Surfing Detective 02 - Wipeout

jams. Waimea takes on the elevated mood and bustle of a world-class amusement park. A Disneyland of waves.
    But for big-wave riders this is serious business. The potential thrill of a lifetime can become, in unfortunate cases, the
end
of a lifetime. Mark Foo, drowned in 1994 at Mavericks, said it best: “If you want to experience the ultimate thrill, you have to be willing to pay the ultimate price.”
    When the California surfer wiped out on Christmas Eve there was undoubtedly no shortage of photographers on hand with powerful telephoto lenses that can pick out a tattoo a quarter mile away. But since Corky’s wipeout occurred after sundown, the light would not have been best. The news clippings said a few bystanders had watched him get pounded by the first of several twenty-footers. No one reported seeing him after that.
    As we approached Waimea, I noticed the bell tower of the Mission of Saints Peter and Paul soaring over the bay, familiar to surfers around the world. Less well known is the ancient cliff-top Mahuka
heiau,
or temple,for human sacrifice just beyond. Both the bell tower and the
heiau
have always suggested to me the sacredness of the bay. For surfers, coming here represents a pilgrimage, a confrontation with the ultimate power, and maybe even a meeting with their destiny.
    This morning the bell tower cast its long shadow across Waimea’s wide beach, where countless caution signs pierced the sand like errant spears: “High Surf . . . Hazardous Conditions . . . No Swimming . . . Beach Closed.”
    Despite these warnings, two surfers were paddling out to join many others in the distant lineup, where one of those liquid mountains was just now steaming in. As it jacked up, a dozen surfers flailed their arms like winged fleas trying to climb over the massive cresting wave. Some few tempted their fate, turning and plunging down the almost vertical cliff.
    “Booooom!”
The mountain detonated in the bay.
    “Chance ‘um, Kai?” Alika’s brown eyes taunted me as he pulled his truck into the jammed lot, parked illegally on a grassy strip, and we stepped out.
    Dry mouth again.
    Alika nudged me. “Grab one board.” He pointed to the two guns in the truck’s bed.
    “Booooom!”
Another mammoth crashed, shaking the ground beneath us. A shiver of fear ran through me.
    “Bettah do da interviews first.” I wasn’t deliberately stalling, but wasn’t in any hurry to paddle into those giants either.
    “Da surfahs you need fo’ interview stay in da waves, brah,” my cousin replied, “not on da beach.”

Five

    If I was going to go tight in the chest, if I was going to start breathing fast and feeling weak-kneed or get butterflies in my stomach, if I was going to panic—the full-blown signs would appear now.
    Had the unlucky Corky McDahl shown these telltale signs?
I didn’t know and right now I didn’t care. My only job was to keep them away from me.
    “No Fear . . . . No Fear . . . .”
I said a little mantra to focus myself and stay loose.
    I stripped off my aloha shirt and khakis, revealing the board shorts I was wearing underneath and the shark bite on my chest that Alika always referred to as my “tattoo.”
    Alika handed me a chunk of wax and I began reluctantly rubbing it onto the deck of his lime green gun. Out in the distant lineup riders and their surfboards looked like ants clinging to toothpicks. Little more than specks. Each breaker jacked up three or four times higher than the boards cutting white trails down it. The swell was still rising.
    “Ho,
brah!” Alika pointed toward the roaring bay. “Let’s paddle out.” I took a deep breath and tried to exhale.
    We jogged down the beach to the water. The cool February sea and hiss of the distant foam gave me a few more shivers. The glassy surface near the beach lay deceptively calm, but suddenly an overhead shorebreak wave slammed the beach like a guillotine. We waited for a lull again, then mounted our guns and paddled quickly through the danger zone.
    I am not an experienced big wave rider. The few surfers who are form an elite cadre whose door Corky McDahl was knocking on when he got knocked off by those twenty footers. I’ve often heard the names of big-wave pioneers of the ‘50s and ‘60s uttered with reverence—if not a tinge of envy—by young surfers like Corky:
    Greg Noll earned the nickname “Da Bull” for aggressively charging the biggest waves anybody of his day had ever ridden; Buzzy Trent, the consummate,