The Big Juice: Epic Tales of Big Wave Surfing Read online

  Edited by

  JOHN LONG AND SAM GEORGE

  Preface by John Long . . . . . . . . . . . . v

  Introduction by Sam George . . . . . . . . . . vii

  Big Wave Timeline xx . . . . . . . . . . . . i i i

  as told by Shane Dorian, Mark Healey, and Dave Wassell . . . . . . . . . 1

  Surf Like Jay: Moriarty (1978-20( by Ben Marcus . . . . . . 17

  by

  . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

  Surviving December 1st, by Ted Gugelyk . . . . 67

  Beyond the as told by Greg Noll . . . . . . . 87

  by Sam George . . . . . . . . . . 97

  Tangled Up in as told by Maya Gabeira . . . 103

  Hammer by Evan Slater . . . . . . . . 113

  Spirit of the Foals by Leonard Doyle . . . . . . 129

  Beneath the by Chris Dixon . . . . . . . 135

  Reflections on by Brock Little . . . . . . 155

  Dungeons by Rusty Long . . . . . . . . 163

  by Tony Harrington . . . . . . . . 173

  gars on the North Shore by Sam George . . . . . . . . . . . . 183

  Pat Curren Coffee by Mike Davis . . . . . . 215

  Dislocated: Mavericks by Taylor Paul . . . . 225

  if Garrett by Kimball Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . 235

  The by Evan Slater . . . . . . . 251

  Aamion by Daniel Duane. . . 259

  as told by Mike Parsons and Greg Long . . . . . . . . . . . . 273

  High Noon at by Chris Dixon 285 . . . . .

  The Heart of the as told by Vincent Lartizen . . 295

  Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299

  Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . 301

  About the Editors . . . . . . . . . . . . 302

  What a blast working on this project with my friend Sam George. Our office was Rockreation, the local climbing gym in West LA. We'd "take a meeting" there every week or so, talk about the book for five minutes, and spend the rest of the time climbing and recounting to each other the most remote adventure stories, which we grew up on and continue to read incessantly. We both are prodigious talkers and could never get a word in edgewise. But we climbed a lot of plastic. I'm not sure how this book ever got done, considering all the other projects we had going concurrently. For most of this past year, The Big Juice stretched before me like a gracious bridge over the gray ditch of my other assignments. The Big Juice was never work, rather a passion.

  Per the stories, we've tried to stay close to first-person accounts with people who were physically there, embedded in the pit," so the writing is rooted in the iconic moments or taken from direct contact with the key players. But there is much more to the big wave milieu than just monster surf and survival stories. So we've sprinkled in some arcana and anecdotes that evoke the mood and atmosphere of the big wave continuum, including the equipment-as sacred as an Indian's wampum-a few personalities for the ages, and the spirit and vibe of the whole shebang. Many are enchanted by the big juice but not the two-wave hold-downs. For those, we offer this volume.

  Yet, even here we run the risk of misrepresenting the basic allure and betting against the mystery of the sea. Big wave surfing has become increasingly popular in the last decade, but it's nothing new, and something lasts, an enchanted slipstream you can feel reaching through these stories and through the fissures of time. To the bold and the restless, the ocean has called forever. Few have said it better than Algernon Charles Swinburne:

  A massive Jaws left-like trying to outrun chain lightning. Sebastian Steudner (above) and Yuri Soledade (below)

  PHOTO © ERIKAEDER.COM

  Shane Dorian sat high on a hill overlooking the harbor at Half Moon Bay, California. It was a late afternoon in February, the end of an unseasonably warm day along the northern California coast. Scattered around the inner harbor, behind the protective arm of the Princeton Jetties, both the commercial fishing fleet and the private yachts nestled against the quay, snug and satisfied.

  But not Shane Dorian.

  Sitting on the back deck of a friend's hillside home, Shane gazed out on the far side of the black stone jetty to wild, open ocean, out past the jagged black sea stacks, toward the lineup of the surf break known as "Mavericks." It was hard to imagine that within a few hours on this calm, glassy afternoon, this same lineup, so benign and indefinable from this vantage, would transform itself into a battlefield, churning under the assault of a titanic north-northwest swell and breaking waves in the 50- to 60-foot range, monster waves, some twelve hours out yet but descending relentlessly on the bay, predators from the deep.

  Dorian knows what's coming, just as he knows what's required of him when the waves come marching in. So he sits there, scraping wax onto the deck of the brand-new 9'8" big wave gun laid across his lap, trying not to look at the Mavericks' lineup, trying not to think about the first time he surfed the place-the very last time he surfed the place-when he came within a half-breath of drowning.

  Dorian recounts his epic story in full on page 1. But sitting there just then, counting down the minutes to the winter's first danger swell, Shane was speaking about anything but that episode, so I did most all the talking. I'd known Shane since he was a fourteen-year-old grommet competing in his first professional event, and even then, as now, his steely aplomb was evident; it was hard not to envy him for it.

  Shane Dorian's mind-bending Teahupoo barrel, 2009

  PHOTO © ROBERT BROWN

  Shane enjoys one of surfing's most enviable careers, transitioning from hot up-and-comer to top-ranked pro to fabulously sponsored free-surfer to big wave hellman with hardly a ripple in his gunslinger's cool. The outrageous wave in Tahiti that won Dorian the 2008 Billabong XXL Ride of the Year award epitomizes surfing's right stuff. When, after recovering through a series of near-disasters on a 30-foot Teahupoo widowmaker, he was blown out of the humongous barrel upside down-totally cool and seemingly in control even when wiping out.

  I've had my own surfing career, a path that sometimes crossed Shane's in various oceans. But watching him quietly preparing for the next day's adventures, I told Shane that if I regretted anything about my surfer's life, it was the big waves I hadn't ridden and that as someone sitting on the shoulder of big wave surfing, both literally and figuratively, I wished I had on occasion pushed myself into the heavy water alongside the Shane Dorians of the world.

  No, you don't, Sam," he said, looking out again toward Mavericks like an infantryman on the eve of battle. "You enjoy your surfing. You always have. This . . ."

  Shane looked down at the board on his lap, regarding its curves, pointed nose, and stiletto tail-it really did look like a weapon. "This is an obsession. And I'm really not sure how healthy it is in the long run."

  If anyone has earned the right to make that statement, it's Dorian. And yet he's hardly the first.

  Big wave surfing has always represented the obsessive nature of top-end adventure sports, though of the millions who surf worldwide, only a handful ever ride big waves, at relatively few spots across the globe, and only then on relatively rare occasions. Compared with the legions of surfers whose commitment requires daily surf regardless of conditions, work and school schedules, or relationship status, big wave riding is a tiny aspect of the surfing experience. Yet, it looms huge in the surfing world's collective imagination, establishing the distal end of the scale of what we, as surfers, believe is possible, a benchmark against which, despite our relative comfort "on the shoulder of the big wave," we constantly measure ourselves. And it absolutely dominates the civilian (read: the general nonsurfing public) perception of the sport. What casual observer knows the current pro circuit ratings, let alone that
on a 2-foot wave some Santa Cruz surfer finally pulled off the sport's first successful kick-flip? No, when it comes to representing the height of surfing action, it's always been big waves.

  "The higher the sea and larger the waves, the better the sport," wrote William Ellis, a clear-eyed Calvinist missionary who, upon his visit to the Hawaiian Islands in the late 1820s, was impressed by the water skills of local surfers.

  "Sometimes they chose a place where the deep water reaches the beach, but generally prefer a part where the rocks are 10 or 20 feet under water and extend to a distance from shore, as the surf breaks more violently over these."

  Even the ancient Polynesians gravitated toward big waves, no doubt intoning their surf chants as a modern deep-water hunter would check his surf-forecasting website.

  There is even evidence of history's first big wave surfer. Researching a pair of antique Hawaiian koa wood surfboards abandoned at Honolulu's Bishop Museum in the early 1930s, surfing innovator Tom Blake discovered that they belonged to Chief Abner Paki, who once ruled over a fiefdom in Makaha, a wave-swept shore on the west side of the island of Oahu. Blake, adding to a number of firsts that included designing a lightweight hollow board, putting a fin on a surfboard, and inventing the waterproof camera housing, penned Hawaiian Surfboard in 1935, the first serious examination of the sport, in which he described Paki and his passion:

  "It is said that Paki would not go out surf-riding unless it was too stormy for anyone else to go out," wrote Blake. "His reputation of going out only in big surf is a natural thing when a man gets beyond his youth. Today it takes big waves to get the old-timers out on their boards."

  It wasn't too long after Blake's book came out that a new wave of surfers began getting out there when it was too stormy for all others, and the history of Hawaiian big wave riding has been well and often chronicled: the development of the narrow-tailed hot curl in the 1940s, the first serious "bigger wave" board, and the modern exploration of ancient blue-water breaks like Makaha Point Surf by Island pioneers Wally Froiseth, John Kelly, and George Downing, to mention a few, and later the first crew of California adventurers like Pete Peterson, Whitey Harrison, Wally Hoffman, and Buzzy Trent. (For a detailed account of the discovery of Oahu s North Shore and its subsequent status as big wave surfing's mecca, see "Harsh Realm" on page 183.) A question largely unanswered, however, is why it took surfers so long to look beyond Hawaii in their search for big waves. It was as if the scale of the waves being ridden in the Islands during the late 1950s and early 1960s was so outrageous, the prospect so daunting, that perhaps the surfing world was silently grateful that huge surf existed nowhere else. Consider this narration from the most influential surf film of all time, in which filmmaker Bruce Brown, justifying 1965's Endless Summer eureka moment of discovering 3- to 4-foot Cape St. Francis peelers, emphatically stated:

  "No one goes looking for a really big wave. If you found one you'd never ride it-it would be much too dangerous."

  This from a film that introduced the surfing and nonsurfing worlds to the enchanting concept of Planet Surf, albeit with small waves everywhere but Hawaii.

  For almost half a century the surf world's general perception limited big wave riding to an 8-mile stretch along the northern shore of Oahu, even when surfers saw swells rising elsewhere with their own eyes. A 1972 issue of Surfer magazine, for example, featured the first photos of giant Mexican beachbreak at Petacalco, one particularly fearsome shot running with the caption "15 to 18 and it ain't Hawaii," the editor's disbelief impossible to hide. Fourteen years would pass before the big wave paradigm shifted forever.

  In 1986 Surfing magazine ran a cover story featuring twotime world champion Tom Curren, along with future big wave hero Mike Parsons, riding a massive winter peak on Isla Todos Santos, a remote and barren islet off the coast of Baja California. Known as "Killers," this thick, powerful right-hander had previously been ridden only during moderate summer and autumn swells, and never mind the big winter days like this one. Working with thenfledgling surf forecaster Sean Collins, the Surfing team anticipated double-overhead surf during one particularly strong, long-interval, northwest swell. But when the Ensenada fishing pangas delivered the surfers and photographers into Killers' lineup, even the world champ knew at once he was seriously undergunned. The photos that ran-including the Curren cover shot-detonated like a bomb, blasting away the idea that "20 foot" could mean only Hawaii.

  "We couldn't believe our eyes," said hellman Mike Parsons, whose longtime association with the break later earned him the moniker "Todos Parsons." "Waves as big as Sunset Beach right here in our own back yard. But we had to call it '18 feet: We just couldn't say '20, not here on the West Coast."

  Whatever you called them, the winter waves at Killers were huge, and over the next few seasons it was discovered that those big, big days occurred more frequently than at most of the timehonored Hawaiian breaks. Todos Santos became the first new, truly legitimate big wave arena outside of the North Shore, and, as if suddenly realizing that their world was not flat, surfers all over the globe began considering the possibilities.

  Fearless Mark Healey, backside in the peak at Waimea Bay

  PHOTO © JEREMIAH KLEIN

  Of course, nobody then knew that a quiet, intense young goofy foot from Half Moon Bay, California, was riding four-story waves, all by himself, and had been since 1975. Jeff Clark tried for years to convince his friends that the ferocious peak jacking up off the Pillar Point headland was a world-class big wave, and for over fifteen years, Mavericks' waves were giant redwood trees falling in the forest that only Clark could hear. That finally changed in 1992, when Clark finally talked Santa Cruz big wave stars Tom Powers, Dave and Richard Schmidt, and Vince Collier into making the short drive up the coast to his private, cold-water Waimea. Surfer magazine's cover story soon followed. The concept introduced six years earlier at Killers on Todos Santos now gained widespread credence: This wasn't just Planet Surf, it was Planet Big Surf.

  Caught inside-a dilemma with consequences at Isla Todos Santos, Mexico

  PHOTO © ROBERT BROWN

  During that same year, a third, epoch-bending big wave innovation occurred: the advent of tow-in surfing. On the seminal first day in'92 when Laird Hamilton, Derrick Doerner, and Buzzy Kerbox took Kerbox's inflatable Zodiac out into a huge swell at Backyard Sunset Beach and towed each other into 20-foot swells at the end of a ski rope, the big wave world's axis shifted. By the next winter Laird and crew had swapped out the cumbersome Zodiac for a jet ski and moved their operation to nearby Maui, where they drafted the jet assist to campaign a colossal peak called "Peahi," whipping each other into what previously was considered the "unridden realm." During each successive Peahi swell (known to most haoles as "Jaws") and each remarkable ride, surfing's arcane wave scale was recalibrated once and for all. Not so many years before, Mike Parsons simply could not say the words "twenty foot." Now 40-, 50-, and even 60-foot waves were being ridden. And not just ridden, but ripped apart as on their tiny, foot-strapped sleds towsurfers proved they didn't need big surfboards to ride big waves, only to catch them. Freed from the need to paddle barehanded, this new full-throttle generation of big wave riders applied smallwave, short-board maneuvers to jumbo surf, resulting in the greatest quantum leap in performance the surfing world had ever seen.

  This movement was epitomized in a single ride. Up until 2002, towing in was generally reserved for massive, expansive, deepwater breaks like Jaws and Mavericks, waves traditionally considered too big to paddle into by hand. That summer, however, Laird Hamilton shipped his skis and tow boards across the Pacific to Tahiti, chasing a powerful southern swell to the coral reef pass known as "Teahupoo" (pronounced te-a-hu-po-oh). This violently abrupt, cylindrical left tube had already gained a reputation as one of the heaviest waves in any ocean; nobody yet dared towing this shallow-water meat-grinder. Just as nobody-not even Hamilton himself-was prepared for what happened when, during a supersized set, Laird dropped the rope and whipped into a wave so
thick, so hollow, and so treacherous as to be impossible to ride. But ride Laird did, spontaneously improvising technique as he shot through the seething vortex, powering through one unbelievable section after the next. It literally was like nothing any surfer had ever seen, which explains why after successfully negotiating this horizontal hurricane, Hamilton burst into tears. And when the first image of what later became known as the "Millennium Wave" appeared on the cover of Surfer magazine, it was accompanied by three simple words: "Oh my God!"

  This one wave did more to change the game of big wave riding than anything in the past forty years. Before, danger-wave performance was reserved for either hollow-wave tubes or megasurf. By merging these two genres, Laird's Tahitian titan redefined rideable. Almost before the ink dried on the Surfer cover, motivated surfers set their sights on those scary cloud break waves and gnashing "slabs" that had previously been no-man's-land. More importantly, they now had the vehicle to explore this terrain, the jet ski providing unprecedented mobility and access to a brand-new world of big waves.

  Scouring the globe for the spawn of massive oceanic low-pressure systems, bold watermen scoured the coastlines of Australia, Tasmania, South Africa, South America, Ireland, France-even international waters-and it seemed that everywhere they looked there were epic new big waves in waiting. Imagine if the mountaineering world had only now discovered the Himalayas. In terms of surfing history, nothing has so characterized the first dozen years of the new century as the proliferation of global big wave riding-and on a sliding scale that goes only up. This includes a trend within the trend, as many of the sport's top heavy-water masters have dropped the tow rope and returned to tackling 50- and 60-foot waves "by fair means," with nothing but bare hands, brawn, and balls (with all due respect to the rising swell of talented female big wave riders), paddling themselves over the edge on their long big wave guns.