“Andrew, a huge wave just broke! And there’s another out the back, the peak just to the south from your current position,” Nicole Macias shouts into her waterproof two-way radio. “It’s massive!” From her vantage on a cliff in the town of Nazaré, Portugal, she has been tracking the sixty- to eighty-foot waves breaking off the point. These two waves are by far the biggest she’s seen after four hours on the cliff—if not the biggest waves she’s ever seen.
Andrew Cotton, a big-wave surfer from the United Kingdom, guns the Sea-Doo and pulls Hawai‘i waterman Garrett McNamara to his feet, which are strapped into a brick-red tow board. Cotton manhandles the ski into a quick, swooping arc over the back of the wave and whips McNamara onto the open face.
At sixty mph, Garrett’s more like a skipping stone than a surfer. Most other surfers would be racing for the shoulder of the wave — and hence the exit—but not G-Mac. He leans hard against the rope in the opposite direction, toward the apex of the giant peak. With the concentration of a Shaolin monk, he lets go at the precise moment to get the steepest drop, the longest ride and just maybe the biggest barrel of his life.
His board chatters down the dark green face. He feels his way to the bottom, relying on his instincts and his years of experience. After what seems like an eternal drop, he reaches the bottom and turns down the line. Looking over his shoulder, he sees the thick, feathering lip pitch and collapse like an avalanche. As the whitewater engulfs him, he has no idea that this wave will be later measured at more than ninety feet, making it not only the biggest wave he’s ever surfed but the biggest wave anyone on record has ever surfed.
In the tight-knit world of pro surfing, where a coveted seed on the Association of Surfing Professionals World Tour is the measure of success, Garrett McNamara is among a handful of mavericks: athletes who have taken pro surfing beyond the tour and made a career chasing big waves around the globe. With his larger-than-life reputation as an adrenaline junkie, a big wave hellion and fearless charger, you might imagine Garrett as a crazed, barrel-chested superman whose singular focus is conquering the biggest waves in the world.
Au contraire. At 5’10” and 170 lbs., with a lean, athletic physique, he’s no big-wave muscleman. Neither is he a berserker charging heedlessly into the maw of death. Garrett is calculating and confident, as measured and exact with his words and thinking as with his surfing. And he’s not fearless; in fact, fear is one his prime movers. The only thing larger-than-life about Garrett is his lifted Ford F250.
What exactly has pushed Garrett to dedicate his life to chasing the biggest waves on the planet? Put simply, Garrett is addicted to the rush of surfing big waves, that is, waves with sixty-foot-plus faces, and he does everything he can to satisfy that addiction. “When the possibilities of death are knocking at the door, when you’re fearing for your life that’s when you get the rush,” he says. Still, G-Mac waves off the idea that he’s just a thrill-seeker. “I won’t jump out of plane. I’m not crazy. I do what I’m comfortable doing, what I love doing, what I’m passionate about: surfing big waves.” He laughs and says, “Swimming with sharks, no thank you. I’m even afraid of horses.
“The main thing is having fun. If you would go out there with no cameras, then you’re going out for the right reasons. For me, big wave surfing is natural and easy. It’s all about just being in the moment.” He hasn’t always been so Zen-like. That—along with the gray hair around the temples— has come with maturity. But early in his surfing career, it was all about his ego.
Garrett started surfing big waves when he was 16. He enjoyed charging the bigger, less crowded surf along O‘ahu’s North Shore at Sunset Beach, Waimea Bay and the outer reefs that break only on the biggest winter swells. When he was 17 his sponsor at the time, Surfer’s Alliance, entered Garrett in the Triple Crown of Surfing, a three-event series held on the North Shore every winter. Here was this callow high school senior, a kid who had dropped his childhood ambition of becoming an architectural engineer the minute his feet hit a surfboard, competing against the world’s top watermen. He made the quarterfinals at both Sunset and Pipeline, accepted the prize money and became by default a professional surfer. “It was a full fluke,” he recalls with a grin, “but I’m stoked for the fluke.”
At 17 and supported by a handful of sponsors who paid Garrett to fly around the world to compete on the ASP tour, you’d think he had it made—he was living any aspiring young surfer’s dream. But Garrett loves big waves, and the majority of competitions take place in small, less than stellar surf. The tour turned out not to be his yellow brick road to success; Garrett won when it was big and struggled when it was small. And losing was a bitter pill for a young prodigy like G-Mac to swallow.
So at 22, after five years on the tour, Garrett set a challenge for himself that had nothing to do with competition: get barreled on a wave with a forty-foot face. With the blinders of youth, Garrett felt invincible, like he could conquer any wave.
That winter a bombing northwest swell was wrapping huge walls of water into Waimea Bay. Garrett was all over it. He paddled out past the pack and sat beyond the boil, a marker in the lineup surfers use to gauge their position. A wave rose up on the horizon and Garrett paddled for it, but instead of a beautiful drop, the wave pitched him. He freefell to the bottom and landed on his board as the falling lip crushed him. Garrett surfaced coughing up blood. He had broken a rib.
Two weeks later Garrett paddled back out at Waimea Bay during another extra large swell. His rib hadn’t completely healed, but he was determined to get that barrel. Instead he fell, landing on his belly as the lip came down square on his back. Underwater, he says, he felt his heels touch his head. He surfaced seeing black and white, unable to breathe. Another surfer helped him to the beach. Garrett had herniated a disc, and at 22 his career as an ASP surfer was over. Even worse: After two months on the floor, Garrett could hardly get up. His pain was unimaginable, grotesque. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to surf big waves again.
In the funny way the universe has of turning tragedies into lessons, that career-ending injury might have made G-Mac the successful surfer he is today. “I realized that I couldn’t handle everything,” he says. “You can get taken out on a two-foot wave, doesn’t matter, you have to have respect for the ocean. That’s why I’ve never challenged another wave since, and I’ve never ‘conquered’ any wave, ever. I’ve only complemented them and ridden them to the best of my ability.”
After months of physical therapy, Garrett recovered and promptly returned to charging big waves. Oddly enough, Garrett credits the humbling experience for setting him on his path searching for the biggest waves on the planet. Holding onto several Japanese sponsors, he no longer needed to compete on the tour and focused solely on big-wave surfing. But his passion was barely paying the bills, so he decided to open a surf shop in Hale‘iwa in 2000, a period that Garrett marks as a personal low point, a time fraught with boredom and uncertainty. Instead of sinking into depression and letting go of his ambition, Garrett put pen to paper and wrote down two goals that would reinvigorate his career and, at 35, change his life: win both the Tow-In World Cup at Jaws, Maui and the Quiksilver in Memory of Eddie Aikau at Waimea Bay.
He got the chance to fulfill one of those goals on January 7, 2002. The only hitch: contests were to run on the same day, coinciding with a giant, thirty-five-foot swell (which translates to seventy-foot faces), and Garrett had to decide—Waimea or Jaws? Because he was the seventh alternate position for the Eddie and his entry was not certain, Garrett went to Jaws, a wise decision considering he won the event with Brazilian tow partner Rodrigo Resende. The two split a $70,000 purse, the largest in surf history at the time. (Garrett has yet to check an Eddie win off his bucket list; since the inaugural contest in 1984, it’s run only eight times. It’s not every winter that a forty-plus-foot swell hits the North Shore, which is the minimum wave height requirement for holding the Eddie. Still, Garrett’s surfed the invitation-only event two of those eight times.)
As Garrett continued to push the limits of big-wave surfing both in and beyond competition, something changed: He became habituated to the rush. To achieve it he had to keep upping the ante. So in 2007 he embarked on a landmark surf trip to south-central Alaska to surf a different type of wave in some of the most inhospitable conditions imaginable. Garrett and long-time tow partner Keali‘i Mamala set up camp on frozen ground near a calving glacier, jet-ski and tow board ready. Most ocean waves are wind-spawned; no one had ever surfed a tsunami wave generated by a calving glacier. The pair floated fifty feet from the ice wall, waiting for a chunk to fall. Garrett was freezing, but the wait paid off. “The first ride I got was a chesthigh wave that didn’t really break. I did three turns and then sank. I was separated from the jet-ski, and all I could think about was another piece of the glacier calving. And just …” Garrett’s eyes widen as he demonstrates his anxious breathing while waiting for the ski to pick him up. “It was the heaviest rush I ever got, by far, nothing has come close. We were knocking on heaven’s door the whole time.” Crossing that threshold, though, burned out a few more hormone receptors for G-Mac. “Maybe glacier surfing was a bad idea,” he muses, “because now I can’t get the rush.”
After a week of watching the glacier calve, Garrett and Keali‘i finally surfed a tsunami wave measuring about thirty feet on the face, a feat unlikely to be repeated.
As the wave crashes down from almost 100 feet above, Garrett stays focused. He knows what falling now could mean. For a moment he’s weightless, aloft in the maelstrom of foam, but he stays in control and lands in front of the boiling whitewater. He has safely reached the shoulder. He turns up the face and kicks out.
Andrew Cotton speeds over to pick him up. He tosses the tow-rope to Garrett, who yells, “The next wave, put me deeper!”
Garrett’s partners in Portugal circulate a press release later that day—November 7, 2011—with the video to prove it: McNamara has surfed a wave with a ninety-foot face, a world record. (If you want to see McNamara’s ride, you’ll find it on YouTube or the Billabong XXL web site.) Big wave judges in the surf industry and an independent scientific organization review the video and validate the measurement. It’s a favorite to win this year’s Billabong XXL Biggest Wave Award and its $50,000 prize. The only question for G-Mac now is: How’s he going to top that?
Big waves, the kinetic and powerful swells that Garrett chases, don’t break just anywhere. It takes certain conditions to create extremely big waves, and surfable waves with sixty-foot-plus faces occur in only a few places on the planet. Using weather reports, swell charts, buoy readings, Navy ocean depth charts, Google Earth and a teaspoon of intuition, Garrett says he’s found his holy grail out there in the big blue. Where, he won’t say.
“I don’t have any interest in riding a hundred-foot wave,” Garrett says and then lowers his voice like he’s letting you in on a secret. “One-hundred-twenty feet. And I will. They can have the hundred-footer. I found a 150-foot wave, and I’m not exaggerating. I’ll ride it up to 120,” he says, then reconsiders. “But if it’s 150 and it’s good, then I’ll give it a go.”
Credits: Hana Hou Magazine – http://www.hanahou.com/pages/magazine.asp?MagazineID=66&Action=DrawArticle&ArticleID=1086
Story by Kevin Whitton
Photos by Dana Edmunds
This man, this Italian man, lives and works in Italy for national and international publications and would like to interview “McNamara.” We planed to have an impromptu lunch meeting where I ate and they all talked. The Italian was very friendly and the conversation good. Garrett was quick to share my passion for Italy with our new friend and he quickly started to make plans to have us in Italy before we head to Portugal for this years project. So without doing much more than having a dream I am on my way to Italy…
