Wow: 5 Deadly Waves You Can Surf!

Like, without dying!

Almost twelve years ago, my then business partner and I walked into a Yamaha dealer with the idea of leasing a jetski. Tow-in surfing was all the rage back then, in small and in big waves. We’d started a surfing magazine and figured we could write off the leasing costs as a business expense.

A lucrative deal with the surfing company Billabong, then worth half a billion dollars, meant we had two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the bank.

We figured, why not live a little?

A man in potato sack trousers and a spinnaker shirt that billowed in the autumn offshore breeze pulled out a sheaf of documents we’d have to sign to get our bike. All that work for a twenty-grand buy? Studs don’t do no paperwork.

I pulled out the company credit card and within thirty minutes we’d affixed the trailer to my old four-wheel-drive and were heading to the beach.

We used that ski everywhere. When it was one-foot, when it was ten-foot, we banged it into rocks, my partner once rode it up onto a boat ramp prematurely beaching it on top of a giant boulder, we tipped it over, ran over people, ran over ourselves. Hell of a good time.

And what it showed, at least to someone like me who isn’t the most courageous surfer in the world, unlike my pal who’d eat a 10-foot day at Cape Solander before breakfast, was that deadly waves can be surfed. That you even a borderline kook can survive and maybe even get a photo for perpetuity.

Two caveats here. You gotta be able to swim. And you gotta have access to a ski.

But no more ado. Here are five deadly waves you can surf.

1. Ours aka Cape Solander, Australia: If you can stand upright on your board for a minimum of four seconds, you can survive a session at Ours. As you know and have seen, it’s a dramatic rock shelf and therefore wipeouts can be unpretty if you fall early. But… but… with a sturdy stance you can survive the few seconds before the arrive at the radically deep channel, where not a damn thing can touch you.

2. Teahupoo, Tahiti: An old pal of mine works for Red Bull. Went on holiday to Tahiti with his family one year. Because he’s high on the hierarchal ladder at the company, people want to do nice things for him. Local Tahitian stud says he’ll tow him at six-to-eight-foot Teahupoo, something you wouldn’t wanna touch usually. This pal, more a snow guy than a waterman, was impeccably whipped into a dozen stand-up tubes, his hair untouched by the Pacific.

3. Belharra, France: Do you remember when the board paddler turned big-waver Jamie Mitchell paddled into a fifty-foot wave here, and fell from the heavens? What a ruthless wave this wave, a couple of clicks from Saint-Jean-de-Luz in France’s south-west corner can be. Ruthless to paddle. Amusing to tow. You want a photo for the wall of you on a thirty-foot wave? Get a whip here. Get your photo, steer for the channel.

4. Pico Alto, Peru: A very old school burger perfect for studs on 10-foot afro-fauna chasers. Tow equipped? Easiest wave in the world.

5. Nazaré, Portugal: What the hell. Why not go big? This’ll take you to the edge, but maybe not over it. You’ve seen the big-wave tow-kooks from the most unlikely countries bouncing down three-hundred-foot waves. It could be you!