In March of last year, Christy Davis suffered a heart attack in quite possibly the worst place imaginable: the middle of the Pacific Ocean. More specifically, he was in the lineup at Maverick’s, which is obviously a tad more intense than just aimlessly bobbing along somewhere in the Pacific.
It’s not exactly a place where one just stops and waits for help to come, so the 66-year-old Davis did the only thing he could, which was to make the long paddle back to shore.
“I ended up paddling most of the way in, I just put my head down and kept paddling and breathing,” Davis said. “They took me straight into surgery and put a stent in my heart, my LAD was 100 percent blocked. The doctors say it was a serious heart attack and that if I was not in such good shape, I most likely would have died.”
At the time, Davis declared he’d be back in the water at Mavs — a place he’s been surfing for three decades now — in time for the next winter. You can imagine it’s a story worth telling and coincidentally, an Emmy-winning team had already been documenting Christy’s story in what’s now a three-year project.
“The soul of our film follows two questions,” writes filmmaker Grant Thompson, who’s been self-funding ‘A Man and the Sea,’ the project he calls a labor of love. “How can we deepen our capacity for wonder as we grow older? How does a visceral relationship with the natural world bring vitality into our lives despite the inherent consequence?”
Editor’s Note: You can learn more about A Man and the Sea and the crowdfunding campaign in support of it here.
