in California are engaged in a battle to have jet skis banned from Monterey Bay, which would include the big reef break at Maverick's. The surfers, meanwhile, are seeking an exemption for their favorite reef.
Others question whether the pressure of sponsorship and competitions is pushing some big-wave surfers dangerously beyond their abilities. Hamilton, who surfed Jaws reef the same day Cabrinha set the record, thinks he might have ridden some even higher waves. But he declines to enter the big-wave competitions because he thinks they are bad for the sport. "I resent the whole concept of a bounty to try to ride an 80-ft. or a 100-ft. wave. You are provoking people that maybe shouldn't be out there."
Maybe no one should be out there in surf that is as high as an eight-story building and breaks every 20 seconds with the force of a Union Pacific train. But, as Hamilton would be the first to say, big-wave surfing is not about playing it safe. It's about the thrill of taming that killer wave.
- Terry Mccarthy/Waikiki