Greg Noll's monster drop-to-annihilation wave at Makaha on December 4, 1969, was the defining wave of surfing's defining big-wave swell. World champ Fred Hemmings watched from the beach and said it was the biggest wave ever ridden. Noll himself said it was five or ten feet over his previous best, and not long afterward he tapped out of the game, moved to Crescent City, and became a fisherman.

If you stayed awake during Surf History 101, you already know that Noll's 1969 ride is legendary in part because it wasn't filmed or photographed. There are a few shots of Noll riding Makaha that day, but none of the final great wave. This is how I wrote about it for 

Maverick's: The Story of Big-Wave Surfing:

Noll's ride was witnessed but not documented—much to the benefit of the big-wave canon. Surf photographs, even great ones, are static and fixed. Greg Noll's wild ride at Makaha, especially as described by Noll himself, has a life of its own; it's grown and flourished with time. The story serves Noll, of course. But Noll serves the story, too, and the entire sport, by fitting the ride itself into a real narrative, full of content, plot, subplot, and digression. "I remember being out there [at Makaha] by myself," Noll says, "looking way up the point seeing this tremendous wave rolling through, barreling through, and by the time it got down to near where I was sitting the water on my board, the water drops, were just dancing there, shaking and dancing around. Man, I'd never seen anything like that before."

Noll was and still is a blowhard, of course. A loveable blowhard, hustler, raconteur, and bullshitter. But not an outright fabricator. His big-wave cred, furthermore, extends from here to Valhalla. He led the opening charge at Waimea in 1957, and for the next 12 years rode anything that came his way, fearlessly. "I was overwhelmed by a feeling that there wasn't a wave that God could produce that I couldn't ride," he said. "It was sort of a blind, stupid feeling, but I had all the goddamn confidence of a rhinoceros." Noll rode waves like this:


 named Noll the world's best big-wave rider in 1965. The following year he was a first-ballot inductee to 

 magazine's Hall of Fame. He made surf movies, owned a thriving surfboard company, knew everyone in the game. He was liked and respected and walked away from it all on his own terms, not long after that day at Makaha, reputation fully intact. Thirty-five years ago, when I got a job at SURFER, Noll was one of the first people I called for an interview, and he told me about Makaha, in spellbinding detail, and I ran his story in 

. Never for a moment did I doubt that it went down just as Noll described.

 ran an article by Kirk Owers (reprinted 

 by the Inertia) that respectfully but firmly pushed back on Noll's fabled Makaha wave. Owers says that Noll's ride was in fact photographed and that the shots were published in multiple surf magazines. At some point, however, we came to think that the published shots were of an earlier, smaller wave, and not 

 wave. Why? Because, as Owers sensibly points out, "It doesn't look that big."

Owers then goes on to ask: "Does it matter? Is surf history more about getting the drama and sense of the occasion right than the specifics?" It's the same deal with Bruce Brown's famous Cape St. Francis "discovery" sequence. Does it matter that Bruce and the gang didn't really hike over miles of dunes to find the perfect wave? Is it more important to stick to the details (Hyson spied the wave from down the beach and ran up to check it out; Bruce and Robert followed), or to transmit as best as possible the mind-boggling thrill of the moment?

I read Owers' Noll article in 2011, just as I was getting ready to launch EOS, and realized I'd have to square up Ower's convincing account with the one that I'd repeatedly offered. Eight years later, here we are. With so much source material at my disposal, I figured I could sort this out, or at least get closer to the truth, without much trouble—because, to answer Owers question, yes, drama does matter, but not if you're bending, negating, or inventing facts to get there.

Anyway, to skip ahead, I think Owers got it right, and I've changed my version of Noll's Makaha story in History of Surfing (read 

Which isn't to say the matter is settled. Evidence may still turn up. Ernie Tomson, Shaun's dad, was at Makaha that day with an 8mm camera. Owers contacted Shaun in 2011, and the champ emailed back to say that he did indeed have the wave on film, "but Greg has asked me not to release it so I haven’t."

Meanwhile, let's ask a few questions, try and throw some light, eradicate some bullshit—while acknowledging that the bullshit is in many ways a story onto itself.


Yes. Huge. Maybe bigger than anything we've seen since, although I'll leave it to the Surfline record-keepers to say if 1969 is still #1. Looking further back, there's no telling if the event was indeed the Swell of the Century (as it was quickly labeled), because weather satellite info had come online just four years earlier, which means there's no way to get an apples-to-apples comparison between the swell of 1969 and, say, the 

 (which people like Downing, Trent and Severson all regarded as the Big Makaha gold standard).

One last finicky caveat: the Swell of 1969 was really two separate swells. The first peaked on December 2nd, the next on December 4th. Point Surf Makaha was the go-to both times, and my guess is that details from the two days, 50 years ago, have long been mixed together. Tuesday, December 2, was by far the better surfing day, glassy and sunny and groomed like Faye Dunaway. There aren't a lot of photos out there from this day, but they all have the same sparkle and gleam.


Thursday, December 4, the day Noll got his famous wave (he was also out on the 2nd), was a different story. Randy Rarick was there, and said it was "bigger than ever [but] ugly, kind of stormy, with a Kona-wind shift." Again, not many pix, but you can easily tell the difference between this day and Tuesday.


 filmmaker Alby Falzon, who says he was at Makaha all day on the 4th, and shot a sequence of Noll's famous wave, which ran in 

. SURFER published a shot of the same ride, from an unnamed photographer (caption: "Greg Noll's wave!"), and Larry Goddard's photo of the wave ran in 

 magazine. Here they are, in above-named order:

Writer and documentary producer Sam George says (and I had always believed), that this actually 

 the wave. Here's what Sam wrote in the comments section of Kirk Owers' 

The wave depicted [here] is not the Big One. This was taken earlier in the session as the swell was building. Greg dropped to the bottom and wiped out—the same wave was photographed by Larry Goddard and ran in International Surfing magazine (another version ran in a 1969 SURFER.) The same issue of Surfing also featured a shot of Greg's 11'4' gun stuck in the lip of the next wave in the set—according to Greg after this wipeout his board spun up and out of the whitewater explosion and, in what can only be considered a minor miracle, did not wash to the beach. Greg made the decision to swim back out to his board, a circumstance that led to him sitting way outside for almost another hour, trying to work up the mojo to take off on another set. During the making of Riding Giants I personally went over the Goddard sequence with Greg, as well as with Randy Rarick, who was there that day in'69 and watched Greg's next ride from the beach. Both confirmed that Greg caught two waves that day. This is the first one. When you look at the photo of Greg at the bottom of the wave depicted here, it's frickin' huge, and Greg assured me that the 'Big One' was considerably larger, judging simply by the fact that he caught it way further out and up the point. Like everybody else, I'd love to see a photo of that wave. Until then the legend will have to do.

Apologies, but at this point I've got to steer off into a long but related tangent. Here's the 

 shot Sam mentions, of Noll's board stuck in the lip.

So Noll allegedly rode a first, smaller wave that day, paddled back out, got caught inside by a huge set, 

This is where things fall apart for me. Noll himself, in telling the story—to 

), and especially in his 1989 autobiography (read 

)—never mentions a first wave, or that he got caught inside by a wave said to be "over 30 foot." Noll may be the best story-weaver to ever set foot on fiberglass, and I can't see him leaving either of these juicy low-hanging pieces of drama out of the story, had they actually occurred.

At the risk of piling on, there's a color version of the shot caught-inside shot (above). Get in tight, and it looks like this.


Now, look at Noll's board from that day (below). Different template, different stickers . . . different board. 

Back to Alby Falzon, as quoted in Kirk Owers' story:

I watched the whole unfolding of that day, right up until the last guys were washed in. Two guys were still out there [after Greg had caught his wave]. I’m not sure who they were. They were riding these giant rhino-chasers and there’s a shot of the first guy getting cleaned up and [you can see his] board going over this wave as it’s lipping. Even by today’s standards it’s a gigantic wave. The lip is bigger than the board. And it’s an 11-foot board. The difference between the photo of Greg on his wave and that cleanup wave [below] . . . there’s a real big difference.

The second unidentified guy Falzon mentions, I'm guessing, is the owner of the yellow board, as seen above. So where does that leave us? I think Noll rode just one wave that day, and didn't get caught inside. The wave he caught was huge, but who knows how big, exactly. Noll himself saw the photos not long after the event and realized the wave didn't look as big as it felt. "These things don't show up in a photograph," he told 

 in early 1970, "and readers are going to see pictures of this and probably think, 'What the hell is is this guy talking about? Why is he trying to build it up?'"

WHEN DID THE HYPE ABOUT NOLL'S WAVE KICK IN? AND WHY?


The hype began the next day. In a December 5 

, Fred Hemmings said Noll's wave was "the biggest wave I’ve ever seen ridden." Two months later, in his article for 

, Randy Rarick said that "Greg Noll took off on the largest wave of his career, easily 30-foot." After that . . . nothing. Big-wave surfing went semi-dormant for over a decade. When it returned to fashion, during the El Nino winter of '82-'83, it seemed to benefit everybody—original big-wave surfers, new-generation big-wave surfers, the surf media—to view the past as larger than life; as something not just to recover but to put on a pedestal. Surf writers scrambled for the back issues, picked up on Noll's Makaha wave, and the legend-making got underway in earnest. "In 1969," a mid-'80s pencil-pusher at SURFER wrote—it wasn't actually using a pencil, I was using a powder-blue Selectric— "Greg Noll took off on what many consider to be the largest wave ever ridden." From there we get Mark Foo saying "Nobody has ridden a bigger wave than Greg Noll did at Makaha in 1969," and then you're just a short step away from this cover art for the back of Noll's 1989 book . . .

. . . which in turn gets us to this illustrated view of Noll's wave as seen in Riding Giants . . .

. . . at which point we'd collectively blown enough smoke up surfing's ass that Kirk Ower's article arrived not just as a correction but an act of mercy. He saved us from our own bullshit.

But here's the thing. Greg Noll's reputation can take it. He is a first-ballot big-wave icon, along with Downing, Trent, Aikau, and Hamilton. He deserves a tribute video with a switchblading Link Wray soundtrack, and an opening shot of Noll looking like a cross between the Ernest Borgnine and the Rock, destroying a cheeseburger and dropping big-wave knowledge.

GREG NOLL'S 1969 MAKAHA WAVE HAS THRASHED US ALL

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