Is Surfing Hip?

Lisa Andersen Surfs Better Than You

Killer Cute

Kelly Slater is Just Warming Up

Rebel for Hire

I Believe I Can Fly

A Monster in Half Moon Bay

Mark Foo's Last Ride

Open Throttle

Laird Means Lord

Tahitian Scream

A Webcam for Every Wave

Last Call for Print Media

Taylor Steele Likes it Rough

Searching for the Perfect Phrase

Hollywood Tries Again

Thirty is the New Twenty

Andy Irons' Poetic Fury

The Beast and Beyond

A Dance with the Past

Foam is Dead, Long Live Foam

Nature Gets a Makeover

Surf in a Box

The End of History

The Ride of Your Life

By the end of the 1990s, tow surfing had been exported to Maverick’s, and surfers there were soon catapulting themselves into waves nearly equal in size to those at Jaws—more evidence that a good part of big-wave surfing’s future would be motor-driven. At the same time, as familiarity settled in, the corresponding thrill of the whole tow-in enterprise began to drop incrementally. The breakthrough from 30- to 40-feet had been stunning. Jumping to 60-feet and beyond was merely astounding—and more or less expected.

The number of ridden 25-foot-plus waves had gone up a hundred-fold since 1990, thanks to the multiplying effect of tow surfing. Furthermore, nearly every ride was filmed and photographed and presented in one form or another. Books were published on Jaws and Mavericks. Big-wave documentaries and TV segments arrived by the dozen. The surf mags all ran two or three lengthy big-wave features a year, and the internet was opening up the sport’s deepest, broadest media stream of all. Attention on the big-wave crazies was constant. On the other hand, with few exceptions, people didn't linger over the new shots from Jaws, or Mavs, or Waimea the way they used to.

Also, the endless loop of big-wave imagery begged the question: Just how dangerous is it, anyway? In 1995, a year after Mark Foo died, an unranked California pro named Donnie Soloman drowned at Waimea. A year after that, big-wave bet Todd Chesser drowned at a North Shore outer reef break. In 2011, Sion Milosky of Kauai died at Mavericks. Still, the mortality rate for big-wave surfers wasn’t in the same league as those for auto racers, cyclists, skydivers, or mountaineers. The assumption was that the fatalities would skyrocket as surfers rode bigger, more powerful waves. It didn’t happen. The fact that each tow surfer had a driver looking out for him, takeoff to kickout, helped a lot. In the early 2010s, inflatable floatation vests were introduced, doing for big-wave surfing more or less what airbags did for car safety. (Big-wave pioneer George Downing offered another explanation for the low mortality rate, suggesting that wave power did not go up in direct proportion to wave size. An eight-footer, Downing explained, might be twice as powerful as a four-footer, but a 50-footer was nowhere near double the strength of a 25-footer.)

For whatever reason, tow surfing, as of 2019, 27 years after it was introduced, was responsible for zero deaths. Maybe it was a statistical anomaly. The number of hardcore big-wave riders has always been tiny—no more than a few hundred—and while more big-wave breaks were in play, the number of suitable riding days at a given break has always been fairly small. Or maybe big surf isn't as deadly as it looks. Peter Van Dyke (younger brother of early big-wave surfer Fred Van Dyke), famously declared big-wave danger to be a "hoax" in a 1965 SURFER article. The question remains open—although the numbers are on Van Dyke's side.

Tow surfers, in any event, had thrill options that weren’t available to previous generations of surfers. In 1999, Laird Hamilton became interested in a horror-show break called Teahupoo (pronounced CHO-pu) in Tahiti, and his attraction seemed to have much to do with wanting to put himself—and big-wave surfing—in closer proximity to mortal danger.

Teahupoo is a different kind of wave. The surf here gets big, but not like Jaws or Mavericks. Twenty-five-foot, trough to crest, is about the limit. Volume is what counts at Teahupoo. Just 500 hundred yards past the lineup, the ocean floor is 2,000 feet deep, which means an incoming swell hits the Teahupoo reef so fast, and so abruptly, that it almost trips on itself. On a big day, to equalize, the whole upper-third of a wave will blow out in a solid cantilevered mass. The terms “curl” and “lip” hardly do justice to an unloading Teahupoo tube; surfers began calling this kind of heaving top-heavy break a “slab.”

Teahupoo was on the surf-world map by the early 1990s, and before the decade ended it had more or less pulled up head-to-head with Pipeline as the world’s most fearsome left-breaking wave. Unlike Pipeline, a big one at Teahupoo will already be funneling down the reef by the time it hits the lineup. The surfer’s POV at this point is terrifying. “You’re standing on the tracks while the train’s coming full speed,” one world-tour pro said. “And you turn around and jump on.” As the surfer drops in, the wave bends a few degrees around the comma-shaped reef, getting taller, thicker, and hollower. The ride is a tube-race—nothing else. About six seconds after takeoff, the tube expectorates a few thousand gallon’s worth of vaporized water, and if the surfer is still on his feet, he’ll fly out of the misting remnants and quickly exit over the top before the wave disintegrates into a closeout.

Teahupoo became a world-tour venue in 1999, when it was still thought of as strictly a paddle-in break. Yet, at the first contest, as wave after wave rolled through untouched by the world’s best pros, it was clear Teahupoo had its own height ceiling. Fifteen-footers here simply jacked up too fast for a traditional paddle-in takeoff. Teahupoo was still new, and paddle-in surfers didn’t seem to be in a great rush to go bigger here.

Laird Hamilton watched video of the Teahupoo event and got a kick out of seeing competitors scamper out of the way of the set waves. He’d never surfed there, but the break appealed to him like nothing he’d seen since Jaws. Strapped once again to his huge piece of driftwood, plowing furrows in the beach as he dragged it back and forth, he thought about those bunker-busting Teahupoo tubes. The world-tour pros had only scratched the surface there, he believed. Things could be taken a 

 further. The more he thought about it, the more impatient he became. His idea, of course, was to tow surf the place. And not the 15-footers he’d seen in the video, but something much bigger.

Hamilton and a small retinue of cameramen arrived at Teahupoo in early August 2000. The stakes had just been raised. A few weeks earlier, a local surfer tried to punch through a 12-foot wave, was pulled over the falls and pile-driven into the reef, and later died of massive head injuries.

At sunrise, on August 17, Hamilton was in the Teahupoo channel staring into waves that looked to be half-again larger than anything yet ridden there—although it was hard to tell from his angle. The sun was out, the air was still, the water was mirror-smooth. Hamilton and his jetski driver motored out to the lineup. Veteran filmmaker Jack McCoy sat on the back of a two-seat ski with a camera resting on his lap and watched a wave “unload on the reef unlike anything I’d ever seen . . . a low-tide monster that drained out as if somebody had pulled a bathtub plug.”

Hamilton opened with a few warm-up rides, nothing fancy. He fell on a midsized wave and was lightly rolled across the reef. Just before noon he tracked too high on a triple-overhead wall and was nearly pitched over the falls; he leaned back to fully extended his front leg, bracing the top of his foot against the strap until his toes and instep were completely lifted off the board, and was able to correct his line. Both his ankles began to swell from the strain.

The monster Hamilton caught less than five minutes later was one-third bigger than anything he’d ridden all morning. Incredibly, he launched from 50 yards farther up the reef, and to make up the distance he began angling hard for the channel from the moment he dropped the rope. The wave dilated as it squared up to the reef, and Hamilton was shadowed as the thing wound itself into a huge, blue, satin-finish death-spiral of a tube. He rode just a few feet above the trough. Above his head was another twelve feet of open face; above that was a ten-foot-thick domed ceiling of water. Hamilton’s line this time was perfect. He shot himself like a cannonball through the hollows, vanished as the tube expelled a small weather system of pressurized water, then reappeared and flew across the wave’s back slope. Dazed and breathing heavily as he joined McCoy and the others in the channel, he dropped his head and began to cry.

 called it the “Millennium Wave”—because it happened in 2000, and to emphasize that this was the single most dramatic moment in the sport’s history to that point—and it put another mile or two of distance between Hamilton and every other big-wave rider. More tow surfers would soon come to Teahupoo and ride waves just as big and thick. But Hamilton got there first, as usual. “There’s so much emotion in that moment,” he said a few days later, looking at video footage of the ride and his teary response in the channel afterward. “A lifetime of desires, a lifetime of dreams, of work, of hope—all this stuff got to me in this one moment. I blinked and it was over.”

The Millennium Wave also helped turn slab-riding into a kind of surfing freak show. The old-fashioned Himalayan challenge to ride the world’s tallest waves—that remained. A bizarre open-ocean surf spot named Cortes Bank, and a beachbreak monstrosity called Nazare, in Portugal, would in years to come produce waves in the 100-foot range. But slabs warped the sport into something entirely different, and Teahupoo was just the introduction. A dozen or more soon-to-be publicized slabs around the world—including Shipstern Bluff in Tasmania, Shark Park in California, Cyclops in Western Australia, Ours in Sydney, and Mullaghmore in Ireland—all were capable of producing a kind of mashed-up wave that looked like nothing so much as a three-story piece of Frank Gehry architecture. Most had two or three steps in the face. There were multiple curl lines, some running on a bias. All were incredibly shallow and powerful.

These types of waves weren't new to wave-riding. “Ledge” breaks—scaled-down versions of the slab—had in fact been ridden for decades. (Bodyboarders pioneered a lot of slabs; swimfins gave them a fast start during takeoff, and their small, soft, prone-ridden craft was a huge advantage on a fast-jacking drop.) But tow surfing allowed boardriders to go bigger on than then ever before.

Tow or paddle, a rider almost never dropped down the face of a slab with the intention of doing anything but running himself spear-like through the tube. In that respect, the slab was a throwback to big-wave riding in its original form: surfing as pure survival.

But there was a fundamental difference. As big-wave pioneer Rick Grigg once put it, describing what it was like to sit in the lineup at Waimea or Makaha, “You’d be out there just scared to death—but also completely knocked out by the beauty of it all.” Slabs, by and large, were ugly. Places like Shipstern and Ours, as one surf writer put it, were “so malformed they hardly deserve a name.”

The vast majority of surfers wanting nothing to do with slabs, yet these breaks provided a new and compelling form of surf-voyeurism. There was certainly an appreciation among viewers for the technique and finesse required to get from one end of a reef-gouging twelve-footer to the other. But slab appeal was mostly rooted in visceral fear and Roman Colosseum-like blood sport. Never before had the sport looked so exhilarating. Never had it been so unfamiliar to itself.

Chapter: 8

The Ride of Your Life

Tahitian Scream

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