Photo: Tim Bonython // YouTube
Despite their violence, wipeouts are shockingly reflective moments. As one is getting tossed around underwater, blind and disoriented, there’s not much to do but think. Sometimes, the only way to even survive the experience is to enter a state of zen-like surrender. Big wave charger CJ Macias describes several such moments in the latest short from Tim Bonython, where he breaks down the worst wipeout of his life at Nazaré.
The first came just before the drop. “There was this frozen moment,” Macias explains, “Where I’m on top of the thing, not going fast enough, hardly moving. And it’s about to let me down, I hope. I see the cliff, I can feel the thousands of people there watching. I can see the Jet Ski, there. Laurent, the film crew was there. Just this whole big vision. And then, in that moment, it just lets me go.”
He took an elevator drop, then straightened out to bomb down the 40-foot wave face. “I’m going down this thing, the fastest I’ve ever gone on a surfboard, by far,” he continues. “At least 50 miles per hour, flying straight down.”
Then, the wave caught up to him. Despite a valiant effort to make it out of the whitewash, it pitched him off at exactly the worst spot possible.
The second moment came as he was getting thrashed underwater. As Macias tried to struggle and hold on to what turned out to be a broken arm, he realized that the only way out of the situation was to remain calm. “I realized, ‘oh shit, I’m panicking, wasting a bunch of oxygen,'” he describes. “I was like ‘I need to let this go. I need to make sure that I don’t drown,’ and I just surrendered, went to the place, knew that ‘Okay I’m not breathing until I get back to the surface, so just be here.'”
It’s a wild story, check it out in full below.
