Opportunity lost.
One of the great joys, of the past handful of years, is the rise of Garrett McNamara. The Massachusetts-born, Berkeley-raised stud made a name for himself, in our small surf world, wrangling Oahu beasts but launched into the general public eye by pioneering Nazare. That mutant, breaking off Portugal’s shore, is responsible for the most recent Guinness Book of World Records records, the latest measured at 86 feet, and also for making McNamara a bonafide television star.
But certainly you’ve watched HBO’s very fine 100 Foot Wave. The award-winning documentary series, which follows McNamara, is three seasons old, now, and while a fourth has yet to be confirmed, everyone agrees it would be a lot cooler if it could be 1578 Foot Wave instead of the now tired 100 Foot Wave.
The opportunity was missed, this past summer, when a wave exactly that size went unridden in Alaska.
The behemoth ripped through the Tracy Arm Fjord, some forty miles south of Juneau, on August, 10 after a landslide triggered a tsunami.
Researchers were able to measure it, precisely, thanks to a new NASA Surface Water Ocean Topography satellite.
Dr. Thomas Monahan, an engineer at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, declared, “Until now, we simply didn’t have a way to observe these waves directly, but our study has demonstrated that using data from the new Surface Water Ocean Topography satellite can reveal the full sea-surface structure of these events, even if no one witnesses them directly,
Dr. Dan Shugar, a geomorphologist at the University of Calgary in Canada, added, “Normally with these gigantic rock avalanches, they often give some sort of warning signs in the weeks, months, years prior, when the slope is slowly moving down the mountain. It’s sagging and then it catastrophically gives way in a rock avalanche. In this case that didn’t happen.”
If it did happen, though, the warning signs and all that, there can be no doubt that McNamara and team would have set up camp and waited for the big moment. 1578 Foot Wave has a real ring to it, but alas, apparently it was not meant to be.
Bummer.