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

As exciting as the 1980s rediscovery of big-wave surfing was, the whole thing had a slightly retrograde quality. It wasn’t as obvious as longboarding, which wore the sport’s past glory like splashed-on cologne. But plenty of big-wave surfing’s reference points had been established decades earlier: Waimea remained the ultimate break; the point-and-go style ruled; master shaper Dick Brewer, who’d crafted the world’s most expensive boards during the Kennedy era, continued to make the finest big-wave equipment; and Eddie Aikau, years after his death, was still revered as the sport’s greatest big-wave surfer. By the end of the 1980s, a big-wave event was like a Rolling Stones comeback tour—as familiar as it was dramatic.

Then all of a sudden big-wave surfing’s 50-year-old carapace split open, and the sport that emerged was bigger, more complicated, and far more terrifying. Dozens of previously unsurfed big-wave breaks were charted, most of them outside of Hawaii. Tow-in surfing, slabs, the no-longer-mythical-100-foot wave, motorized equipment, an all-seeing media eye: by the early 2000s, big-wave surfing was nearly unrecognizable to what it was in 1990. Just a tiny percentage of the world’s surfers were directly affected by all the changes, but everybody in the sport, and millions outside of it, watched from a distance, thrilled and chilled and astounded.

The geography of big-wave riding began to shift during the 1980s, with the discovery of a break called Killers, located on Todos Santos, a small uninhabited island just a few miles off the Baja California port town of Ensenada. Marty Hoffman—son of big-wave pioneer Flippy Hoffman, and the older cousin of Christian Fletcher—boated out to Todos Santos regularly during the 1980s and occasionally rode triple-overhead surf at Killers. Following traditional protocol, Hoffman kept the break under wraps. 

 ran a Todos Santos feature in 1982—renaming the island “El Martillo,” to throw people off the scent. Five years later 

 gave Killers a lavish coming-out party with “Big Time,” a 22-page article in which pro surfer Dave Parmenter described the 18-footers he’d ridden there as having more “sheer mass [than] anything outside of Hawaii.”

Also in 1987, North Shore pro Mark Foo, along with 1965 world champion Felipe Pomar, rode a semi-forgotten deep-water break near Lima called Pico Alto. “I thought big Makaha and the North Shore’s outer reefs were the next step for me as a surfer,” Foo wrote afterward. “I was wrong. There were lessons to be learned at Pico Alto. One of them being: no matter where it’s breaking, a big wave is a big wave. Period.”

Years later, Foo’s remark would seem obvious, but at the time it verged on radical. It was a given that Hawaii, uniquely positioned as it was to the North Pacific storm track—close enough to capture the power; distant enough that swells had time to groom themselves—was the only place in the world able to produce dependably huge, clean, rideable waves. This isn’t wrong, exactly. No other coastal region can match Hawaii for big-wave consistency, and only in Hawaii are big-wave breaks found in clusters. The North Shore alone is home to at least six reefs capable of producing ridable 25-foot waves. Still, Todos Santos and Pico Alto expanded big-wave surfing’s horizons. Surfers suddenly realized there were other big waves out there. Maybe lots of them.

This point was irrevocably brought home by a California break called Maverick’s, which from the moment it was revealed looked as powerful and as challenging as anything in Hawaii. Located next to Pillar Point Harbor, about 25 miles south of San Francisco, Maverick’s had long been the private big-wave domain for a terse Half Moon Bay carpenter named Jeff Clark. For 15 years, beginning in 1975, Clark invited local surfers to paddle out with him, describing the Maverick’s wave as “better than Waimea.” (He hadn’t actually been to Hawaii, but it was the only comparison he could think of.) Only a few people even bothered to look. Everybody declined. Clark was moody and fearless—the kind of guy Northern California surfers had in mind when they half-complimented someone as “psycho.” In 1990, not long after he decided to become a full-time boardmaker, Clark expanded his search for recruits, driving to Santa Cruz and San Francisco, looking for anyone to join him at Maverick’s. He still wanted company in the lineup, but he also wanted to bring some attention to his new business. Maverick’s, Clark knew, would get everybody’s attention.

A cool-handed pro named Richard Schmidt was one of the newcomers. He was from Santa Cruz, which up to that point had been known as California’s big-wave region—Steamer Lane and Swift Street, on the northwest side of town, both regularly produce double- and triple-overhead waves. Schmidt at that point had more than a dozen North Shore winters to his credit, and at 30 he was Mainland America’s best big-wave rider. Following his third-place finish in the 1990 Quiksilver-Aikau contest at Waimea, he rushed back to California and drove up the coast to Maverick’s, eager to check out the new big-wave break in Half Moon Bay. Standing on the headland overlooking the reef, he was stunned as he watched 25-footers bomb through—a third again bigger than anything he’d ever ridden in Santa Cruz.

From above, the Maverick’s lineup looks like a huge upside-down check mark: an abrupt left rumbles along the short arm, to the north, while a much longer south-running right bowls across the long arm, often passing through two or three distinct sections. Maverick’s can be ridden in either direction, although the right is the better wave by far. Because the reef’s leading edge is so much shallower than the ocean floor immediately beyond, an incoming wave can in a moment’s time shift from canted to vertical and expand by an extra five or ten feet. Unlike Makaha, where the wave finishes in a bowl section, at Maverick’s the bowl comes at the beginning; at twenty-foot or bigger, nearly every incoming peak, right off the bat, lurches out to form a huge abyssal chamber. On the harbor side of the wave, you can look through the tube and see the cliffs of nearby Moss Beach. This part of the Maverick’s wave was thought of as unrideable, at least by conventional means. At Makaha, and sometimes at Waimea or Killers, it’s possible to launch a ride from what’s known as a “deep” lineup position—where the wave first curls over. On a big day at Maverick’s, a paddle-entry ride almost always begins off the peak, 15 or 20 yards removed from where the curl first touches down. Even then, it’s touch and go.

Maverick’s degree of difficulty can increase in a number of ways. Visibility is often reduced by fog. Ocean temperatures can drop to the upper 40s, and the air temperature can go even lower. Some Maverick’s surfers say they feel “armored” in the mandatory head-to-toe wetsuit rig, but in fact it’s a few pounds of dead weight, and even the stretchiest neoprene is movement-constricting. Todos Santos is a crucial five or six degrees warmer, although full wetsuits are required there as well. Between the Maverick’s impact zone and the beach is a long above-the-water promontory of rocks, and the surfer who gets caught here has to thread himself into one of the narrow waterways to a lagoon on the far side—or risk getting pinned against a crag.

For the finishing touch, Half Moon Bay is located on the eastern edge of what has long been referred to as the “red triangle”—a cold, murky nearshore tract of Pacific bordered by Monterey, Tomales Bay, and the Farallon Islands, located 27 miles off of San Francisco—known to have the world’s highest concentration of white sharks. As of 2009, two attacks on surfers, both nonfatal, had been recorded at Maverick’s. The scarier occurrence happened in late 2000, when a 14-foot juvenile white shark clamped onto Santa Barbara surfer Paul Euwer’s board from the side, then breached completely out of the water, with Euwer bent double around the animal’s snout. Upon landing, the shark let go, thrashed the air with its tail, and disappeared.

Jeff Clark was moody and fearless—the kind of guy Northern California surfers had in mind when they half-complimented someone as “psycho.” For 15 years, beginning in 1975, Clark invited local surfers to paddle out to Maverick's with him, describing the wave as “better than Waimea.” Everybody declined.

Chapter: 8

The Ride of Your Life

A Monster in Half Moon Bay

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