Pacific Quest took up a position near the Bishop Rock buoy, its bell clanging a lazy wake-up call. A righthand wave stood majestically before throwing out a yawning barrel whose size was, again, impossible to estimate. Then as the set swung closer to the boat, a second peak was revealed. Its foam exploded an unknowable number of feet into the air and churned the surrounding waters into a 360-degree maelstrom of confusion. It was shaped like a great, volcanic cone - 43 million pounds of water, terrible and unrideable. A Himalayan peak rose to life far off the bow. Ten minutes later, dawn’s early light revealed a shimmering plume of spray. There it would trip up, careening and falling forward like an enraged giant while peeling down the shallow waterline like a line of toppling dominoes.Įvan Slater (left) and John Walla, two young Californians who earned their stripes surfing scary big days at Todos Santos, smiling at the thought of a Cortes paddle-in session. The wave would rise higher and higher in the shallows until reaching the final big stair step. The Cortes Bank’s ancient terraces would then cause the wave to shoal steadily, while the hook would focus even more energy onto the Bishop Rock like sunlight through a magnifying glass. If a wave swept toward the Bank from the proper northwesterly angle - somewhere between 270 (true west) and 360 (true north) degrees on a circle (though it should be noted that Collins keeps the best combinations of period and swell angle a secret) - the wave should hook onto that thumb, slowing and bending inward on itself and curving toward the shallows.
A long-period wave, something in the 18- to 20-second range, carries energy down beyond a thousand feet, but the energy really begins to concentrate at around 600 feet. At around 600 feet, he and Collins noted a peninsular thumb of sandstone and basalt that juts out three to four nautical miles to the northwest of Bishop Rock. Collins partnered with a Scripps Institute Oceanographer named Bill O’Reilly, whose doctoral thesis involved modeling incoming swells around different bottom topographies. The second piece of the Cortes puzzle lay concealed along the tortured, craggy seafloor off Bishop Rock. With a pure swell of 20 to 25 feet, the comically impossible would become real - a peeling wave, 100 feet high. “I’m putting out the yellow light for this Cortes thing,” Flame said. If the forecast held, hurricane-force winds would soon be raking a thousand-mile swath of ocean between Hawaii and California. A 956-millibar storm was plodding across the Pacific. Then on January 14, Flame rang up Parsons. Though they found big waves, they were never the eight-story titans they had witnessed during the seminal Eddie Aikau swell of 1990. They buzzed the waves at rooftop level on west swells and north swells, during long periods and short periods, and relayed their observations back to Sean Collins. In that time, he and Mike Parsons had launched at least three weather-aborted paddle surfing missions, and he and Mike Castillo had flown out over Bishop Rock, Cortes’ shallowest peak, perhaps 14 times.
In between giant swells, we’ll bring you closer to this crew and the waves they tackle with features like this - and on the very best days, we’ll broadcast the action live, from multiple angles, in ways guaranteed to take it all next level.īy January 2001, Larry “Flame” Moore had spent just over a decade being thwarted in his attempts to document a surf session at the Cortes Bank. If you happen to be a fan of big-wave surfing, we just launched Twenty Foot Plus - a new series, chronicling the world’s best big-wave surfers in the heaviest waves on Earth.
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