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  GHOST WAVE

  THE DISCOVERY OF CORTES BANK AND THE BIGGEST WAVE ON EARTH

  BY CHRIS DIXON

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not have been possible without the work, time, support, hospitality, and/or inspiration of the following people:

  Will Allison, Grant “Twiggy” Baker, Rex Bank, Steve Barilotti, Rob Bender, George Beronius, Warren Blier, Daniel Martin Bresler, John Broder, Bruce Brown, Dana Brown, Rob Brown, Jimmy Buffett, Jeff Campbell, Steve Casimiro, Mike Castillo, Alfy Cater, Jeff Clark, Gary Clisby, Annouschka Collins, Josh Collins, Ken “Skindog” Collins, Sean Collins, Charles Coxe, Chris Crolley, Pat and Mary Curren, Don Curry, Jake Davi, Brett Davis, James Deckard, Jeff Divine, Jean Louise Dixon, Quinn Deckard Dixon, Richard Jobie Dixon, Watts Dixon, Shane Dorian, Dorothea Benton Frank, Lawrence Downes, Harrison Ealey, Grant Ellis, Dr. John English, William Finnegan, Nick Fox, Arthur “Mitch” Fraas, Matt George, Sam George, Brad Gerlach, Joe Gerlach, Dr. Gary Greene, Nancy Whitemarsh Gregos, Angie Gregos-Swaroop, Greg Grivetto, Nicole Gull, Jeff Hall, Laird Hamilton, Christine Hanley, Neil Hanson, Ellis T. Hardy, Christopher Havern, Steve Hawk, Mark Healey, Marty Hoffman, Philip “Flippy” Hoffman, Scott Hulet, George Hulse, Paul Hutton, Tom Jolly, Sebastian Junger, Dave Kalama, Ilima Kalama, Brian Keaulana, Buffalo Keaulana, Momi Keaulana, James Allen Knechtman, Eric Kozen, Dr. Rikk Kvitek, Randy Laine, Larry Kirshbaum, Steve Lawson, Adm. Robert J. Leuschner Jr., Brett Lickle, Kenneth Lifshitz, Brock Little, Greg Long, Rusty Long, Steve Long, Kate Lovemore, Gena and John Lovett, Leanne Lusk, Dr. Terry Maas, Don Mackay, Hugh MacRae Jr., Hugh MacRae Sr., Nick Madigan, Sarah Malarkey, Ben Marcus, Chris Mauro, Lucia McLeod, Garrett McNamara, Clement Meighan, Capt. Scott Meisel, Peter Mel, Tara Mel, Candace Moore, Larry “Flame” Moore, Dr. Walter Munk, Mickey Muñoz, Jason Murray, Ramon Navarro, Greg Noll, Laura Noll, Jeff Novak, Collin O’Neill, Dr. Bill O’Reilly, Dave Parmenter, Rebecca Parmer, Bob Parsons, Mike Parsons, Tara Parsons, Joel Patterson, Nate Perez, Steve Pezman, Judith Porcasi, Paul Porcasi, Jodi Pritchart, Mike Ramos, Rush Randle, Louis Ribeiro, Charles and Victoria Ricks, Anthony Ruffo, Roy Salis, Marcus Saunders, Bill “Dr. Evil” Sharp, Evan Slater, Kelly Slater, John Slider, Shari Smiley, Sunshine Smith, Kelly Sorensen, Jason Stallman, Capt. Steve Stampley, Jamie Sterling, Jean Stroman, Gloria Ricks Taylor thanks mom!!!, Kimball Taylor, Roy Taylor, Beverly Tetterton, Albert “Skip” Theberge, Brendon Thomas, James Thompson, Megan Thompson, Randy Thompson, Michele Titus, Matt Walker, Philip L. Walker, Les Walker, John Walla, Matt Warshaw, Grant Washburn, Frances “Taffy” Wells, Gerry Wheaton, James Whitemarsh, Brad Wieners, Malcolm Gault-Williams, Ben Wolfe, Matt Wybenga, Andrew Yatsko, Dr. Marvin Zuckerman

  I would also like to thank:

  My grandparents, for teaching me the value of a fine southern family and a damn good story.

  My parents, for teaching me the difference between making a life and making a living.

  Quinn, for teaching me the meaning of love.

  Fritz and Lucy, for teaching me the meaning of life.

  My sincere apologies to anyone I might have left out.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: THE GHOST WAVE

  Chapter 2: ONCE UPON AN ISLAND

  Chapter 3: PAWNS TO Bishop ROCK

  Chapter 4: THE KINGS OF ABALONIA

  Chapter 5: ROGUE WAVES

  Chapter 6: MAKING THE CALL

  Chapter 7: AT ARM”S LENGTH

  Chapter 8: THE PRISONERS

  Chapter 9: ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS

  Chapter 10: MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY

  Chapter 11: TRIFLING WITH THE ALMIGHTY

  AFTERWORD

  ENDNOTES

  Copyright

  When foolhardiness would urge me to go and peep into some yawning chasm, my conscience would appear to say to me, “Stop! You are trifling with the Almighty!”

  —A description of the first view of the caldera of Mount Kilauea, Hilo, Hawaii, September 1847, by Lieutenant Archibald MacRae, United States Navy

  (September 21, 1820–November 17, 1855)

  Chapter 1:

  THE

  GHOST

  WAVE

  It was the only time I ever wrote

  out a will before a surf trip.

  —Bill Sharp

  In the predawn hours of a dead-still December morning in 1990, a Black Watch sportfisher, its deck loaded with provisions, thick wetsuits, and big wave surfboards, motored out of Newport Harbor in Newport Beach, just south of Los Angeles.

  Clearing the lights at the end of the harbor’s long rock jetty, the skipper gave the boat’s twin Yanmars their first big huff of diesel and crackling dry Santa Ana air. He then pointed the bow toward an empty spot, a big blank patch of ocean a hundred miles offshore where a ghost wave was said to appear, a wave of massive proportions that came out of nowhere, rose like a monster, and then slid back into the depths without a sign of its passing. According to legend, several vessels had met disaster here and now lay on the bottom, and the few mariners who had been out there told the surfers they were crazy. Along their intended route, compasses were known to spin in random directions. It was a place where the impossible was postulated to be an occasional nightmare reality—a breaking wave 100 feet high. They were headed for the Cortes Bank.

  In addition to the captain, the boat contained four passengers: Surfing magazine editors Bill Sharp, Sam George, and Larry “Flame” Moore, along with a California pro surfer named George Hulse. Sharp, George, and Hulse were experienced big wave surfers, but in 1990, the world of monster swells was a far smaller and more mysterious place than it is today. The crucible of their sport still lay on Oahu at thundering tropical waves like Pipeline, Makaha, and Waimea Bay, and a relatively small group possessed the knowledge, skill, and guts to challenge them. Swell forecasting was still in its infancy; spots like Maverick’s, Jaws, and Teahupoo lay far off the radar. Only recently, these three surfers had tested themselves on the first bona fide big wave find on the North American mainland—an icy, kelp-ringed giant off northern Baja’s Todos Santos Island, appropriately named Killers. No one aboard had ever considered tying a water-ski rope to the stern of a Jet Ski and slingshotting a life-jacketed surfer onto a big wave—the pursuit today known as towsurfing. If you wanted to catch a big wave in 1990, you had to paddle like hell, pray, and never forget that if something went wrong, you were all alone.

  Indeed, the surfers had gone to great lengths to ensure they were alone. This exploratory encounter with what they believed to be an unsurfed leviathan was the culmination of several years of painstaking, almost pathologically secretive detective work.

  In December 1985, illuminated by the neon glow of a photographer’s light table, Larry Moore pointed a freckled finger at page L4 of the Chart Guide to Southern California. “What about this spot? There’s gotta be waves out there.”

  Beside him stood Sam George and Bill Sharp, the newly minted young editors of Surfing magazine. They had been scouring the nooks and crannies on the map, looking for places where they might find surf.

  If there was one thing that George and Sharp had come to realize, it was that Flame was obsessive about everything he did. You didn’t get a grain of sand in his Ford pickup. You didn’t miss a 4 A.M. roll call for a photo shoot. You didn’t mess with any element atop his photo desk. And you sure as hell didn’t talk about surf spots you were scouting out. That was the great privilege and maddening frustration of the job. Larry possessed an obsessive need to know about the waves that broke along the Pacific Coast and to be the first to document them. Inclusion among his tight circle of explorers made you a very fortunate person, but you had to keep your mouth shut until Flam
e was ready to reveal a discovery—which might be never.

  Flame was a fairly seasoned sailor. He had pored over his chart guides, studying coast and bathymetry from Vancouver Island to Cabo San Lucas. The same set of features that might sink a ship could also indicate a hidden wave. Lately, he had set his sights toward Todos Santos and San Clemente Island and now this weird shoal called Cortes Bank. He saw danger and opportunity. In fact, a mere month earlier, the Los Angeles Times had carried a story about the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise actually colliding with an unnamed reef “100 miles off San Diego.” What other reef could it possibly be?

  “Here’s what it says,” Flame read to Sharp and George. “Cortes Bank is about twenty-five miles long west-northwest to east-southeast by seven miles wide, with Bishop Rock awash and buoyed. The rock was struck by the clipper Bishop in 1855 and is the farthest-outlying coastal danger. Nontidal currents of one to two knots cause much swell and moderate sea often breaks over the rock. A wreck near the rock is covered by only three feet. The bottom from five miles west-northwest to two and a half miles east-southeast is broken with hard white sand, broken shell, and fine coral. Anchorage is reported impractical due to swell, breakers, and lost anchors.”

  Sharp’s blue eyes traced the tight contour lines. In addition to Bishop Rock, other shoal spots lay on Cortes Bank, one only nine fathoms deep. Another nine-fathom bank called Tanner lay just to the northeast. A few miles out, the ocean plunged to a thousand fathoms, or six thousand feet. “Good lord,” Sharp said to Flame. “Three feet deep?”

  Flame’s first enquiry about Cortes Bank was with Philip “Flippy” Hoffman, a gruff old diver and local textile magnate. Hoffman had been among the very first Californians to challenge the giant, empty waves along the North Shore of Oahu in the early 1950s, and in 1973, he became one of the very first to surf Kaena Point, a frightful open-ocean wave off Oahu’s easternmost edge. Hoffman moored his boat in Dana Point next to Flame’s cherished Candace Marie, and he was as hard-core a waterman as you could ever hope to meet.

  “I used to dive the Bank with the abalone fleet back in the 1950s, and I told Larry it had big wave potential,” Hoffman said, his strong, old voice sounding as if it had been run through a fan.

  “We’d go out there mostly in the fall. That’s the nicest time of year for weather. I never saw it break all that big, and I never surfed out there because the currents are horrible and you couldn’t stay in the lineup.”

  Diving was an isolated, dangerous business. Even with no breaking waves, the entire Bank was subject to tremendous, swirling surges of swell that could push or pull you sideways, or up and down in the water column, far faster than you might equalize the pressure in your ears. There were abalone the size of Bibles, lobsters the size of men, and sharks the size of busses. Were you swept from your boat, a current that suddenly rose to two or even four knots could make return utterly impossible.

  Hoffman recalled being able to see the top of Bishop Rock, a pinnacle of hard volcanic basalt, in the trough of waves on a very low tide. “We went, maybe, four or five times from 1951 to 1958, just commercial fishing for abalone,” Hoffman said. “The water could be very clear or dirty with plankton, and the fishing was just not quite as good as we thought it would be. It was a very rough place to try to sleep at night. Cups and plates would fly across the galley. I knew sometimes it must get really big out there.”

  Hoffman also told Flame that at least one diver—a famous Hawaiian big wave surfer named Ilima Kalama—had very nearly died out there.

  In short, the Bank was not a place to be trifled with.

  After that, Cortes Bank became an obsession for Flame. In January 1990, he and a gonzo surfer and bush pilot named Mike Castillo decided to see it for themselves. A now-legendary swell had just blitzed Hawaii, and they wanted to see what happened when it reached Bishop Rock, Cortes Bank’s shallowest reach. From Castillo’s tiny Cessna, a few hundred feet up in the air, Flame and Castillo were shocked to find a titanic, unruly wave unloading onto the submarine reef. Flame had traveled the world in search of surf, but he had never seen anything like this. A mile-long mutant Malibu was reeling off in the middle of the ocean. Castillo dove low and flew alongside a wave from a height of around thirty feet. Astonishingly, they appeared to be looking up at the wave’s cascading lip.

  “If anyone ever tries to surf out there,” Castillo said, “they’d better take the fucking Pope along to pray for them.”

  A few days later, Flame showed photos of Cortes Bank to Sam George and Bill Sharp, swearing them to secrecy, as always. They were stunned. The photos raised disturbing and perplexing questions. Being big wave surfers, the most important was: How big was it? In the photographs, the only point of reference was a red marker buoy that disappeared in the maelstrom of white water at regular intervals as the waves passed. Flame didn’t reveal the fact that he and Castillo had actually observed a wave from near sea level.

  Bill Sharp recently mused, “If I knew how big the waves in those photos really were—or how big Flame thought they might be, I’m not sure if I would have gone. And if I had, it sure as hell wouldn’t have been on such a tiny boat.”

  Eleven months later, and not long after exiting Newport Harbor in darkness, Sharp offered to take the helm of that tiny boat. He had a good basic understanding of LORAN navigation systems (GPS was not yet commonplace), and he was wide awake, so everyone else bundled up and went to sleep. The plan was to motor the twenty-nine-foot Black Watch for twenty miles out and around the southern end of Catalina Island. They would then cross another thirty-two miles of ocean to the southern flank of San Clemente Island, a naval base and artillery range populated by unexploded ordnance and a dwindling herd of feral, shell-shocked goats. From there, it was a simple, straight shot across forty miles of far wilder water. They had deliberately not notified the surfer-filled ranks of the Los Angeles or San Diego Coast Guard sectors of this expedition. “Loose lips sink ships,” Flame told Sharp.

  As the boat droned past Catalina, the first rays of sunlight painted the sky a pinkish purple. In the island’s lee, a whisper of Santa Ana breeze carried the scent of chaparral and decaying bull kelp. Rising and falling over the butter smooth Pacific, Sharp uneasily pondered the last-minute nature of this mission. Despite seeing photos, the surfers were essentially flying blind. Once the Black Watch cleared the shadow of San Clemente Island, the swell would become much bigger. But just how big? Sharp was particularly troubled by the rumor that this phantom wave had once scuttled a huge ship somewhere near the surf zone; a wreck was listed right there on the chart. What if some jagged piece of hull lay on the bottom? Getting stuffed by thirty feet of white water into a rusty portal was not a hazard most surf spots presented. What if the Santa Ana winds defied the forecast—as they often did—and wound up to hurricane force? What if a fog rolled in? Sharp thought of VW-size elephant seals and the creatures that dine on VW-size elephant seals. It was as if they were setting out to find and ride Moby Dick—bareback—and Sharp knew how that story ended.

  The winds remained calm, but the undulating swells increased markedly. By the time the Black Watch rounded San Clemente Island three hours later, the crew began to stir, and Sharp informed his fellow surfers that they were dropping into the troughs of swells six to eight feet high at regular intervals of between seventeen and eighteen seconds. It was a solid west swell.

  Sharp, Hulse, and George had all followed somewhat similar paths into the world of competitive surfing, but by 1990, none ranked at the top of the sport. Each began his career as a representative of the amateur National Scholastic Surfing Association’s National Team. Hulse and George competed atop traditional surfboards, while the iconoclastic Sharp chose to ride his waves on a kneeboard. This kneebound surfing earned ribbing from Sharp’s buddies, but that typically ceased when they saw him charge through suicidal barrels or launch himself onto waves on his short, stubby rocket that standup friends—including Sam—wouldn’t touch. Sharp had developed a particularly
fierce reputation at Todos Santos and at a mutant neck-breaker of a wave in Newport Beach called the Wedge.

  Sharp was the son of a hard-charging Air Force fighter pilot. He had studied business at San Diego State University, where he founded the school’s surf team. Hulse and George went on to compete in the ASP World Tour, a championship series of contests run by the nascent Association of Surfing Professionals. By 1989, Sharp and George had found their way—somewhat unexpectedly—into the small world of surf journalism, while Hulse, ground down by nonstop travel and a debaucherous party scene, had quit the World Tour. He was not nearly so widely known as Flame’s “A-listers,” pro surfers like Tom Curren, Brad Gerlach, Dave Parmenter, or budding West Coast big wave specialist Mike Parsons. Fortunately for Hulse, on this day all were off competing.

  Sam George didn’t share Sharp or Hulse’s big wave bloodlust, but he could hold his own in most of the world’s more radical lineups. He regarded the polished water and surging swell. “A lot bigger than it was when we left,” he said to Sharp. “I wonder what the hell we’re getting ourselves into.”

  “Shit, man,” Sharp chirped, clutching the wheel and striking his best sea captain’s pose. “Adventure is our business!”

  At around 11 A.M. , the LORAN indicated that the Black Watch was approaching the shallow southern periphery of Cortes Bank. “Something’s going on,” Sharp told George. “Look at the horizon.”

  Rather than the ruler-straight undulations of the previous several hours, the wave pulses suddenly steepened. They approached from odd angles, wobbling and lurching toward the boat like punch-drunk ski moguls. There was no obvious cause, but there was a reason.

  The boat had rapidly passed from waters more than a mile in depth to the 150-foot-deep edge of a vast sunken mesa, which had disappeared beneath the Pacific Ocean a mere four thousand years ago. Swells whose energy columns ran nearly twelve hundred feet down were reacting to the first obstacle since slamming into the Hawaiian Islands twenty-five hundred miles ago. The Black Watch was built with a stable V-shaped hull, perfect for offshore fishing missions, yet she swooned from starboard to port. Confused, lumpy seas like this wouldn’t have been all that unusual in a gale, but the air remained warm and calm. Sharp hoped the depth finder, which indicated that they were still motoring safely in more than a hundred feet of water, was functioning properly. He eased the throttle back a notch and strained for any point of reference. None was to be found.