Amazing Surfing Stories E-Book

Alex Wade

• Herausgeber: Fernhurst Books Limited
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

This eclectic mix of surfing stories has something for everyone, from classic tales of monster waves and epic battles to stories of when life among the breakers goes wrong. There are accounts of death and disaster, as well as bravery and triumph. The bizarre and the extreme rub shoulders with perfect breaks and beautiful beaches. Be thrilled by legendary surfers, as well as learning about local heroes who never made the headlines. Each compelling tale has been chosen to stoke the fire of armchair surfers and hardcore wave-riders alike, and many are illustrated with colour photographs.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Part One: Going to Extremes

Child's Play? Definitely Not

Hold Down

Surviving the Atom Blaster

Oh My God (Take 1)

Size Matters

Part Two: Tragic Tales

In Memory of Andy Irons

Veitch: RIP

QED

The Peterson Problem

Part Three: When the Big Stuff Bites

A Bite out of Burle

People In Car Crashes Don't Stop Driving

Bare Hands and Bombs

The White Zone

Part Four: Gonzo Interlude

Being Dave Rastovich

A Thrust Too Far

Do you know Russell Winter?

Four Surfers and a Painting

Part Five: Contests and Communities

Higher than a High Five

Black Clouds and Bellyboards

Bad Boy Bobby and the New York Quiksilver Pro

The Big M

Lord Thurso, Cool in Caithness

A Debt at Dungeons

After Rio Breaks

Part Six: Worldwide Waves

Seven Ghosts

Hokkaido – The Rights of Passage

1,300 Miles for a Wave

Ed's Left, aka the Spot with No Name

Loco on Lobos

The Lady in the Emerald Green Bathing Dress

Purring thanks to ‘Da Cat’

Part Seven: Obsession

Peg Leg Rik

Soldiers Get Stoked

The Daily Wavester

The Amazing Mr Slater

Part Eight: Inspiration

Stoked

Colonel ‘Mad Jack’ Churchill

OMG (Take 2)

Dr Sarah and the Meaning of Surfing

Acknowledgements

Color Plate Section

© 2012 Alex Wade

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wade, Alex, 1966- Amazing surfing stories / Alex Wade. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-119-94254-2 (hardback) 1. Surfing—Anecdotes. I. Title. GV840.S8W28 2012 797.3′2—dc23 2012024429

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-119-94254-2 (ebk) ISBN 978-1-118-33727-1 (ebk) ISBN 978-1-118-34020-2 (ebk) ISBN 978-1-118-33736-3 (ebk)

Cover image: © seandavey.com

Wiley Nautical – sharing your passion

At Wiley Nautical we're passionate about anything that happens in, on or around the water.

Wiley Nautical used to be called Fernhurst Books and was founded by a national and European sailing champion. Our authors are the leading names in their fields with Olympic gold medals around their necks and thousands of sea miles in their wake. Wiley Nautical is still run by people with a love of sailing, motorboating, surfing, diving, kitesurfing, canal boating and all things aquatic.

Visit us online at www.wileynautical.com for offers, videos, podcasts and more.

This book is dedicated to my surfing sons, Harry and Elliot, and to the man in the east, Neil Watson

PREFACE

This book aims to do what it says on the tin: it is a collection of amazing surfing stories. What, though, is an ‘amazing’ surfing story?

In many cases, the stories are demonstrably ‘amazing’, as in the tale of Laird Hamilton's infamous ‘Millennium Wave’ at Teahupoo on 17 August 2000, when he took surfing to a new level, or in two pieces which feature another Hawaiian hellman, Garrett McNamara. ‘GMAC’, as he is known, surfed what was subsequently ratified as a world record wave at Nazaré, off the coast of Portugal, in November 2011 (it came in at a hefty 78ft and is recounted in Size Matters), but perhaps even more astonishingly he has also surfed waves created by a calving glacier face. He described this outlandish Alaskan experience as being “like sitting underneath the Empire State Building, waiting for it to come down on you” (see Child's Play).

Hamilton and McNamara join other exponents of extreme surfing featured in this book, who include Shane Dorian (see Hold Down), Carlos Burle and Mark Visser. These men are well-known in the surfing community, and elsewhere – Australian surfer Visser especially is making a name for himself beyond surfing, thanks to achievements like surfing the legendary Maui break of Jaws at night (see Surviving the Atom Blaster). Other surfers and their stories may not be so embedded in the mass wave-riding consciousness, but are just as mind-boggling: witness English surfer Andrew Cotton's fearlessness in The White Zone, and unsung, underground hero Tony Butt's commitment to big wave surfing in Bare Hands and Bombs.

The quality of amazement may not arise from a single act of derring-do. It may be down to the way a life was lived, and the way it ended, as in the stories of part two Tragic Tales. Or it might flow from the spirit of a competition (see Higher Than a High Five) – or its aftermath (Bad Boy Bobby and the New York Quiksilver Pro). Travel opens the mind and if it might not engender jaw-dropping as profound as a shark attack (see Bethany Hamilton's tale in People in Car Crashes Don't Stop Driving), a Rip Curl search in Sumatra led to some extraordinary moments in Seven Ghosts, while a South African surf trip by a Cornish photographer yielded two opposing sides of surf travel: on the one hand, words to treasure from surfing legend Miki Dora; on the other, the tragedy of a shark attack which ended in death.

Elsewhere, there are gentler stories that can legitimately wear the amazing tag. Did Agatha Christie really go on a surf trip when she famously disappeared for 11 days in December 1926? Read The Lady in the Emerald Green Bathing Dress to decide. There's an act of selflessness in a competitive world in A Debt at Dungeons, an obsessive nature to beat all others in The Daily Wavester, and wonderful examples of determination to surf despite adversity in Peg Leg Rik and Soldiers Get Stoked.

There's a mild Gonzo interlude, too. For me, Dave Rastovich's life is, quite simply, amazing – take a look at Being Dave Rastovich to disappear, for a while, into his world. Other less than conventional surf stories appear in this part (called, funnily enough, Gonzo Interlude) which is intended to create portraits rather than precision, rather like Tony Plant's painting of the last tree on earth, one viewed by Rasta, Dorian and Buttons Kaluhiokalani, among others, in Four Surfers and a Painting.

The stories end with inspirational tales. Colonel ‘Mad Jack’ Churchill was the first man to ride the Severn Bore – what a man he was, too. If ever there was one, Mad Jack's was a life well lived, as is Mark Cunningham's, the mesmerizingly good Oahu bodysurfer – see OMG (Take 2). Cunningham bodysurfs with the beauty of a dolphin; my own experience of surfing with them is recounted in Stoked.

Finally, the book's last story perhaps goes to show that this is a book of amazing surfing stories which does what it says on the tin – with a caveat. For me, one of my most amazing surfing experiences came not thanks to a monster 30ft wave, or a near death experience, or a barrel to beat all barrels or the slickest, most radical off-the-lip ever performed – still less by witnessing wave-riding genius or talking to any of the leviathans of the surf world – but through surfing waist-to-shoulder high waves on a balmy summer's eve at a local secret spot, in the company of a person I barely know. The break should have been crowded, as it always is in the summer, but unaccountably there was barely anyone around. Dr Sarah and I shared benign and mellow waves whose memory will last us a lifetime – that, for me, is the most amazing thing about surfing.

PART ONE

Going to Extremes

CHILD'S PLAY? DEFINITELY NOT

Garrett McNamara and Keali'i Mamala are not the first surfers to ride Alaskan waves. But they are the first, and possibly the last, to ride Alaskan waves which were generated by a calving glacier.

Midway through the trailer for George Casey's 1998 film Alaska: Spirit of the Wild, the camera pans over the deep crevasses of a glacier in a sequence filmed from a helicopter or a small plane. The landscape is frigid, stark and monumental, beautiful and yet inimical to man. Next is a head-on shot, probably from land, of the face of the glacier. A vast slab of ice detaches itself from the face and plummets into the water below. A huge and murky, mud-brown wave erupts, staggering in its velocity, only for the footage to move almost as quickly as the rhapsodic score and sweep from mountains to whales and other Alaskan wildlife. The trailer closes with an image of a grizzly bear cub playfully eating a fish.

Anyone who loves the great outdoors would feel stirred by the trailer, let alone the 40-minute Charlton Heston-narrated film. But if you happened to be a surfer, and you witnessed the waves created by the ice as it fell from the face of the glacier, what would you think? Would you think ‘Wouldn't it be great to ride one of those waves?’ Or would you conclude that any such enterprise would be the height of madness?

For Ryan Casey, who worked on Spirit of the Wild as the stills photographer, the sight of the glacier-generated waves wouldn't go away. A fanatical surfer, Casey believed that the waves were rideable. While working on the film in 1995 he had seen them peeling for 200 yards, and at serious size: the biggest offered faces of between 20 and 30 ft. The fact that the slabs of ice were falling onto an ice shelf which was a mere 18 inches in depth meant that these waves also had an awful lot of power, even forming barrels sometimes.

The scene of the phenomenon seen by Casey and those who worked on Spirit of the Wild was Child's Glacier, some 50 miles from the small city of Cordova in south-central Alaska. Between May and September, as the glacier inches forward, it ‘calves’ – chunks of ice collapse into the water of Copper River below, as the river undermines its face. Each year, the calving process draws the more intrepid kind of tourist. Intrepid because this is an elemental place, much visited by bears, especially when outsize calving occurs; the waves caused by the falling ice detonate like a round of artillery fire and can throw up salmon on the shore of the opposite river bank, some 300 yards away. Bears – and eagles – know the sound, and they will not spurn such an easy meal.

For a long time, Casey thought about the waves he'd seen at Child's Glacier. And then, one day, he mentioned them to a good friend. That man, Oahu-based Garrett McNamara, was the kind to say ‘Let's do it’. In 2007, 12 years after Casey worked on Spirit of the Wild, he and McNamara, along with a formidable Hawaiian surfer by the name of Keali'i Mamala, ventured to Alaska to do what no man had ever done before, and what very few, if any, will ever do again. They set up camp opposite Child's Glacier for a week and took on the waves created by ice falling from a 300 ft high glacier face.

“It was intense,” says McNamara, whose frame and features look as if they have been hewn from rock. With deep, dark eyes and his black hair cut in a boxer's crewcut – there are neither the blue eyes nor the long, flowing blonde locks of surf cliché here – McNamara, or ‘GMAC’ as he is known, is one of surfing's characters. There is something primeval about him, something immutable. He brings an intensity to the mere uttering of the word ‘intense’, let alone in the way he lives his life.

Despite hailing from inland Massachusetts, GMAC has blazed a remarkable trail in surfing, which includes victory in the tow surfing world cup and a prodigious session at Praia de Norte, Nazaré, in Portugal 2011, when he rode what was widely cited as a world record 90 ft wave. McNamara has also earned a reputation as one of the best Teahupoo surfers. He has pushed the limits of stand up paddle board (SUP) surfing, taking SUPs deep into barrels at places like Jaws. But as much as the undoubted prowess required for such exploits, McNamara is known for his fearlessness. He looks like a gladiator and, by all accounts, acts like one too. If anyone could feel sanguine about sitting for hours underneath a towering glacier face, waiting for house-sized seracs of ice to cascade into icy river water, it is surely him.

McNamara's trip to Child's Glacier was the first time he had visited Alaska. “We were there for 10 days,” he says. “We spent seven of them in the water waiting for blocks of ice to fall. It was daylight for 20 hours, which made for long, full-on and very cold days. The water was freezing.” At 34 degrees Fahrenheit – which equates to around one degree Celsius – this statement is nigh on exact. McNamara and Mamala were suitably kitted out in thick wetsuits with 7 mm gloves and booties, not to mention a 2 mm survival suit complete with a helmet. They took a support crew and two jetskis: there was no way that it would be possible to paddle in to the glacier's waves. Moreover, jetskis would also enable them to outrun waves if need be.

And so it proved. “The first day was terrifying,” says McNamara. “It was like sitting underneath the Empire State Building, waiting for it to come down on you.” So frightening was the pair's first day that they were tempted to give up and return to Hawaii. “We thought about it. We had a feeling that maybe we'd taken on more than we could handle. We couldn't predict exactly where the ice would sheer off and fall, and on the first day it seemed like the whole glacier was dropping into the river. On top of that the place was eerie; we were miles from anywhere, co-existing with brown and black bears and a bunch of salmon. The whole atmosphere made you feel small and scared, and then the sound of the ice when it smashed into the river – it was awesome, really, really heavy. But we decided to stay and try again.”

Their perseverance paid off. As the days passed, McNamara and Mamala fell into a routine, heading out on their jetski across the river to the gargantuan wall of the glacier and then taking turns to make passes underneath it. By doing so the surfer driving the jetski would be able to turn and tow the other into the path of an oncoming wave, hopefully picking it up as it peeled to the left or right once the debris of shards of ice had passed. They ended up catching waves every day for the remainder of the trip, some with faces at least double overhead high. Of standout rides, Mamala had a left that seemed to go on forever; McNamara had what he calls “a little shampoo job” on a right-hander. Tourists and fishermen who had ventured as far as the viewing point on the riverbank opposite were treated to an extraordinary spectacle: never could they have expected to make the trek to Child's Glacier and witness two surfers going about their business.

A summer's week at play underneath the terminus of Child's Glacier was enough. It was time to go home. By this point, McNamara had become convinced that calving glaciers are capable of producing the biggest waves in the world: “They could definitely produce bigger waves. It depends on how big the glacier is, how much water it displaces and how deep the water is and if there is a bottleneck where the swell hits. You could possibly find the biggest waves in the world like Lituya Bay.”

A family man – he has three children (Ariana, Titus and Tiari) with Nicole, whom he says is “the love of my life” – McNamara is comfortable with risk. “I've been doing this kind of thing all my life so it's just how it has always been.” He's also at ease about the model he provides for his children: “I encourage my kids to follow their own dreams and do what they're passionate about.” But he describes his experiences at Child's Glacier as “the most horrifying, closest to death, heaviest rush I have ever experienced.” Amazingly, he also says “I can't really get a rush like that anymore in the ocean.”

Even for a man of McNamara's capabilities, it seems that glacier surfing isn't child's play. Asked if he would ever do it again, McNamara is emphatic: “Never again. It was as extreme as it gets. Definitely not.”

HOLD DOWN

A Two-Wave Beating at Maverick's Leads to Inspiration.

Shane Dorian knows what he's doing in big surf. In fact, as a member of surfing's ‘new school’, which came to prominence in the 1990s, he knows what he's doing in any kind of surf. The man, who is the son of a stunt double for Elvis Presley, is just as good at getting air and sliding on the lip as he is at paddling into massive Jaws and charging Teahupoo.

But however good you are, sometimes things go wrong. As Dorian puts it: “Todd Chesser, Donnie Solomon, Mark Foo, Sion Milosky – they were all super-fit, confident guys. They all died big wave surfing. It can happen to anyone.” It nearly did to Dorian at Maverick's in February 2009.

Dorian had flown from his home on Hawaii's Big Island to the notorious northern California big wave break on 13 February – his wife Lisa's birthday. He recalls the motivation clearly: “I'd never surfed Maverick's but had been building up to it for years. The chart showed a huge swell so I went.”

Lean and ultra-disciplined – he is in the gym every day for a two-hour session starting at 5 o'clock in the morning – Dorian speaks quietly, calmly, almost gently. But despite the provenance of its name, there's nothing gentle about Maverick's. Legend has it that the break acquired its name in honour of an exuberant, white-haired German Shepherd puppy called Maverick. Sometime in March 1958 three surfers, Alex Matienzo, Jim Thompson and Dick Notmeyer, paddled out to surf waves which they had seen breaking off Pillar Point, just north of Half Moon Bay. Maverick was with Matienzo, and, accustomed as he was to swimming in the sea (or perhaps mindful of his role as man's best friend), decided to take to the water too. The loyal canine was later tied to a car bumper for his own good, allowing Matienzo, Thompson and Notmeyer to surf overhead waves about a quarter of a mile from the shore. They were content to leave it at that, but named the break they'd pioneered Maverick's Point.

The wave remained unridden for nearly two decades, but in 1975 Jeff Clark, who grew up in Half Moon Bay, decided to take on the break which he recalled one of his high school teachers calling ‘Maverick's’. Clark's name has since become synonymous with it, and no wonder. Aged 17, having watched Maverick's breaking on a number of occasions, Clark paddled out with the words of a school-friend ringing in his ears: his friend said he'd “call the Coast Guard and tell them where I last saw you”. It was obvious that surfing Maverick's was going to be dangerous – the wave breaks a long way from the shore, it's cold and murky, prone to ferocious currents and sharky – but Clark was smitten. For 15 years, he surfed the wave alone, even learning to surf switchfoot so that he could ride frontside at Maverick's whether it was breaking to the left or to the right.

Eventually and inevitably, word got out. Surfers from northern California's surf city, Santa Cruz, began to drive the few miles north to Maverick's, inspired by tales of hollow and powerful 20 ft beasts which had been ridden by Dave Schmidt and Tom Powers, the first men to surf the wave with Clark. Next up came a southward influx, as San Francisco's big wave surfers learned of the break. Then, with the publication of a photograph in a 1990 issue of Surfer magazine, the surfing world knew all about Maverick's. Within a few years, its ‘discovery’ had metamorphosed into the stuff of legend thanks first to Santa Cruz surfer Jay Moriarty and then to Hawaiian big wave charger Mark Foo. Aged just 16, Moriarty took off late on a monster right-hander, only to freefall down the face into a wipeout of seismic magnitude; the incident was captured on film, and made the cover of Surfer. Four days after Moriarty's skirmish with death, Foo, who had flown over from Oahu with fellow big wave surfer Ken Bradshaw, died while surfing an 18 ft wave at Maverick's.

Foo's demise shocked the surfing world. Handsome, slick when it came to self-promotion, and yet deserving of the accolades that came his way thanks to his fearlessness and poise in giant surf, Foo coined one of surfing's great quotes: “If you want the ultimate thrill, you've got to be willing to pay the ultimate price.” The media loved it; the media loved Foo; but soundbite turned into bitter reality on 23 December 1994 when Foo, surfing Maverick's for the first time, caught a rail and wiped out. Maverick's was so crowded that day that it wasn't until hours later, when his body was found floating on the surface, that people noticed his absence.

Shane Dorian knew Foo well. He also knew the next man to die at Maverick's, Hawaiian surfer Sion Milosky. Kauai born and raised, Milosky lost his life at Maverick's after a two-wave hold down on 16 March 2011. What happened was dramatically described by another Maverick's surfer, Ryan Seelbach: “On this particular wave, [Sion] was right in the heart of the bowl. He made the drop, got to the bottom, did a bottom turn and the thing just mowed him over. There was no making it to the shoulder on that.” Although he was later plucked from the water by Nathan Fletcher – a top-rated surfer who once snapped his femur while surfing Pipeline (on a benign, 4-6 ft day) – and given CPR on the beach, there was nothing anyone could do to save Milosky. Videographer Chris Killen, who was involved in the attempt to save Milosky's life, distilled the essence of Maverick's thus: “They cut his suit off, and we found a flotation device in his suit and it freaks me out that a guy like Sion, arguably one of the gnarliest big wave surfers in the world, could not survive a Maverick's hold down, even with a floatation device. Once they put him in the ambulance, we knew he was gone.”

Dorian's first Maverick's session seemed to augur well. As he recalls, “The first day was really good. It was really big but I felt comfortable and confident.” But on day two, Maverick's took on a darker hue. “The next day was supposed to be smaller, but it wasn't. I fell on a wave and had a two-wave hold down.”

Dorian speaks in an even, measured tone which masks the drama of that day. According to one witness, he was under water for over a minute. “I was thinking to myself ‘Stay calm, stay calm, stay calm’ but after a while it was impossible not to panic. I knew I was getting close to blacking out. I had to start fighting and scrambling for the surface. It was either that or die. Just before I surfaced, I thought ‘That's it, there's no chance, I’m not coming up'. I thought about Lisa, about my son Jackson and daughter Charlie. But I did. There was just time to catch a breath before the next wave hit me.”

There was then yet another wave, pushing Dorian in towards the rocks before Frank Quirarte, a photographer known for his coverage of Maverick's, came to the rescue. “I think I would have been OK by that stage, but was glad to see Frank arrive on his jetski,” says Dorian. There followed two days in which he felt “really out of it. I had concussion and my body felt battered. I slept for a whole day and night and had a headache for two days. I was so spaced out that I forgot to ring Lisa and say Happy Birthday.”

But as Dorian reflected on his experience at Maverick's on the plane back to Hawaii, inspiration struck. The idea for what he subsequently christened ‘the V1-Suit’ crystallised. “I'd been experimenting with foam floatation in wetsuits but realised that these wouldn't be enough at a place like Maverick's. The idea of a wetsuit with an inflatable air bladder came to me and as soon as I was home I went online to see if there was anything like it. I was really surprised but there wasn't. I did some more research and then got in touch with Hub Hubbard, Billabong's wetsuit designer. It took another five or six months but then one day a package arrived in the mail. It was the first prototype of the suit, using a CO2 cartridge to inflate the bladder when it's pulled by a ripcord. I tested it the same day in calm water and couldn't believe how quickly it brought me to the surface.”