Riderless jetski causes chaos at epic twenty-foot Mavericks session!

Ghost jetski delivers a bravura performance at California's premier big wave!

If you’re in California or you like to fiddle with cams and surf reports and so on, you’ll know there’s been waves of some magnitude hitting the Pacific coastline, including big daddy Mavericks.

The “massive extra long period west swell” belting California, and notably Mavericks, is the same damn swell that lit up Jaws and co.

Yeah, there was a little south wind on it but it didn’t stop a United Nations of surfers from Tahiti, Hawaii, Portugal, as well as the usual local heroes including the big-wave surfer turned occasional WSL commentator Peter Mel, from hitting Mavericks. 

(Three years ago, almost to the day, Mel, who wears slightly too big flannel shirts and pants with stone washing applied at the factory, rode a thirty-foot tube at Mavericks. “Everyone on earth should see this ride,” said Kelly Slater.)

Mavericks was was first surfed in 1975 by seventeen-year-old hotshot Jeff Clark, who surfed it alone for 15 years before introducing it to the world in 1990.

In 1994, the great big-wave rider Mark Foo died surfing Mavericks; in 2011, another great Hawaiian surfer Sion Milosky drowned after a two-wave hold down. One month earlier Milosky had been named the North Shore’s underground surfer of the year. He used part of his twenty-five gees prizemoney to chase the swell to Mavericks.

(It got its sexy name in 1967 after Alex Matienzo, Jim Thompson, and Dick Notmeyer were surfing way inside Mavs and Matienzo’s flatmate’s dog Maverick kept swimming out to ’em.)

Anyway, turns out a riderless jetski stole the show with a bravado performance, sticking its unmanned lance into a monster wave’s neck before running out of steam as it attempted to motor back through the Mavericks swell and out to sea. 

In the clip, captured by Jamy Donaldson, watch as the jetski roams the lineup with impunity before flying too close to the sun.

Anyone who’s ever owned one of the damn things will know they come equipped with a kill switch lanyard, which is attached to a wrist band.

You fall off, boat stops. You don’t wear one, you fall, and it’s a no-man rodeo. 

Early reports suggest the runaway jetski belonged to Brazilian Lucas Chianca, one of the best big-wave surfers inn the world although he does ride a very fine line ‘tween life and death.

Two years ago at Nazaré, Chianca and his tow partner Kai Lenny were almost killed after a rescue forced the pair to ride their seven-hundred pound jetski into a ten-foot shorebreak.