Just after we all rang in the New Year, a run of enormous swell smashed into California. It lasted for a few weeks and lit up Maverick’s. By the end of it, everyone who surfed there was exhausted and full of war stories. None, though, stack up to Grant ‘Twiggy’ Baker’s Maverick’s wipeout.
It was January 10, 20201. The buoys were hovering around 20 feet at 20 seconds — incredibly big. It was just a few days after Peter Mel caught the wave of a lifetime, and the adrenaline was running high for everyone in the lineup.
Twig chipped into a 50-footer, got to his feet, and looked down to see the bottom of the wave was dropping out. He fell, and he fell hard. It was what happened next that was truly frightening, though. Wave after wave poured through, leaving Twig just a gasp of air between each one.
“I didn’t make it. I slapped my head really bad and my hand — the only thing that is kind of injured is my wrist — but I slapped my head really hard,” he explained on his new YouTube channel. “Straight away, kind of stars… I didn’t get sucked over; I think the lip must’ve been right by me and just drilled me. Super violent. The first wave I was relaxed and cool, just kind of talking to myself under water… try to relax, try to relax. As I came up from that one, I was facing the beach. I lifted up and got a little bit of air. As I turned around to look, the next one hit me. That thing was heavy, heavy, heavy duty. Ragdolled. Gnarly, intense energy. I was in the worst spot. I just got absolutely annihilated.”
In the footage you see above, Baker takes the viewer through exactly what happened. Then the focus shifts away from Baker and to what else was going on in the lineup. It’s a strange thing, big wave surfing. While Baker was fighting for his life, other surfers, unaware of what he was going through, were celebrating the same massive waves that were bearing down on him. That’s big wave surfing, though, and Twiggy is aware of what he signed up for. It’s still extraordinarily frightening, and we’re just glad Baker lived to tell the tale.
