Holy Shit!

if you fall, you die

Big-wave pioneer Buzzy Trent put it this way: "Big waves aren't measured in feet, they're measured in increments of fear." There is another way to measure a wave, one borrowed from the world of skiing. Risk seekers who ski down near-vertical chutes or sail off rock cliffs use the term extreme. It simply means: If you fall, you die.

Mark Foo, a surfing legend who met his death on a 15-foot wave at Maverick's, had a four-word credo: "Ultimate thrill. Ultimate price." On a less lethal note, some define extreme as any act that is "dangerous, shock inducing or envelope pushing." For years, a 25-foot wave represented the outer limit of surfing, the equivalent of the sound barrier. But that barrier has been broken.

How big is a 25-foot wave? Let's just say it's so big it creates its own wind. It's so ravenous for water it creates a depression in its path. If you panic and attempt to dive through the base to save yourself, there is enough pressure from the water stacked above to rupture your eardrums the moment you penetrate the surface.

It's not the height alone that creates fear--it's the hold-down. Think of a wave as a moving pyramid of water. A 25-foot wave, for example, may be close to 40 feet thick at its base. Add just ten feet to its height and the mass doubles. When waves reach that height, they break on the reefs with a sound of cannons detonating. The shock of big waves can raise ripples in coffee cups a mile inland.

Surfers caught underwater in the impact zone tell of watching shafts of water boiling like tornados, of hearing the clack of boulders being rolled about the ocean floor. They describe being mauled, hammered, pounded and scoured by a pressure equal to five fire hoses, of having wet suits torn off their bodies. In big waves, the hold-down can last a minute or more. Hard enough with a lungful of air, almost impossible if you've had the breath knocked out of you by the fall.

Big-wave expert Darrick Doerner describes a wipeout at Jaws, the surfing site on Maui where these photos were taken. "It's the most horrifying thing I've ever experienced.

I got slammed to the bottom, tried to push off and got squished flat. All I could do was wait until the pressure let up and hope I had some air left. I thought about my son. I thought about my mom and dad. I thought about the next wave about to break. At Jaws, if you wipe out in a bad place, you aren't going home. We call it the gravel truck. If it unloads on you, you aren't going anywhere."

Until recently, big-wave surfers were limited by human frailty. Go bigger than 25 feet and no surfer can paddle fast enough to make the drop. It's like trying to catch a freight train on a bicycle.

Too little speed and the huge amount of water moving up the face will cause the surfer's board to stall and lose contact with the wall. Both the board and its separated rider will then free-fall like lawn darts.

Achieving board speed is the key. Once a rider chooses a wave and starts paddling for it, his ability to change his mind diminishes with every stroke. And it not only diminishes, it becomes increasingly dangerous. At a gut-check place like Maverick's in northern California, where the giant walls are bone-cold, dark and merciless, a surfer has to want each wave with a savage intensity. Unless he can force himself to take those last few paddle strokes over the ledge and into the maw of the beast that is forming and transforming beneath him, he won't stand a chance.

A million or so people surf. Perhaps a thousand brave the waves raised by winter storms. Only a few hundred attempt waves in excess of 20 feet. Each year that number diminishes. Donnie Solomon died trying to paddle out in 20-foot waves at Waimea. Todd Chesser drowned beneath a 25 footer on the north shore of Oahu, at Alligator. The few surfers who test themselves at Jaws and other extreme sites tell the same tale.

Rush Randle says, "Out there, you're in the zone. You're looking 50 feet down the line, thinking only about that millisecond of time. You're totally one with the board and the wave. If your mind drifts, it can be detrimental to your health. It's not what you'd call fun, till later, when you come down."

Dave Kalama describes the focus needed to survive: "When it's big, the power is so intense and intimidating you don't dare think about anything else. You're so focused you don't even hear the wave breaking behind you."

Pete Cabrinha says, "If you get the right wave and dial in to it, your whole world is that moment. You're ecstatic."

To suppress the fear and stay focused on the vertical series of events about to surround him, a surfer must have godlike clarity and desire. It is why few surfers ride big waves. It is why the ones who do, and do it well, find ways to structure their lives to do litde else. A 15- to 20-second ride can last a lifetime. When conditions reach the natural boundary, paddle surfers retire from the field. But other watermen remain. Windsurfers such as Robby Naish, Pete Cabrinha and Laird Hamilton learned to carry speed onto a wave. On the way out, waves became ramps for aerial maneuvers. On the way in, they became canvases for slashing cutbacks and sweeping-bottom turns. The sail was a wing that allowed them to fly, but it was also restricting. They were at the mercy of the wind. A fall in the impact zone turned a rig into shrapnel.

Windsurfers used their sails as engines to search for ridable surf. They moved from familiar sites to outer reef sites--called cloudbreaks. (The name originates from the visual--all you can see from shore is a line of white on the horizon.)

Eventually, their developing skills brought them to Jaws, on the north shore of Maui. With its gigantic peak and immense ridable barrel, Jaws was the biggest accessible and survivable wave anyone had ever seen. By the mid-Eighties, (concluded on page 166)Holy Shit!(continued from page 114) magazines showed windsurfers outracing waves that were several times the height of the mast.

Once surf reaches a certain height, rescue boats are useless. At Waimea, they station their helicopter on big days. Lifeguards discovered that Jet Skis and personal watercraft had the speed to outrun surf and the maneuverability to move on the face of waves. Jet Skis can move in and out of the impact zone, plucking surfers in the brief, very dangerous intervals between waves.

Windsurfers looked at the Jet Ski and saw a way to remove sails from the equation. In the early Nineties Laird Hamilton (along with pro surfer Buzzy Kerbox and Doerner) began to experiment with board design and tow-in craft. Hamilton developed a slender 16-inch-wide board with foot straps that was more water ski than the long boards used by paddle surfers. Towed by a partner on a Jet Ski or Wave Runner, Hamilton could now slingshot onto 35-foot waves with sufficient speed to survive the drop. At the end of a ride, his teammate would pick him up before the next wave.

For the skillful and the daring, this new technique granted immediate access to waves that were beyond any surfer's experience. Power surfers caught more waves in a day than paddle surfers do in a year.

Ken Bradshaw, a convert to tow-in surfing, tells of catching what may have been the largest wave ever ridden off Oahu. "We normally pace a wave at 35 miles per hour and let go of the tow rope around 27. On this one, we paced it at 40 plus and let go at 35. When my partner, Dan Moore, picked me up he was yelling, 'That was radical! You could have put three houses inside the barrel.' He said it was 12 to 15 times overhead. I'd say it had an 80-foot face. I used to think I rode big waves, but a 25-foot Waimea is half the size of what we're riding now. Nobody knows what the limits are anymore."

Doerner says, "Laird and I have been riding 80- to 100-foot faces for some time now, but there's this place called King's Reef outside Hanalei on Kauai. King's can get really big."

For photographers, Jaws is a paycheck with a motordrive. A big day at Jaws could fill surf magazines for a year. Big-wave surfing created a buzz that seemed to feed America's appetite for the extreme. K2, Inc., a ski company based in Los Angeles, acquired a surfwear company and launched the Big Wave Challenge. It offered a $50,000 prize to the surfer who bagged the biggest wave in the winter of 1998; $5000 would go to the photographer whose picture captured the event. The winner was Taylor Knox, a 26-year-old Californian, who paddled in on what K2 officials called a 50-foot face. The ride made surf magazines and ricocheted around the Internet. None of the power surfers from Jaws bothered to enter, nor did they attend the Quiksilver-sponsored Men Who Surf Mountains contest the following year.

In the beginning, the group of friends who pioneered tow-in surfing didn't want publicity.

Surf photographer Sylvain Cazenave says, "Before the Wave Runner, when Laird was out testing the cloudbreaks with his Zodiac rubber boat, I never knew where he was. I had to chase him to get photos. I had to convince him that photos were inevitable. But in the beginning they just wanted to avoid the crowds and find a big place to surf by themselves."

Perhaps they wanted to avoid controversy. Paddle surfers defend the purity of man against wave. Tow-in surfing, they say, has turned a solo pursuit into a team sport. The mechanical has violated the natural with the noise of engines and the smell of exhaust. There are surf reports on the Internet, radio buoys, and helicopters overhead. You're only as good as your driver. A mechanical breakdown could mean death.

The conflict is similar to debates about the use of bottled oxygen on Mount Everest. Power surfers have harnessed technology to take them to a previously unridden realm, to the rarefied terrain where simple acts have ultimate consequences. Some worry that tow-in surfing will allow the rich and unqualified to buy their way onto waves that can and will kill them.

But even purists admit how much bigger the waves at Jaws are.

"You don't forget for a second how dangerous it is," says Buzzy Kerbox, who has done both kinds of surfing. "It's exciting and demanding, but ultimately, you're on your own. You have to be able to back it up physically."

The inescapable fact is that they have changed surfing forever.

Despite their initial shyness, big-wave surfers have become icons. Beachwear companies now offer big-wave shorts designed, they say, not to be ripped from your body. They come in bright colors with a special checkerboard design to aid helicopter rescue. A coffee-table book on Jaws chronicles the exploits of the 40 or so athletes who have mastered the big waves. National Geographic devoted a cover story to Jaws. Hollywood concocted a dramatic feature presenting the conflict between purists and power surfers, called, appropriately, In God's Hands. In cities across the nation, audiences attending the Imax movie Extreme watch a tow-in surfer on a screen that is six stories tall--almost the height of the wave. The walls tremble.