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

 researchers uncovered a taped interview with Foo, shot not long before he flew to Maverick’s, in which he again stated that he wasn’t afraid to die in big surf, but that he hoped it would be “on a 50-foot wave.” What 

 and every other media outlet missed in their coverage of Foo’s death was that 50-footers were now, for the first time ever, actually being ridden.

Thirty-foot waves had long been recognized as big-wave surfing’s top end. Beyond that, the dangers and difficulties were overwhelming. Paddling out was a nightmare. Holding position in the lineup was nearly impossible. The only way to catch a 35-foot wave was to use a long, thick, fast-paddling piece equipment that looked more like a single scull rowing boat than a surfboard; when Ken Bradshaw turned his attention to the North Shore’s outer reefs in 1990, he built himself a flame-orange 12-footer. Unfortunately, once the surfer was up and riding, an oversized board, rather than cleave to the face, wanted to run on a straight, water-skimming line. There was no finessing your way out of a tight spot. Hit a surface bump or ruffle, and you were pitched off. Get a pocket of air under that huge prow and the board flipped. The length and volume necessary to get you into the wave, in other words, all but prevented you from succesfully riding it.

A motorized solution to huge surf first came up in 1963, when Makaha powerhouse Buzzy Trent suggested that “the surfer might be towed into the wave much like a waterskier.” In 1975, a few older North Shore vets, including Flippy Hoffman and Ricky Grigg, were towed into a few midsized waves at Kaena Point and Sunset behind a friend’s Boston Whaler. Alec Cooke and Mark Foo also gave the idea some thought. With a running start, Cooke mused, you’d be “flying down the line [before] the wave starts to pitch, [and] matching speed with the wave.”

In 1987, Herbie Fletcher, using a Kawasaki 550 Jet Ski with a long nylon tow rope tied to the stern, towed some world-tour pros into a few towering Second Reef beauties at Pipeline. Watching from the beach, North Shore lifeguard Mark Cunningham said it was like “seeing something from the future.” But Fletcher’s idea didn’t catch on. Most surfers hated jetskis, and had ever since Fletcher began hot-rodding across waves near his Southern California home in the mid-'70s. Jetskis were loud, smoky, bad-smelling, and left a trail of unburned fuel in their wake. More than that, surfers liked that their sport was stripped down—waves, board, wax, trunks, a wetsuit if it's cold; throw a towel, a bottle of water and a day's worth of snacks into a backpack, and you're still running to the beach with one hand free. As a recreational tool, the jetski stood for everything surfing wasn’t.

Australian surf writer Derek Hynd was also on the beach at Pipeline in 1987 when Fletcher and the pros were buzzing around Second Reef, and he captured the inherent conflict of tow surfing. It looked “funner than a day at Magic Mountain,” he wrote.” It also seemed as if the surfers had “prostituted themselves” for the ride.

In late 1992, retired world-tour surfer and Ralph Lauren model Buzzy Kerbox looped a waterski tow line to the back of his new Zodiac inflatable and invited fellow North Shore surfers Laird Hamilton and Darrick Doerner out to a little-surfed break called Backyards, just east of Sunset Beach, where they took turns driving each other into some 15-foot waves. It was the first time any of them had tried tow surfing, and they quickly established a routine. The Zodiac driver circled slowly, about two hundred yards past the lineup, with the rider being pulled behind, holding the rope and already standing on his board. When a likely-looking wave appeared, the driver aimed for shore and gunned it, matching the wave’s speed. About 50 yards beyond where a conventional surfer would begin paddling, the rider dropped the rope and was off to a gliding 30-mph start. The boat then veered off to the shoulder and kept pace. When the ride was over, surfer and driver reconnected and dashed back outside. If the right wave came along, he could be off and running again just two or three minutes after the last ride ended.

The photos of the Backyards sessions were astounding. Also, Kerbox, Doerner, and Hamilton raved about the experience, and they carried enough weight to blunt any criticism. Kerbox had been the highest-ranked American pro for two years running in the late 1970s; California-born Doerner was a consensus pick as the world’s best big-wave rider; and Hamilton, while never an ASP competitor, had been out-surfing the top pros on the North Shore for years. Kerbox and Doerner were in their mid-30s, Hamilton was twenty-seven, and all three were tired of doing battle against North Shore crowds that grew bigger with each passing season. As Doerner recalled, their original motivation with tow surfing was to find a way to ditch the mob: “I’ve been surfing here for 20 years, and I don’t want to be part of the zoo anymore. I just want to go way out there and ride with my friends.”

The tow surfing advantages were enormous. By motoring out to breaks that generally weren’t suited to traditional surfing, Doerner and his friends indeed beat the crowd, and they caught ten times as many waves per session. No energy was wasted on paddling; everything got put into the ride itself. Getting caught inside was nearly impossible, as the Zodiac, if it had to, could turn around and race ahead of the wave, toward the channel.

After just two or three more go-outs using Kerbox' Zodiac, it was obvious to the three surfers that they were, in fact, about to reinvent big-wave riding, and they redoubled their efforts. By late 1993, the jetski—specifically, the brutish 650cc Yamaha Wave Runner III—had replaced the inflatable boat as a power source. Also, the base of operation was changed from the North Shore to Maui, with an eye toward a thunderous cliff-fronted break called Jaws, located a few miles from the sailboarding capital of Hookipa.

Jaws (also called Peahi) made its surf-world debut just a few months before Mark Foo died at Mavericks. Of the two breaks, Jaws was viscerally less terrifying, just for being set in the tropics. (Mainland big-wave riders loved visiting Hawaii, but the feeling wasn’t reciprocated. “You’re reduced to nothing over there,” one Oahu surfer said after riding Mavericks for the time. “First there’s the fog, so I can’t see. Pretty soon it’s so cold I can’t feel anything. You lose all your senses.”) Jaws breaks less often than Maverick’s, Waimea, or Todos Santos, and the water surface is often turned to a meringue of whitecaps by Maui’s renowned valley-funneled offshore winds. An entire winter season can pass without Jaws hitting peak form.

Under the right conditions, though, it produces a classically perfect wave. Unlike Waimea, which is front-loaded and short, or the lurching and segmented rights at Maverick’s, the wave at Jaws is long, tapered, and hollow from start to finish. Of all the world’s big-wave spots, only Jaws would still be considered an A-grade spot even if miniaturized to normal size. More to the point, when the tow surfing pioneers assembled in Maui in 1993, Jaws’ upper limit extended well beyond that of any charted break at the time. How big? Jaws hadn't been on radar long enough to really know how much size it could handle. But half-again bigger than Waimea, at least. Maybe double. In other words, this radical new age in surfing had a suitably radical new break.

A second breakthrough in equipment, nearly as important as the jetski itself, was the creation of a new kind of big-wave board. Up to this point, paddle speed had been the controlling design objective. With paddling now scratched from the equation, all that mattered was riding performance. To that end, Laird Hamilton and his shapers came up with a new design—patterned mostly on wave-riding sailboards—that was much smaller, narrower, and thinner than big-wave boards of the past. The idea was to get the board riding low enough in the water that it could be directed and controlled, even at maximum speed. Weight was added for stability. To give the board more “stick,” the midsection rails were made nearly parallel, and the rocker was brought down until the bottom was nearly flat. Neoprene-covered footstraps were bolted on, which allowed the surfer to stay connected while flying over bumps and ridges. The straps also increased the surfer’s leveraging power during turns. Eventually, the standard tow board would be just over six-feet long, 16 or 17 inches wide, 2 inches thick, and 25 pounds.

With its reduced size, pinched outline, and clunky footstraps, the tow board looked like something whanged together from leftover bits of surfboard, snowboard, and sailboard—it had none of the sculptured allure of a traditional big-wave board. In 1988, 

 ran a photo essay called “Gun Club,” in which famous big-wave riders individually posed with their favorite board. Each man threw a proud arm around his long, slender, graceful board and looked into the camera like a high schooler who’d hit the jackpot on prom night. Tow boards would never be so adoringly flaunted and displayed.

Yet nothing in the sport’s history, including the shortboard revolution, represented a more radical design leap. Survival had always been the goal of big-wave surfing. On the new boards, with a motorized start, the wipeout rate was reduced by 75 percent, and the huge up-tilting wave field was now open to high-velocity turns and tuberiding. There was a massive increase in speed. Those elliptical trough-to-crest moves allowed the tow surfer to cover a lot more ground than his paddle-in counterparts. Thirty miles per hour was the top end for a surfer at places like Waimea and Makaha; at Jaws it was pushed to 50 mph. “You can’t even fuckin’ 

 the speed,” Darrick Doerner rhapsodized, early in the tow era. “And the 

. The wall stretches out a mile long in front of you. The wave is twice as big as Waimea, and five times better. Fifty-yard bottom turns. Fifty-yard top turns. Close your eyes and mind-surf that, man. It’s a totally different world out there.”

The tow surfers set new big-wave height records continually. On the smoothest big swell of the year at Jaws in late 1993, Laird Hamilton rode three or four waves that were maybe a shade smaller than the biggest waves ever caught by Greg Noll or Pat Curren or Peter Cole. In 1994, three days before Mark Foo’s death at Maverick’s, a brick-shaped Maui regularfooter named Dave Kalama—already a legend among sailboarders as the first person to land a forward loop—charged across a Jaws monster that was five- or ten-feet bigger than anything ever ridden. And while nobody claimed the title as such, for the next few years, Hamilton, Doerner, and Kalama took turns as the surfer who’d ridden the biggest wave.

In 1998, at a North Shore break called Outside Log Cabins, 45-year-old silverback Ken Bradshaw found himself riding a wave so big that it blew a fuse on the sport’s wave-height measuring scale. According to the new tow-in performance standard, Bradshaw’s ride wasn’t especially radical: a gliding drop, a careful turn off the bottom, one midface swoop, then an easy cruise to the channel. But at the peak moment, just as Bradshaw leaned into his first turn, the wave’s trough-to-crest height was in the neighborhood of 70 feet. It was inarguable. The ride had been captured on videotape, blurry but legible. Surfers everywhere hit “pause” on the VCR, estimated that Bradshaw himself was crouched down to about five feet, and with that unit of measurement did the math. Seventy feet? At least.

The big-wave cognoscenti, using the old height-devaluing “Hawaiian scale,” had so far refused to ID any wave as greater than 35 feet. They didn’t budge to acknowledge Bradshaw’s Log Cabins ride, either—but people were beginning to sound a little defensive at the reductiveness. “You can’t even say how big it is at that size,” Dave Kalama shrugged. “After 25 feet, it’s all just ridiculous.”

Bradshaw’s wave was still reverberating the following March when a panel of judges met in Newport Beach to pick a winner for the K2 Big-Wave Challenge—a $50,000 winner-take-all event, where each competitor submitted a photo of himself on what he hoped would be declared the year’s biggest ridden wave. Only paddle-in surfers were eligible. Traditional big-wave riding hadn’t gone out of fashion with the advent of tow surfing. Dropping into a huge wave without assistance remained the sport’s greatest challenge, and the K2 event honored that. However, judges not only had to select a winner, but offer their best collective estimate as to the wave size for each of the six finalists. And the numbers couldn’t be downplayed, cooler-than-thou, Hawaiian-style throwaways. Contest officials wanted a deliberate base-to-peak appraisal.

World-tour pro Taylor Knox won the K2 Challenge for riding a Todos Santos wave precisely identified at 52 feet. From that point on, in giant surf at least, two forms of measurement were used. Big-wave pros themselves mostly continued to describe waves at about half their actual size. K2-style competitions, and tow surfers, and a small number of surf journalists, used what 

 editor Sam George coined the “face value” system.

On a huge day at Pipeline, in 1987, Australian surf journalist Derek Hynd watched an early version of tow surfing. It looked “funner than a day at Magic Mountain,” he wrote. But it also seemed as if the surfers had “prostituted themselves” for the ride.

Chapter: 8

The Ride of Your Life

Open Throttle

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