The Wave Read online

  It felt strange to be terrified of the water. After decades of competitive swimming I’m usually more at home in aquatic environments than I am on land. Over the years I’d done assorted damage to myself on solid ground—bruises, bumps, tears, a knee pieced together by titanium screws—but nothing bad had ever happened to me in the water. Then again, I’d never experienced the water in this particular mood. As I watched the surfers launch themselves into the churning ocean and paddle toward the break, I worried for each of them. Their sport seemed more gladiatorial than athletic, like showing up for work each day to grapple with bull elephants.

  Which is why, a few years later, I was stunned to see a photograph of a man riding a wave more than twice the size of Sunset, somewhere in the sixty-foot range. The surfer was Laird Hamilton, a six-foot-three, 215-pound twenty-eight-year-old from Hawaii who looked completely at ease inside a barrel as tall as an office building. His blond hair whipped back in the spray; his muscular arms were spread wide for balance as he plummeted down the wave on a tiny board. He had classically handsome features, chiseled and intense, but no fear showed on his face, only rapt focus. Looking at the picture, I didn’t understand how any of this was possible.

  Since surfing became popular in the mid-twentieth century, faces in the forty-foot range have represented the outer limits of human paddling abilities. Anything bigger is simply moving too fast; trying to catch a sixty-foot wave by windmilling away on your stomach is like trying to catch the subway by crawling. Never mind, though, because even if you could catch it, there would be no way to ride it. Too much water rushes back up the face of a giant wave as it crests, sucking you, the hapless human (not enough momentum), and your board (too much friction) over the falls. So while the most popular surf spots quickly became so overrun that fistfights erupted in the water, all over the world the most impressive waves were going to waste. To Hamilton and his friends, this was unacceptable. The rules had to change, and a new system invented. So they came up with a technique called tow surfing.

  Borrowing ideas from windsurfing and snowboarding, they created shorter, heavier surfboards with foot straps, and thinner, stronger fins that sliced through the water like knives. Then they added Jet Skis and water-ski ropes to the mix, using them to tow one another into perfect position at thirty miles per hour. In the optimal spot, just as the wave began to peak, the rider would drop the tow rope and rocket onto the face. The driver, meanwhile, would exit off the back. Using this method, with its increased horsepower and redesigned gear, a surfer could theoretically catch the biggest waves out there. Riding them—and surviving if you fell—was another story.

  Hamilton was the test pilot, followed immediately by other surfers and windsurfers in his circle: Darrick Doerner, Brett Lickle, Dave Kalama, Buzzy Kerbox, Rush Randle, Mark Angulo, and Mike Waltze. Nicknamed the Strapped Crew, they experimented on the outer reefs of Oahu and Maui, far beyond the crowds. “No one was there,” Hamilton said. “No one had ridden waves this size. It was the unknown. It was like outer space or the deep sea. We didn’t know if we were going to come back.”

  Anything involving giant waves qualifies as a risky pursuit, but tow surfing seemed to invite disaster. The sport’s learning curve was a series of hard lessons, and the price of falling was high. It included dislocated shoulders, shattered elbows, and burst eardrums; broken femurs, snapped ankles, and cracked necks; lacerated scalps, punctured lungs, and fractured arches; hold-downs that Brett Lickle described as “sprinting four hundred yards holding your breath while being beaten on by five Mike Tysons.” As for stitches, Hamilton “stopped counting at 1,000.”

  Regardless of its dangers (or maybe because of them), tow surfing’s popularity and visibility grew throughout the 1990s, the surfers venturing onto more treacherous waves every year. They tinkered with equipment. They refined their techniques. Working in teams of two—a driver and a rider—they figured out how to rescue each other in behemoth surf. As the stakes got higher and the margin for error got slimmer, a kind of natural selection occurred. Riders who’d glimpsed their own mortality a little too closely drifted to the sidelines. At the other end of that spectrum was Hamilton. Watching him, you got the feeling that no wave was out of reach. The more intimidating the conditions, the more he seemed to thrive in them.

  Then in July 2001 a surf impresario named Bill Sharp issued a challenge. “For 2700 years,” his press release read, “the Homerian [sic] epic known as the Odyssey has been associated with beautiful-but-deadly temptresses, forgetful lotus-eaters, and scary, one-eyed monsters. But now thanks to surf wear giant Billabong, it’s associated with an even scarier monster: the elusive 100-foot wave.” The company, the press release continued, would offer a prize of $500,000 to any man who rode one. This payday was exponentially larger than anything surfing had seen; millions more would come from sponsors in the wake of the triumph. A select group of tow teams would be invited to participate, a crew Sharp referred to as “the Delta Force of surfing.”

  It was a sexy frontier, defined by a nice round number. Marketing that number was Sharp’s intention; he noted that he’d sold the hundred-foot-wave Odyssey contest, originally named Project Sea Monster, to Billabong in less than fifteen minutes. Prone to flourishes of hype, Sharp delivered vivid sound bites: “The Odyssey is Jacques Cousteau meets Evel Knievel meets Crocodile Hunter meets Jackass,” he said. And almost overnight the idea of the hundred-foot wave became the media grail, tow surfing’s equivalent of a moon landing.

  There were a couple of snags. First, was it physically possible? No one knew how riding a hundred-foot wave might differ from, say, riding a seventy-five-foot wave. As they grow in size, waves increase dramatically in speed and energy. At what point would the forces overwhelm the equipment, or the surfers? “The 100-foot wave would probably kill anyone who fell off it,” Time magazine wrote. Honolulu’s then–ocean safety chief, Captain Edmund Pestana, agreed: “It’s a deadly scenario for everyone involved.” The trade journal TransWorld SURF Business was blunt: “You’re asking these surfers to take huge risks for our titillation.”

  Next, even if a surfer wanted to take his chances, finding the wave was a problem. Although they were no longer considered imaginary, hundred-foot waves were not exactly kicking around within Jet Ski range. Further complicating things, for tow surfing’s purposes not just any hundred-foot wave would do. The enormous seas the Discovery encountered; the huge freaks that pop up to batter oil rigs—these are unsuitable, despite their great height. Waves that exist in the center of a storm are avalanches of water, waves mashed on top of other waves, all of them rushing forward in a chaotic jumble.

  Surfers need giant waves with a more exclusive pedigree. In their ideal scenario, a hundred-foot wave would be born in a blast of storm energy, travel across the ocean for a long distance while being strengthened by winds, then peel off from the storm and settle into a swell, a steamrolling lump of power. That swell would eventually collide with a reef, a shoaling bottom, or some other underwater obstacle, forcing its energy upward and sideways until it exploded into breaking waves. And that’s where the ride would begin—far enough from the storm’s center to be less roiled and choppy, but not so far that its power was too diminished. This was a pretty tall order. If the ocean was a slot machine, rideable sixty- or seventy-foot waves came along about as often as a solid row of cherries. And the perfect hundred-foot wave? Hit that one and the sirens would go off as everyone in the casino stopped what they were doing to gawk, and the staff rolled in palettes to help you haul away your money.

  A surfer who intended to participate in the Odyssey, therefore, would be signing up for a global scavenger hunt. Not only would he have to ride the wave, he’d have to scour the oceans to find it, monitoring the weather’s every nuance like a meteorologist, and then show up at precisely the right moment toting Jet Skis, safety equipment, surf gear, and photographers along with him—not to mention a highly skilled partner who didn’t mind risking his life when called upon to do so. This w
as a surfing competition the way the Space Shuttle was a plane. “The Odyssey makes climbing Everest look easy,” one British journalist wrote. Regardless, Sharp was undeterred. “I think everybody’s ready,” he said. “Now, on the giant days, there’s no wave that anyone’s backing down from.”

  Millions of years before there was water on the earth, before steam turned into rain turned into oceans, there were giant waves. There were electromagnetic waves and plasma waves and sound waves. There were shock waves from the many explosions and collisions that made our planet’s earliest days so lively. Asteroids smacked into it and sent up waves of molten rock, thousands of feet tall. At one time scientists even believed that an enormous wave of this magma, created by intense solar tides, had swung off into space and become the moon.

  Although that particular theory is no longer considered true, it points to something that is: waves are the original primordial force. Anywhere there’s energy in motion there are waves, from the farthest corners of the universe down to the cells in your eyeball. I wondered if this was why, after eighteen years, I couldn’t stop thinking about that day at Sunset Beach. Far from being an abstraction in the ether—like electrical waves, X-ray waves, or radio waves—those thirty-foot ocean waves were a majestic demonstration of the unseen force that powers everything. Catching a glimpse of something that elemental, that beautiful, and that powerful created one inevitable result: the desire to see it again.

  The more I read about the mysteries of freak waves, the more jaw-dropping tow-surfing images I saw (and the more inevitable it became that someone would ride a hundred-foot wave), the more fascinated I became. New technologies began to reveal startling information. “Ship-Devouring Waves, Once Legendary, Common Sight on Satellite,” read the USA Today headline on July 23, 2004, describing how radar was now able to measure waves from space: “ … a new study based on satellite data reveals the rogues are fairly common.” “Rogue Giants at Sea: Huge, Freakish, but Real, Waves Draw New Study,” the New York Times reported in July 2006. “Scientists are now finding that these giants of the sea are far more common and destructive than once imagined, prompting a rush of new studies and research projects.”

  From a science and technology standpoint, we humans like to think we’re quite smart. Over in Switzerland, for instance, physicists are chasing the Higgs boson, a subatomic speck so esoteric that it’s referred to as the “God particle.” If we’re closing in on this, how is it possible that only fifteen years ago a force that regularly demolishes 850-foot-long ships was deemed not to exist?

  Quite simply: the ocean doesn’t subscribe to the orderly explanations that we would like it to. It’s a mosh pit of variables, some of which science has considered and others of which it hasn’t—because we don’t even know what they are. Though we’re more informed about the sea now than we were several hundred years ago when mermaids were listed along with sea turtles in Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, the depths still hold more secrets than anyone can count. And this lack of knowledge affects far more than ships at sea.

  Anyone who lives on this planet is utterly dependent on its oceans. Their temperatures and movements control the weather; their destructive—and life-giving—ability dwarfs anything on land. Now that climate change is an accepted fact with unknown consequences, our vulnerability is sinking in. The earth’s mean surface temperature (land and oceans combined) is warmer now than at any other time during the past four hundred years, and it continues to rise. In its 2007 report the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that “the ocean has been absorbing more than 80 percent of the heat added to the climate system.” As the waters heat up, wind velocity increases; storm tracks become more volatile; polar ice and glaciers melt, causing sea levels to rise. How far will they rise? All we have is a best guess, continually adjusted upward as new (and discouraging) data arrives. In 2007 the sea levels were predicted to rise about 23.5 inches by 2100. In 2009 that number was raised to 39 inches, a level that would displace some 600 million people in coastal areas. (Other scenarios, like the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, should they occur, would raise the sea level as much as twenty-three feet. For perspective, that would drown most of Florida.) As a result of all of the above and, likely, other factors no one’s aware of yet, average wave heights have also been rising steadily, by more than 25 percent between the 1960s and the 1990s. Planetary waves, massive subsurface ocean waves that play a key role in creating the climate, are speeding up as well. The details about what a warmer planet will look like are still coming into focus, but there is one thing our environmental future will clearly hold: a lot of restless water.

  If anyone needed a stark preview of the kinds of situations that a stormier, more liquid world might bring, it came on August 29, 2005, when a twenty-eight-foot storm surge from Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the levees surrounding New Orleans, submerging 80 percent of the city and killing almost two thousand people. (A record-breaking twenty-seven tropical storms formed in the Caribbean that year.) Intense storms are destructive enough on their own, but when the waves hit land the potential for damage goes off the charts: more than 60 percent of the global population lives within thirty miles of a coastline. Then, of course, there are tsunamis, extraordinarily powerful waves caused by underwater earthquakes and landslides. Six years ago the world watched in horror as an estimated hundred-foot tsunami wave erased the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh, home to 250,000 people, in a matter of minutes. Japan, perhaps the most vulnerable nation, has lost entire coastal populations to the waves. In the geological time frame these sudden inundations are hardly isolated events. Over the course of history volatile seas have wiped cities, islands, and even civilizations from the map.

  In Waveland, it was as though the scientists aboard the RSS Discovery had dropped through a secret trapdoor in a surly but typical North Atlantic storm and into the darkest heart of the ocean: a place where giant waves not only exist but flourish, a place so obscure to us that we’re more familiar with the workings of subatomic particles. What is out there? What happens in that place? That’s what Dr. Penny Holliday and her team wanted to learn. And so did I.

  Five years ago I set out to understand giant waves through the eyes of the people who knew them most intimately: the mariners, for whom Shackleton’s “massive upheaval of the ocean” is a present and serious threat; the scientists, who are in a race against time to understand the intricate complexities of the sea in a rapidly changing world; and of course, the tow surfers. The members of this rarefied tribe—maybe fifty highly skilled riders across the globe—don’t just stumble across giant waves or steer their ships clear of them or consider them as equations on a computer screen, they seek them out. While everyone else goes to great lengths to avoid encountering a hundred-foot wave, these men want nothing more than to find one.

  What kind of person drops in on Mother Nature’s biggest tantrums for fun? What drives him? And since he has gone into that dark heart of the ocean and felt its beat in a way that sets him apart, what does he know about this place that the rest of us don’t? My questions went on, but I knew one thing for sure: if you followed the wave experts into the waves, you would have an interesting—and turbulent—time.

  HAVING WANDERED SOME DISTANCE AMONG GLOOMY ROCKS, I CAME TO THE ENTRANCE OF A GREAT CAVERN … TWO CONTRARY EMOTIONS AROSE IN ME, FEAR AND DESIRE—FEAR OF THE THREATENING DARK CAVERN, DESIRE TO SEE WHETHER THERE WERE ANY MARVELOUS THINGS IN IT.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  HAIKU, HAWAII

  Eight miles east on Maui’s Hana Highway, in the shadow of the Haleakala volcano, away from the tourists streaming to the island’s lush southern beaches, there is a candy box of a town called Paia. Only a few blocks in size, its streets thrum with locals-only bars, open-air seafood joints, yoga studios, shops selling bikinis and hemp T-shirts and dolphin-themed art. The peace-love-aloha vibe aside, Paia’s main purpose is instantly obvious: every vehicle bristles with surfboards.

  The surfers are headed to Sprec
kelsville and Hookipa, nearby stretches of the north shore where the waves are consistently lively. Both areas are wild and exposed; neither is a spot for beginners. Compared to what lies a little farther up the road, however, they’re a pair of kiddie pools. The true spectacle requires another five miles of driving, past the blink-or-you’ll-miss-it town of Haiku, down a red-dirt path bearing the signs “No Trespassing,” “Beware of Dog,” and “Authorized Personnel Only,” and through a sea of green pineapple fields. At the foot of those fields, there is a cliff.

  It’s a lonely spot with a harsh beauty, blasted by wind and pummeled by the sea that surges in, three hundred feet below. But a half mile offshore, a number of geological features have combined to create something even more dramatic and foreboding: a giant wave called Pe’ahi, also known by its nickname, Jaws.

  For about 360 days a year Jaws lies dormant, indistinguishable from the seas around it, waiting for the right conditions to come along and set it off, like a match to a gas leak. This is one of the first places the North Pacific storms hit, menacing splotches on the radar maps spiraling down from the Aleutian Islands. When a powerful enough storm arrives, all of its energy—which has traveled through water hundreds and even thousands of feet deep—trips on Jaws’ fan-shaped reef. Deep channels on either side of the reef, carved by millennia of lava flow and freshwater drainage from the Pe’ahi Valley, above, funnel the energy inward and upward. (Imagine a runaway Mack truck suddenly hitting a ramp.)