Greg Long (left) and Mike Parsons cheating the storm 100 miles out at sea. Photo: Rob Brown
Editor’s Note: Rob Brown is a longtime friend and associate of former SURFER magazine editor Sam George. Rob’s book, Pacific Quests, is available for order on May 23 at PacificQuests.com, when the site also goes live. The following is an excerpt.
Consider, for a moment, the exquisite irony that the most epic, daring, potentially life-threatening and altogether outrageous surf session in the history of the sport got its start in a Starbucks.
It was the winter of 2008, and a massive storm front was lashing the entire West Coast (which in terms of big wave surfing meant from Baja’s Isla Todos Santos in the south, to Maverick’s in the north) roiling the sea with gale-force onshore winds and driving rain, precluding any possibility of riding the gigantic swell accompanying the angry low-pressure spawn. Lamenting the loss of opportunity, the coast’s big-wave community could only hunker down and ride out the evil conditions.
All except big wave aces Greg Long and Mike Parsons. These two meteorological geeks had discerned a weather chart anomaly that apparently escaped everyone else — at least anyone in their right mind.
“The whole time I was conversing with Greg,” explained Parsons in a 2008 interview. “He’s kind of my partner in crime, so as far as planning goes. So, the day before the brunt of the swell is supposed to, hit I’m reading the weather charts for the hundredth time. And I called Greg at about 3:00 p.m. and said, ‘Are you lookin’ at this?’ And he said, ‘I can’t believe you just called me. I’m looking at the exact same thing.’”
What the intrepid pair had divined was the possibility of a brief window of relatively calm winds, tucked between approaching frontal systems, coinciding with the peak of the highest swell-buoy readings they’d ever seen: 23 feet at 20 seconds. A one-hour window that might be taken advantage of, if only they could somehow fight their way to a break far enough offshore to escape the chaos pounding the coastline. Only one option: Cortes Bank, the remote shoal rising up out of the Pacific, located 100 miles off the coast of San Diego. A serious, full-on expedition, even during the most ideal conditions. A madman’s race against the devil during a storm like this one.
“So what do you do?” Long, interviewed at the same time, remembered asking himself. “The logical side says, ‘There’s a storm raging. Don’t even go outside today, let alone one hundred miles offshore.’” But then the other half’s going, ‘Okay, well…what if?’”
Which is why, in the pre-dawn drizzle, Long and Parsons found themselves in a Dana Point Harbor Starbucks, taking one last look at their charts, gauging the tremendous storm spume cascading over the protective jetty, sniffing the wind and asking themselves, “What do you think? Should we do this?”
There really was no choice at that point. Because the night before they had run their crazy theory past multi-XXL Award-winning photographer/skipper Rob Brown, who at the time was attending a boat show in San Diego. And it went something like this:
Parsons: “Hey, RB, it’s Mike. It could be on tomorrow at Cortes.”
Brown: “You’re kidding me, right? It’s supposed to be howling south wind. There’s no way.”
Parsons: “We think there’s a chance [explains wild theory].
Brown: “Okay. Okay. If you guys are that serious about it, I’ll trailer the boat up there and get it ready. But you gotta know, if we do make it out there, and something happens to the boat, you guys are walking home.”
Serious hardly describes what followed the decision in Starbucks to motor out into international waters, through the eye of a monster storm, attempting to catch a brief period of calm weather in order to ride what could be the biggest waves this team of hellmen might ever face. Joined by last-minute recruits Grant “Twiggy”Baker, Brad Gerlach and videographer Matt Wybenga, Brown piloted his twin-hulled cruiser straight into the gnashing teeth of the confused, eight-to-10-foot windswell, with Long taking the first shift on one of the PWCs that had to be towed the entire distance, pounding along in the vessel’s wake.
“All of us on board had experienced some pretty rough ocean crossings with no problems,” said Parsons. “But this was on a completely different level. Two or three hours into it we were all sea sick. Matt Wybenga was sicker than anyone I’d ever seen, almost comatose. He must’ve thrown up 10 times. And just looking at him I was actually wondering, “Can a person die of sea sickness?”
In fact, Wybenga, the boat-trip veteran, had become almost completely incapacitated, the rest of the crew almost joining him on the deck after being relentlessly battered by their shifts on the ski. None having any idea what might be waiting for them beyond the obscured horizon: the most epic session ever, or, if things didn’t go perfectly every watery step of the way, the surfing world’s most tragic disaster at sea.
So just imagine their sense of relief and wonderment when, finally approaching Cortes Bank, they found that the wind had indeed temporarily slackened, the ocean’s surface smoothed, and the waves exploding across the bank’s vast lineup were, in a word, gigantic. As in, the biggest any of those on board had ever seen.
“And we hadn’t even seen a set yet,” recalls Brown. “A real set that swings wide.”
Brown knew a little something about those swing sets, having logged more hours negotiating Cortes’ Rubix Cube lineup than just about anyone else.
“Two different times I’ve gone straight up 50-foot waves in the boat there, and it really shakes you up,” claimed Brown, in epic understatement. “You remember for the rest of your life what not to do. You’re tempted to move over to where the waves appear to be breaking, but you can’t do it. I mean, one set swung wide, at a minimum eighty-five-feet. If there had been a person on it, perhaps a hundred feet, I don’t know. It was unbelievable — the lip threw and just went silent for a long time.”
Still, 100 miles is a long way to come just to watch.
“We were all so beat up by this point,” recalled Parsons. “Just wasted. I don’t know if it was because we were so stoked to surf or that we just wanted to get off the boat, but we all scrambled into our gear and got the skis out in record time.”
Grant “Twiggy” Baker, shaking off mal de mer for an epic ride well worth revisiting. Photo: Rob Brown
“And straight away it was obvious that these were the biggest waves any of us had ever seen,” said Long. “So, we had to be right on our game. During that entire day, had any of us made a mistake, it was gonna immediately put everybody in a life-threatening situation. We made it clear going out there that everyone had to be on point — no mess-ups. This was not the day for it.”
What it was a day for was a session that, in terms of total commitment — and total craziness — was simply beyond compare.
“We started feeling our way into it,” recounted Long. “Edging over into this massive, a-frame widow’s peak, breaking way out and way over from where we would normally lineup. If you can use the term ‘lineup,’ where there’s absolutely nothing to line up off of. Each set just kept getting bigger and bigger, until about halfway through the session I’d towed Twiggy into this absolutely huge wave. Bigger than I’d ever imagined, the second wave in this giant set. And I remember going over the back of it and looking behind me, and there’s Mike and Brad towing into the biggest wave I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”
“Greg towed Twiggy into the second one and we went over it,” said Parsons. “And there was this huge, beautiful wave standing up in front of us. Brad was driving and he looked back at me and I just yelled, ‘No, go over this thing.’ And he was giving me that look, the one that says ‘You gotta be kidding me. You really think there’s something better behind this? Or bigger?’ He was kinda irritated that I didn’t want it. But we motored over it and there was the fourth wave of the set and I was like, ‘Ohmigod, I’m actually going to have to try to ride this wave.’ Then Brad whipped around and I was committed on the biggest wave of my life. The biggest wave I’ve ever seen.”
Not that anyone else would see it either. Not really, anyway.
“The funny thing was that the swell kept getting bigger throughout the entire day,” Long recalled. “And later in the afternoon we all rode waves that were probably close to Mike’s in size. I know I caught the biggest wave I’d ever ridden. But the problem was that Rob was dodging 60-to-80-foot sets and had to shoot from over half a mile away, the only place he could safely put his boat, and Wybenga, our video guy, was semi-conscious the whole time. So the session wasn’t really documented completely. But photos or no photos, video or no video, that was a session I’ll remember for the rest of my life.”
Of course, then there was the ride home, with Brown’s herculean stint at the wheel, and Parson’s solo, rough-water marathon on the ski, soon to become the stuff of legend. Yet, at the end of their longest day, they had made it back to Dana Point Harbor, completely wrung-out, but relatively intact. And it’s been said that if a miracle happens within 10 miles of you, take credit for it. In that case, as a weary Brown finally switched off his engines, and an exhausted team of big wave adventurers staggered onto the dock, Long and Parsons had every reason to crack a well-earned smile.
