You have to pay to play, but sometimes the price of admission is hefty. Photos: YouTube//Screenshots
It’s very likely that the very first thing you did on a surfboard was wipeout. It’s the one thing that every single one of us has in common, from Kelly Slater to the newest of surfers. Everyone has done it. Everyone still does it. And Matt Bromley is nothing if not part of the everyone. He’s spent much of his life chasing huge waves and trying not to wipeout on them, but it’s unavoidable. Here, he runs through one of his worst.
“Puerto is one of the heaviest waves in the world, one-hundred percent,” Bromley said. “It’s a beachbreak, which makes it extremely unpredictable. The currents are like nowhere else I’ve ever surfed, and the waves get up to 30-40 feet high, breaking right on the beach in shallow water. It’s extremely heavy and intimidating… the barrels are as wide as they are tall, but it can also deliver the wave of a lifetime.”
Bromley is no stranger to surfing big waves. He’s surfed his fair share of them at places like Pipeline, Nias, and Maverick’s, but over the course of surfing those big waves, he’s managed to remain relatively unscathed. But this one shook him.
After making the drop smoothly, he pumped up the face and got ready for the barrel. As he looked down the line, though, he knew he was in for a rough ride.
“You really need to pick your waves carefully out there,” Bromley said. “…as I kind of started getting locked into the wave, I saw this frothy foam in front of me. I was just thinking, ‘oh no,’ because you don’t want that. That can make the barrel change shape. I had nowhere to go but to pull in.”
Bromley did indeed pull in, despite knowing that it was likely going to close out on him. That’s nothing new for him, though, so he reacted how he normally does.
“The barrel just kind of imploded on me,” he remembered. “I waited for the foam ball to kind of pick me up and then I did a pin drop off the front of the board.”
The point of that pin drop is to penetrate the wave and get underneath it as it rolls through. While it generally is the way to go, Mother Nature is unpredictable and Bromley suddenly felt something hit his head.
“When you get hit that hard,” he said, “you’re just in shock. My immediate thought was just ‘stay awake. Stay conscious. Get to the surface and then we can go from there.'”
Before he could reach the surface, he put his hand to his head and realized that something was wrong. There was something hanging off his head — a flap of skin or a piece of fiberglass, Bromley assumed — and when he did manage to break the surface, his left eye was already full of blood.
“I couldn’t see properly because I only had vision in the one eye because of all the blood,” he said. “There was another really big wave towering over me. In that moment I just said, ‘God help me, God help me.'”
After three or four more waves on the head, Bromley finally found himself in a bit of a lull. After taking stock of his injuries, he decided to make a beeline for the beach. The current at Puerto, though, is notoriously strong, and Bromley fast found himself in a rip.
“I was sprint paddling for maybe two minutes,” he recalled. “The beach was right there and I could not get to it.”
When he realized he was doing himself more harm than good, he let the rip take him back out. That’s when all the surfers in the lineup paddled over to help. They surrounded him, held his board, and told him that he was going to be okay.
“That was a really beautiful moment,” he said. “I could see a bit of shock in people’s faces when they saw how big the gash was, but I had no idea how bad it was.”
Eventually, the lifeguards launched the Jet Ski, which is one of the most important pieces of safety equipment in a big wave lineup. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t start once it was in the water, so plans in the lineup changed. With the help of the other surfers, Bromley began paddling for a safe zone about half a kilometer down the beach. There, a fishing boat plucked Bromley from the water and brought him to the harbor where an ambulance was waiting.
It wasn’t until right before surgery that Bromley had a look at the damage. The surgeon showed him a picture of the wound, and it was far worse than he imagined. His forehead was opened up from his eyebrow to his hair line, a huge flap of skin pulled back to expose his skull.
Thankfully, all went well and Bromley is recovering. He’ll likely have a hell of a scar, but if there’s one thing that Bromley has proven, it’s that he’ll be back in the water as soon as he can be.
