Like, without dying!
A few days ago, I hosted another surf
journalist for breakfast. While we filled our
non-athletic stomachs with pancakes, we shared anecdotes
and laughed at the absurdity of everyday surfers like us travelling
with the best surfers in the world and their accompanying
entourages of filmers and managers and so forth.
At one point, my companion told how he’d made a perfect
“hook-up” with a water photographer and, at the photographer’s
urging, had given the turn everything he had. Surfing generally
does something terrible to a man’s ego and I waited for the
obligatory showing of the photo, me doing the ooh-ahh, thing, while
thinking: have you no modesty?
The photo was something else. It looked nothing like my
good-looking blue-eyed friend. Instead it presented him as a
fat and reddish blob awkwardly trying to tip an oversized board
onto the rail while making a vomit face with a tongue that looked
like it was trying to swallow his face. (Oh, I wish I could
reproduce it here.)
Anyway, it reminded me of how, as a travelling surf writer
of sorts, I often find myself dangerously outclassed at waves that,
by any sort of right, I shouldn’t be near. Teahupoo, P-Pass,
Ours, those sorts of deadly waves.
And, y’know what, sometimes you can get away with being
a bit of a kook at the world’s deadliest waves. Five cardinal
rules: Choose the right waves. Tow in if it’s a ledge.
Surf it small if it’s the North Shore. Know your escape routes.
Avoid the shallow inside section.
Let me recount my experiences in the field.
Teahupoo: I remember so clearly sitting in the channel
watching Kalani Robb, of all people, for it was early in the
century, take a west bowl and stand straight up in a barrel
immediately after takeoff. I was hampered by two things. Fear and
an inability to ride a backside tube. What could I do? I couldn’t
just sit in a fifty-foot deep channel all week.
Cheat sheet: Teahupoo is open to two swell
directions, south and west. The west bowl is an immediate tube. As
Luke Egan said once, “If you have to look for the tube there you’ve
already missed it.” Waves that come from the south, however, arrive
further up the reef and move outward to sea. I’ve been to Teahupoo
five times, caught hundreds of waves, and never been tubed! Or
hurt! If you can’t surf, you want ’em from the south.
Ours: Mark Mathews and Koby Abberton showed me
this wave a very long time ago and, because I have very bad wave
sense, I couldn’t even see the wave.
“There is it is… take off here…”
“Where?”
Later, when I was in business with a pal who loved the joint, he
would take me there every time it broke, offshore, onshore, two
foot, ten foot, just to see, I’m convinced, the terror in my eyes.
But I got tubed, got inside some real tubs of fun. How’d I do
it?
Cheat sheet: Get on a jetski and get
towed. Paddling at Ours requires real wave sense to see the boil,
find the chip shot, paddle down the face, and stand upright. With a
tow? Bend your legs to absorb the shock, wait and don’t panic when
the wave folds.
Backdoor Pipe: I rode this every day with Andy Irons
one year, which made me feel immortal, although the biggest day was
four foot. I remember Carissa Moore paddling out with Pancho
Sullivan and asking, “Is it breaking?”
Cheat sheet: Backdoor at two foot is a
dream. So much zip!
Waimea Bay: Who hasn’t watched The Eddie and
dreamed of cutting himself off his own slice? I have! I’ve stroked
with an intensity I never thought possible, jumped into a deep
crouch, and cut down one felt like a one-hundred foot wave.
Cheat sheet: Did you know Waimea Bay has a
smaller inside wave called Pinballs? I think it’s the safest wave
in the world at six foot and yet, stroking in, and taking off, you
get almost the same vision that fills the eyeballs of the best
big-wave surfers in the world. The church. The beach. The
highway.
Cloudbreak: Is the Fiji Pro still as warm as
morning bread in your head? Do you remember those little days
where it looked like you could throw yourself at a mostly
harmless, at least for a reef, lip, but recoiled when that long
interval swell showed up?
Cheat sheet. Up to six foot, even with sneaker
eights, Cloudbreak can be managed simply by sitting up the reef, on
the ledge. Ride a longer board, get in early, and get out before it
hurls itself onto the inside, even the middle, section. Your rides
are short, you kick off in deep water, and when you want to go back
to the safety of the resort pool you can paddle around the takeoff
zone and back to the boat.