Wade Amazing Surfing Stories

Tales of Incredible Waves & Remarkable Riders
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-118-34020-2
Verlag: Fernhurst Books Limited
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 4, 228 Seiten

Reihe: Amazing Stories

This eclectic mix of surfing stories has something for everyone, from classic tales of monster waves and epic battles to stories of when life among the breakers goes wrong. There are accounts of death and disaster, as well as bravery and triumph. The bizarre and the extreme rub shoulders with perfect breaks and beautiful beaches. Be thrilled by legendary surfers, as well as learning about local heroes who never made the headlines. Each compelling tale has been chosen to stoke the fire of armchair surfers and hardcore wave-riders alike, and many are illustrated with colour photographs.

Alex Wade is a writer, freelance journalist, media lawyer and lecturer. As well as running the Surf Nation blog, Alex has edited and/or contributed columns and features for many national newspapers and magazines including The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent titles, the FT, The Telegraph, Huck, Wavelength, The Surfer's Path, Flush, Coast and Cornwall Today. In 2009, Alex was short-listed as Sports Feature Writer of the Year in the Sports Journalists' Association's awards and he has sat on various occasions as a judge for Coast's annual awards. He was the first UK writer to cover surfing in serious depth for a national newspaper. Alex has travelled the globe extensively in search of the biggest waves and best breaks. He has written about surf breaks from Hawaii and Costa Rica to France and Portugal. Despite a restless life he thinks he has found paradise in West Penwith, Cornwall, UK, where he surfs all year round.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wade, Alex

Leseproben

SURVIVING THE ATOM BLASTER

When Australian professional surfer Mark Visser decided to try and ride Jaws by night, he had no idea quite how draining the experience would be.

It vaporized me. I felt like my body went into little particles.”

Laird Hamilton's summary of what a wipeout at Jaws feels like is all the more apposite given the name first coined for Maui's legendary reef break. “Before it was ‘Jaws’,” says Gerry Lopez, aka ‘Mr Pipeline’, “we called it ‘Atom Blaster’ because it broke like an atomic bomb. It's a super freak wave.”

Jaws entered the surf world's consciousness thanks to two events in 1994. First came that year's September issue of Surfer magazine, which featured the wave, although its precise location was not given, and then a few weeks later, came Endless Summer II. Bruce Brown's update of his seminal 1964 celebration of surfing showed Jaws breaking at size, and emerged as the most memorable sequence in the film. It put Peahi (its Hawaiian name, meaning ‘beckon’) on the map, although the wave had been ridden since the late 80s and early 90s by hard-charging windsurfers such as Dave Kalama, Rush Randle and Mike Waltz. The mid-90s saw the advent of tow-in surfing; by the end of the decade Jaws – which only breaks over 20 ft around six times a year – was as well-known as Waimea Bay (and, when it worked, probably more crowded).

Since the early 90s to the present day, Hamilton has been the surfer who is most regularly associated with Jaws. To a degree, this is down to his exceptional media savvy: if there is one surfer who knows how to talk amiably to journalists, it is the 6 ft 3 inch, 220-pound, blond, square-jawed and muscular Hamilton, who was born at San Francisco university in an experimental salt-water sphere. Mostly though, Hamilton's dominance of the line-up at Jaws is simply because he is its best surfer. Time and again he has proved this by challenging the wave rather than merely riding it, carving turns on its vast, open faces and slipping into barrels as if Jaws was an 8 ft walk in the park rather than the terrifying 80 ft beast that it can be.

But for all that Hamilton is Peahi's virtuoso performer, there is one thing that even he has never done. It is something that only one man has done. It is something that very few people, if any, will ever do – and that fewer still would even conceive of doing. Anyone for surfing a pumping, fully awoken, bone-gnawing Jaws by night?

The man who can lay claim to this feat is Australian surfer Mark Visser – and his achievement began with a friend's dream.

“A friend called Christo had a dream about riding big waves at night,” says Visser, an ultra-fit 29-year-old dubbed the ‘Lung Fish’ on account of his ability to hold his breath under water for over six minutes. “His dad owned a torch company, and it got him thinking about whether it would be possible to ride big waves at night if they were lit up. He had this weird dream of me surfing while wearing a miner's light. It was one of those things that we talked about in the pub.”

If the genesis was unusual, the planning was precise – and again involved a close friend. “My best mate, Ryan Stewart, pushed me to think of a way of realising Christo's dream. Ryan was always on at me, making me think it through, and I began working with submarine lighting engineers to develop the illumination necessary to complete the project. Initially, it failed time and time again, but finally, after three years, we developed a mechanism to make the light reflect against the wave, thereby allowing the rescue crew to keep track of me. At the same time, I could see where I was going without being blinded by the light. All in all, four years after he had his dream Christo's idea came to fruition.”

More to the point, it came to fruition at Jaws – one of the most dangerous waves on earth, as Visser knew all too well from personal experience. “Jaws is a gnarly place. The first time I surfed there I got washed into the cliff. I didn't forget the experience in a hurry and although I've surfed the place many times since, you can never take it for granted.”

Visser's first session at Jaws gave him a visceral sense of the truth of renowned Hawaiian big wave surfer Darrick Doerner's much-quoted line: “When you go down [at Jaws], and you will, it will be the most devastating experience of your life.” But Visser, who quit the World Qualifying Tour (WQS) because he grew weary of surfing small waves, thrives on danger. Although he avows that “I wouldn't consider myself a daredevil”, Visser's post-WQS predilection for giant surf might, to many people, put him squarely in this category. He has surfed many of the world's most demanding waves, from Teahupoo in Tahiti, Cloudbreak in Fiji and Hawaii's best spots to Australian monsters such as Shipstern's Bluff, Cow Bombie in Western Australia and another fearsome WA wave known only as ‘The Slab’. But aside from such high profile derring-do, Visser has also amassed an impressive series of big wave contest results, placing fifth in a 2006/2007 tow-in tour event in Chile, seventh in Oregon's Nelscott Reef Big Wave Paddle-In event, and runner up in the 2008/2009, 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 Oakley ASL Big Wave Awards. Visser, who began surfing at the age of 10 and went on to represent the Australian schoolboys team, has also had several waves entered into the XXL awards for biggest wave ridden.

“I really want to push myself on a whole range of different levels,” says Visser, but in deciding to night-surf Jaws he got more than he bargained for, as much in the build-up, as on the night. “It was so draining in the lead-up to the night ride, everything was so intense and I was so scared by what was looming that I didn't sleep properly,” says the goofy-footer, whose home is on Australia's Sunshine Coast. “Every day for about a week I would wake up at 5am in a hot sweat. It was the most traumatic experience in the lead-up to anything I've ever done in my life.”

There were logistical problems galore too, from the creation of custom-made LED lighting built into a buoyancy vest and on Visser's surfboard, to finding a jetski driver on the night. It took several modifications to get the lighting just right, so that it wouldn't hinder the vision of Visser, the jetski drivers and the helicopter pilots, but then the original jetski team dropped out. “We had teed up some drivers for the project,” explains Visser, “but I think reality set in – they pulled out at the last minute, saying it was a suicide mission. Luckily, my regular tow-surfing partner, Yuri Soledade, lives on Maui and was happy to step in at the last minute. I've competed with Yuri in big wave events all around the world, so it was actually a relief that he was able to be in the water with me.” Helicopters fitted with special lights to light up the sea in case Visser wiped out were used, but finding a pilot wasn't easy either: “It was really difficult getting helicopter pilots willing to be involved in the project as it was so dangerous,” says Visser. “But we were going to do it one way or another and had an evacuation plan set up on the cliff if we needed it.”

Months of preparation for the night-surf saw Visser work with safety teams, members of the special forces and a number of Australia's best fitness coaches, all of whom conditioned Visser to deal with the unexpected. “The training with the coaches was tough,” he told journalist Cassandra Murnieks, who writes for The Australian. However, training did not simply consist of testing the technology in smaller waves at night in Australia and endless work-outs, it also included paddling in shark-infested seas for up to six hours. As Visser said to Murnieks, “The coaches pushed me and they had me paddling at night in shipping channels and in shark-infested waters. On one night, I was told to paddle in a shark area for six hours. For the first two hours, it was pitch-black and I kept coming into contact with fish and jellyfish, which freaked me out a bit. But after the first two hours, my eyes had adjusted to look out for the shadows and it became easier after that. If I had all of those things under control, it was one less thing to worry about when it actually came to surfing Jaws.”

But the fear factor on the night was undiminished. Jaws was breaking in the 30-40 ft range; big enough by day in anyone's book, but an even scarier proposition in darkness. In the heaving ocean, and barely able to see, Visser's senses were even more finely tuned than usual. “In daylight, you can see and react to how the wave is bending and turning, whereas at night you can't control any of that and you're really in nature's hand. You have to use all your senses because you can't see. As much as is humanly possible, you have to be at one with the wave.” And fear is part of the process: “I always feel fear, but I'm OK with it,” says Visser. “I accept it and I deal with it as I go along.”

Eventually, at 2am on Thursday 20 January 2011, Visser took to the water with just Soledade to tow him into waves and another man driving a rescue ski. Forty minutes passed before he caught his first...