The classic rule is the one-surfer-per-wave or, if that cannot be maintained, the no-coming-at-Bradshaw-from-the-side, the no-crowding-Bradshaw, or the no-cutting-off-Bradshaw-when-he’s-deep-into-a-ride. Afterward, he paddles up to the offender and warns him. If there is a need for a second warning he paddles up again and says, “O.K., that’s two. You will go in on the third one.” He means he’ll send the man to shore—usually by breaking the fins on his board.
To me Bradshaw explained, “Sometimes then it gets ugly. They start into ‘Fuck you, asshole!’ If they say that to you, what are you going to do about it? A challenge like that. Are you going to back down, or go for it?
I’ve sat on my board saying, ‘You get the first swing, dude. Swing away. But as soon as you hit me, I will take you down so hard you will not believe it.’ Some swing, some don’t.”
The problem is that there are too many surfers in the world and too few good waves to ride. This may come as a surprise, given the extent of global coastlines, but most surf is unrideable or uninteresting, and good locations are small. The North Shore, for instance, is only 13 miles long. It contains several dozen renowned surfing spots—particularly the “inside breaks” of Pipeline, Sunset Beach, and Waimea Bay, one after the other, close to the shore—but their takeoff zones are typically just a few yards wide, and they are crowded with surfers vying for advantage.
Bradshaw calls this the dark side of surfing. The crowding is compounded by the fact that, even on good days at good breaks, good waves are relatively infrequent, and when one finally arrives, even if it is large, it usually offers enough space for just one good run. What goes on as a consequence Bradshaw calls natural selection. Actually, he calls it Darwinism, and means the same thing.
It’s not about survival so much as getting the rides. In the minds of people like Bradshaw, the two are related. If you leave a challenge unanswered, the punks will start stealing your waves. There are a lot of punks in surfing.
Bradshaw said, “Yeah. I’m not afraid to go for it. I’m not afraid to be underwater for a long time. And I guarantee you I have stood on people.”
By people he meant men. For some reason this never comes up with women.
I mentioned the options: “You can hit them, hold them underwater, or knock their fins off.” He nodded.
He prefers to knock their fins off. There is a technique to it. First you flip over the other man’s board and brace it, sometimes by holding it under your arm; then you smash through the fins hard with your fist, striking beyond them in your mind, as in karate. It is only if the punk later persists, or challenges you directly, that you have to resort to more drastic measures. At least that’s the way it was before, when scores were settled fast.
In recent years the struggle for dominance has become more drawn out, with threats of lawsuits and criminal charges. Bradshaw has been visited by the police several times. It goes like “There’s been another complaint, Ken. Did you hit this guy?”
“No. I knocked his fins off.”
Or like “Did you really bite his board, Ken?”
“Why, did you see teeth marks?”
“Well, it could have been a mouth, Ken. Hard to believe it was a mouth. Was it really a mouth, Ken?”
“I was trying to make my point without getting in trouble.”
Trouble? Ken, like which kind?
This is a man who rides waves so heavy they shake the earth when they break. Who has sacrificed comfort and wealth to do it. Who has willingly suffered the derision of conventional minds for the choices he has made. Who recently married for the first time, and to a much younger woman. Who may give her children. Who knows that she may break his heart. Who accepts that we are all alone when we die. Who rides with a single-mindedness that no one can equal—crouched low on his board in a predatory stance, left foot forward, body coiled, intently assessing the contours ahead, swerving and carving through the salt water.
And for what? To do it again without repetition. And why? Because he is an athlete. Because every wave is different.
Last winter was an El Niño winter, and conditions on Oahu were extreme. Most of the inside breaks were trashed. The crowds of pretenders stayed away. Bradshaw reveled in it, taking on giant waves at the outside breaks over volcanic reefs a mile or more offshore. These were huge ocean swells that rolled in from distant storms and reared up to twice their height over the shallows, forming vertical faces that stood 50 feet high before curling and lunging forward with unfathomable force. Fifty-foot waves are five times higher than the highest waves that most surfers ever ride.
Bradshaw rode them in obscurity, with no expectation of gain, absorbing the hits and hold-downs, spitting up blood, and continuing on for hours. His subsequent tumble down the stairs seems minor by comparison, though it broke two of his bones.
We spoke about it the next day. He described his loss of balance, one foot missing a step and the other stepping into air, and the perception of inevitability that followed. He said that because he is accustomed to falling from heights the tumble seemed to happen in slow motion. He curled to protect his head, rolled in flight, and bounced once hard on landing. I sympathized with him for his injuries, but expressed greater concern for the stairs.
I. Outside Log Cabins
So he was like a monkey in 1998. Now he shuns the contest, but at the time he was broke as usual and still trying to make money by surfing. Whatever resentments he harbored toward commercial interests, he needed to take a crack at that prize.
On Tuesday, the day before the event, he stayed home and monitored the weather reports. Local conditions were balmy, but the latest low-pressure system in the distant North Pacific was an especially dramatic one that had aimed unusually powerful swells directly toward Hawaii. At seven p.m., Bradshaw telephoned for the hourly observation from a wave buoy anchored 390 miles to the northwest. It was reporting massive 19-foot swells, measured top to bottom, with extraordinarily long 25-second intervals between successive crests.
Swells are energy pulses, not movements of water. The interval between their crests is a function of their speed. Bradshaw did a rough calculation and concluded that these were traveling at about 60 miles an hour—at least 15 miles an hour faster than the fastest he had experienced before. To top that, over the next few hours the buoy reported swell heights increasing to 22, then 25, then 27 feet—all with the same high-energy interval of 25 seconds in between.
Bradshaw had a hard time sleeping that night. The swell could rise to 30 feet and beyond. If it did, the next day might bring the heaviest surfing ever seen. Eighty-foot, 90-foot, 100-foot faces—who knew? A 100-foot wave is the size of a 10-story building. Getting drawn up that face and thrown from the top would be like being thrown from a 10th-floor window and then having the building collapse onto your head.
Bradshaw told me that in the darkness that night he did not feel afraid. Of course he didn’t. He said he felt the anxiety of anticipation. Of course he did. The entire direction of his life until then—the accumulation of every serious choice he had ever made—meant that he was going to take on those waves. He tried to worry instead about his house getting washed away, but there was no question about the relative importance of surfing in his mind.
The location was equally clear. It would be the outer reef known as Outside Log Cabins, more than a mile offshore. That place has its name because it lies outside an inside break called Log Cabins, which itself is named after log cabins that once stood on the shore. The cabins are gone, but Outside Log Cabins remains as Bradshaw’s discovery, a reef where mammoth waves continue to break in conditions much larger than those that Waimea Bay can handle.
Waimea Bay is really just a cove. It is famous because of its flanking shoals and its central deepwater channel, which in combination can handle swells of up to 25 feet and turn them into perfectly shaped breakers twice as high—with faces up to 50 feet within easy camera range of spectators on the beach. It does have limits, however, and is overwhelmed on the rare occasions when swells of 30 feet or more come in.
When breaks get overwhelmed they are said to “close out.” This means that the waves they form no longer peel progressively from their peaks but collapse at once along their entire fronts and are impossible to surf. At Waimea this looks like breakers of 50 feet or more exploding into the confines of the cove, turning the place into a seething bowl of whitewater that Bradshaw calls a cauldron of death.
Resting in the darkness, with the buoy readings in mind, Bradshaw expected that Waimea would close out in the morning, and that Quiksilver would have to cancel the contest. He was just as glad. The company would step aside with its proffered prize, and he would head offshore in good conscience.
A set is a cluster of similarly sized swells, typically about a half-dozen strong. These particular ones must have been about 30 feet tall. When they hit the shoals they rose into 60-foot faces and collapsed explosively across the full span of the bay. For some minutes a relatively peaceful interlude ensued, during which 25-foot swells rolled in, which could perhaps have been surfed, but then another close-out set arrived, and others after that, with less and less time between them. After watching the pattern for a while, Bradshaw realized that any competitors who tried to paddle out there to ride in the interludes were going to get crushed before they could even get into position.
The hopelessness seemed so obvious to him that he wanted to leave, but a Quiksilver representative advised him to hang around. The man spoke in exclamations.
“Ken!” he said. “Don’t go anywhere! We’re going to run the contest!”
“Are you out of your minds?”
“No, no! We’re going to run it!”
Bradshaw walked over to lifeguards from the Hawaiian Water Patrol, a commercial rescue service hired to stand by with specially equipped Jet Skis in case intervention was necessary to keep surfers alive. Bradshaw said, referring to Quiksilver, “Are they serious?”
A lifeguard said, “Man, they are serious. Can you help us talk them out of it?”
He said, “Yeah.” He meant he could try.
At that moment another close-out arrived, and people on the beach shouted “Oh my God!” because they had never seen anything so big. Conditions continued to worsen. Two photographers on Jet Skis appeared, having negotiated a passage up the coast and into the bay from the outside. Hardly had they arrived when another giant set came in. Bradshaw was watching, everyone was watching, and no one could believe how big these things were. Seeing what was coming, the photographers on the Jet Skis desperately gunned their machines straight up the enormous faces, taking air across each crest and barely escaping into the ocean beyond.
Bradshaw went to the contest organizers and said, “Isn’t that proof enough? You can’t even rescue people if they get in trouble. Pretty soon you’ll be trying to rescue the rescuers. You’ll have to send in the helicopters. People can die in these kinds of waves. You need to call this whole thing off.”
The organizers said, “Well, if you don’t want to be in the contest, Ken, just leave. We’ll put in an alternate for you.”
Bradshaw thought they were being dicks about it. He said, “O.K., fine, fuck you, I’m out of here,” and he headed for his car.
But other contestants, who themselves were reluctant to rebel so openly against the power of Quiksilver, asked him to stay and keep up the fight. He did, and endured the attitudes of the contest organizers for another hour. Remembering, he recently said, “It was like ‘Even if the surfers are afraid, Quiksilver is ready to go for it!’” But conditions at Waimea continued to worsen, until nearly every wave was collapsing, and Quiksilver had no choice but to cancel the show.
It was 10 in the morning, and time had been wasted since dawn. At last Bradshaw could leave. State officials had just declared “Condition Black,” a typically superfluous prohibition against dying by entering the waves.
Bradshaw got into his car. He was thinking about the deepwater break a mile or so offshore and how he might be able to get to it.
A friend asked him where he was headed. He answered, “Where else?”
II. Death at Maverick’s
It was October 1969, at the outset of what turned into the largest El Niño winter anyone had yet seen. The waves were big in Encinitas. The waves were huge in Hawaii. According to Matt Warshaw, author of The Encyclopedia of Surfing, among other excellent works, the surf on Oahu’s North Shore smashed 60 houses and washed two people away.
Toward the end of that episode a man named Greg Noll surfed the largest wave yet attempted—an impossible, exploding, 35-foot face at Makaha, on Oahu’s west side. Noll was an animal. People called him “The Bull.”
Twelve years earlier, in 1957, he had been the first to take on Waimea Bay. He was as strong and tough as Bradshaw would someday be. He survived Makaha by diving off the back of his board during the wave’s collapse. This means he did not technically “make” the wave, but he did ride it for a while, and in these matters courage counts for a lot.
Warshaw quotes Noll’s memoir, in which he wrote, “That day at big Makaha was like looking over the goddamned edge at the big, black pit. Some of my best friends have said it was a death-wish wave. I didn’t think so at the time, but in retrospect I realize it was probably bordering on the edge.”
Bradshaw told me about meeting Noll many years later. He said, “Noll asked me, ‘Do you ever close your eyes?’ “I said, ‘Excuse me?’ “‘At the top of the wave.’ “I said, ‘No! I always want to know where I’m going!’
Then I realized, that’s how he did it. He’d get to some point where it was scary, then just close his eyes and keep going. Because his desire was greater than his fear.”
He needed big waves. He flew to Hawaii. When he landed there he was 20 years old with $20 to his name. It was 1972. He got a restaurant job, picked up an old car, and eventually rented a shack on the North Shore.
Over the following years he worked on and off as a backhoe operator at construction sites, and he devoted his winters to learning the North Shore breaks. It was a huge investment of time, much of it spent just floating around and waiting for waves. The waits were agonizing. If there were other surfers there, some talked stories, some talked shit, and some just stared at the ocean in frustration. Bradshaw got good at shooting water out of his hands.
Surfing was only beginning to get commercialized, and the breaks were uncrowded compared with now. The better ones were still partly claimed by locals, some of whom disliked outsiders.
Bradshaw grew a beard to look tough. It didn’t take much. He was a single-minded all-city-linebacker health-food freak. He stood his ground in fights. He made a few friends.
He began to make boards imprinted with his name. The boards did not say Ken Bradshaw from Texas. They said Ken Bradshaw in Hawaii. He had found his place.
He was a moralist. He refused to chase publicity. He equated it with the greed that causes some surfers to steal other surfers’ waves.
Recognition came to him anyway, in 1978, when the biggest magazine in the business, Surfer, ran a glossy story about him, titled “The New Matador?,” drawing attention to his heavyweight style and suggesting that he was the next Greg Noll. Principles aside, Bradshaw did not deny that he was pleased.
A bathing-suit company called Sundek offered to sponsor his surfing. The arrangement did not pay well. It required Bradshaw to pose bare-chested in the company’s swimsuits—holding his own boards, yes, but exhibiting himself as a man who could be bought. It was demeaning. Nonetheless, combined with the additional earnings from his board-making business, it allowed him to stop working in construction and to make a down payment on a house.
It helped that the world’s premier big-wave contest of the time was held every year at Sunset Beach. It was called the Duke Kahanamoku Invitational and was financed and televised by ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Bradshaw won it in 1982 on a nasty day with an onshore wind and a riptide running west through bumpy 20-foot faces. He was the best surfer in the worst conditions. He said, “Yeah, it had to be crap before I could win.”
He was 30. He never won another contest. He was probably too determined in his style. He probably lacked some of the flare necessary to impress the judges. Even so, he was now a star. He set off on the first of many publicity tours in California and up the East Coast from surf shop to surf shop from Florida to Maine.
Back home there were women around. He fell in love with several but in single file. He was not a misogynist. He was a serial monogamist. Somehow the women always left him. It was always sad.
He always warned them in advance that he had no time for raising children. He always explained that to catch good rides he needed to be in the water when the good waves arrived. Maybe the women thought they could change him. Love is blind.
During a long dry spell for big waves on the North Shore he spent more time in the water, not less. The dry spell ended dramatically in the first few weeks of 1983, during a huge El Niño winter, when Bradshaw surfed Waimea on 23 out of 49 days. Sick. It was so good it was insane.
For the first time in memory there were more big waves than volunteers to ride them. That was the craziest part. There were days with to-die-for conditions when the bay looked nearly abandoned. Actually, it was eerie. Be careful what you wish for.
Focus had shifted away from big-wave surfing as the industry concentrated its promotional energies on the much larger markets associated with the use of shortboards in small waves. Now, however, in this huge El Niño winter, the photographic opportunities on the North Shore could not be ignored. Bradshaw himself was one of those who called up the magazines to tell them what they were missing out on. In retrospect it was a mistake—and it certainly violated his principles—but he was caught up in the excitement about the surf, and caught up in a career.
The magazines responded. Surfer ran a picture of Waimea on its cover and published celebratory stories, one titled “Whatever Happened to Big-Wave Riding?,” which proclaimed the North Shore’s return, and another called “Dinner at Charlie’s,” which made the scene seem fraternal and fun. For the marketing juggernaut of Quiksilver, that was enough. The company needed time to figure out how, but it would soon claim Waimea Bay as its own.
“Yeah, where’s my board?”
The lifeguard radioed, “He’s fine. I told you he was going to be fine.”
Bradshaw said, “Where’s my board?” They had his board.
The rescue helicopter arrived and clattered overhead. The bay was now a mess, offering few if any rides between the close-outs. Bradshaw made the obvious decision to quit for the day.
Soon after he did, however, four surfers in two pairs launched from the beach and paddled toward the break. Bradshaw regarded the second pair especially with distaste. One was a man named Alec Cooke, who called himself Ace Cool. Enough said.
But the second of them was someone for whom Bradshaw reserved a particular disdain. He was a brash, fast-talking self-promoter named Mark Foo, who had washed out of the professional small-wave circuit and had recently come to the North Shore determined to leverage big-wave surfing into wealth and success.
Foo was six years younger than Bradshaw. He was not a bad surfer, but he cared too much about fame. He made pronouncements like “If you want the ultimate thrill, you’ve got to be willing to pay the ultimate price.” He was constantly hustling the press, mouthing off about his exploits, working deals with photographers, angling to have his picture taken, and getting in the way on the water, stealing Bradshaw’s waves.
This last was a mistake. Bradshaw believed that, because his motivations were wrong, Foo did not know how to behave. He had no patience with him. He had already held Foo under, and had sent him to the beach just for being Foo.
But Foo was irrepressible, and he was obviously up to another of his publicity stunts today. Bradshaw could think of no other reason why a surfer would bother with the waves that by then existed at Waimea Bay. All four had to be desperate for attention.
They managed to paddle to the standard takeoff position just outside the break, and there they floated in the heavy swells waiting for any chance of a surfable wave. Bradshaw and a couple of friends watched from the coastal road overlooking the bay. Two big sets passed under the surfers and closed out at the break. Then suddenly a huge rogue wave arrived. Bradshaw watched in amazement as it broke far out in the ocean and surged violently over the surfers.
Mark Foo had attached his board to his ankle with an elastic double-length leash. He popped to the surface in the aftermath, found the board intact, and paddled back into position outside the break. Foo was nothing if not persistent. The other surfers had to quit because they had lost or broken their boards. Ace Cool had to be rescued by helicopter.
Meanwhile, Foo had made his move. Unable to find a wave that could be ridden, he launched over the lip of an impossible 50-foot vertical face and then free-fell to the base without making it to his feet. The wave collapsed on top of him. He survived, and was plucked from the impact zone by the helicopter.
That one wave made him famous as a big-wave rider. He had not ridden it. He had attempted it knowing full well that he could not succeed. But a dramatic picture had been taken, which he then promoted as documentation of “the biggest wave surfed” and used to launch his career.
Bradshaw still shakes his head at the thought. Recently he said, “Mark was such a marketer. It was a picture of an airdrop going nowhere. It was stupid, right? But that’s what we were becoming.”
“Doing less surfing?”
“Doing more.”
In 1991, Quiksilver tried to drop him, and he found himself begging for mercy. In 1992, Quiksilver did drop him, and by comparison it was a relief. He kept surfing in the competitions. He rejuvenated his board business.
One day, in March 1993, he was surfing with a partner at an outer reef called Outside Alligators. The day was gorgeous, all pretty and clean, with long, glassy, 30-foot breakers coming in. Suddenly Mark Foo showed up. Bradshaw was not happy to see him, but he kept his peace. After a while Bradshaw’s partner had to leave to go to work.
Foo paddled over to Bradshaw and said, “You staying out?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought you might.”
They began to surf together. The waves were incredibly consistent. You could just pick them off.
Both men had ridden them in and were paddling back out in the channel when Foo said, “This is it, huh? This is as good as it gets, isn’t it?”
Bradshaw was surprised. He said, “Yeah? Yeah, Mark, it is.”
Foo said, “But, no, no, this is really it, isn’t it? Just two guys in the water. Fifteen- to 18-foot swells. Perfect waves. No sections. This is as good as it gets.”
Bradshaw said, “Yes, Mark. This is what it’s about.”
A light came on in his head. He thought, Wow, Mark actually does get it. He actually understands why we do this.
Bradshaw said, “There’s just the two of us in the water. You’re riding some of the best waves of your life, and having a great time. How cool is that? No photographers, no cameramen, no nothing—just us.”
They paddled to shore and ended up at Foo’s house. They talked about nothing much, and for a while it was great.
Then the phone rang, and suddenly Foo was saying, Oh, man, you wouldn’t believe what I just did! I did this! I did that! Oh yeah, I was out there with Bradshaw! Blah, blah, blah!
Bradshaw looked at him in disbelief. Foo hung up, called a magazine, and started in again. Bradshaw walked over and hung up the phone.
He said, “You don’t get it after all, do you? Can’t you let it go once? Just once in your life? Don’t tell anybody? This was our moment. We did it. Isn’t that good enough for you?”
“Um, I don’t know, Ken. I could try, I guess.”
After landing in San Francisco, they rented a car and kept talking about the plan while driving to the coast. When they got to Maverick’s the breakers were not as large as they had hoped for, but still big enough at 30 feet to be worth the effort. Bradshaw and Foo joined others in the water and caught a few rides.
Bradshaw had surfed at Maverick’s before. Foo had not. Bradshaw asked Foo if he was having a good time. Foo said he was.
Both of them tried to take off on the same wave. Bradshaw was in the prime position and should have owned that wave, but he saw the look on Foo’s face, as he had seen it many times before, and he knew that Foo was going to take it no matter what. Foo stole the wave. Bradshaw pulled back at the last instant as Foo dropped over the edge.
Foo immediately wiped out. He fell sideways off his board and was sucked up the face and thrown forward over the curl, then pounded deep into the water. After more than an hour he was found floating facedown with his ankle leashed to a fragment of his board. Exactly how he drowned is still not known. He may have hit his head against the reef or been held down by a snared leash.
In the parking lot of the harbor nearby, Bradshaw knelt and held him for a moment, finding it hard to accept that this had just happened. Later a funeral was held in Waimea Bay, with a large group of surfers sitting on their boards in a circle. Bradshaw tried to say something, but to his surprise grew too emotional to speak. He still thinks about Foo often.
“Death is part of life—I know that,” he said to me recently. “But we had just made this turn together, and he ends up dying that same day. It was a tough one in the big picture of what you’re chasing, and what you’re doing it for.”
III. The Monster
It was far-fetched because surfers need to nearly match the speed of a wave to intercept it at the start of a ride. The problem is that the speed of the wave is (partly) proportional to its size, and those that broke at Outside Log Cabins were too fast for even the strongest paddlers to catch. It turned out that, with rare exceptions, swells larger than 25 feet simply could not be joined. This meant that 50 feet was the maximum face height that surfers would ever ride. It was discouraging. Ambition was no substitute for entry speed.
Then everything changed. It happened in the early 1990s, when a few Hawaiians, including the poster boy of big-wave riding, Laird Hamilton, began strapping their feet onto boards and using Jet Skis to tow one another into high-speed intercepts of fast-moving waves off Oahu and Maui. Doing this required enormous strength, and the ability to endure almost unimaginable punishment when things went wrong, but once the surfers released the towrope and dropped over the edge of the rising faces, they were rewarded with rides that were longer and faster than anyone had experienced before. More fundamentally, because intercept speeds were available up to 60 miles an hour, there was suddenly no limit to the size of the waves that could be ridden. Purists objected to the idea of power-assisted starts, and they deplored the noise and pollution caused by Jet Skis, but the sport of tow-in surfing was born.
Bradshaw embraced it from the start, and with a sense of awe at the possibilities it afforded. To me he said, “I remember sitting around with Laird and a couple of other guys saying, ‘So how big is big?’ and ‘How do we ride it?’ and ‘Do you realize it hasn’t even been big yet?’ We looked at each other and almost got a spooky feeling. It was, like, Wow, we’re really going to have to face it when it comes.”
Those conditions arrived on the now famous day in January 1998. After the cancellation of the Waimea contest, Bradshaw and Moore drove up the coast to a grassy beachfront lot in a neighborhood called Velzyland, where they kept the Jet Ski. The lot is a prime location for launches, because it overlooks a channel that dives straight away from the beach and is so deep that it allows access to the open ocean even in 30-foot swells, when every other possibility has been overwhelmed.
But the situation now was different. By the time they launched their boat through the surf at the beach, at 10:30 in the morning, the swells had risen to 35 or 40 feet, and the channel was succumbing to the pressure about a half-mile out. How big is big? Large waves collapsed over deep water between huge waves breaking across the shallows on both sides.
Bradshaw sat in front, doing the driving. Moore sat behind him, hanging on to the board. After repeated attempts, they made it through the maelstrom into the open ocean outside. It was a beautiful place to be.
When Bradshaw and Moore got to Outside Log Cabins they found powerful swells rising into giant, velvety, perfectly formed breakers. The water was warm. The wind was light. The swells were traveling in sets as always. The biggest of them were easily 35 feet high and producing solid 70-foot faces that cascaded from their peaks or pitched forward into tubes, and peeled majestically from left to right, as seen from behind, before smoothly tapering off onto broad shoulders. Moore later said that not a drop was out of place.
For half an hour he and Bradshaw studied the waves, pacing the inbound swells, plotting the entry and exit lines, and planning the rescue if things went wrong. While they were doing this, another tow-in team showed up. These guys were loose cannons, Bradshaw thought. No sooner had they arrived than they went for a meager 20-foot swell. He decided to ignore them because they would not get in his way.
Moore assumed the driving, and Bradshaw rolled into the water and strapped onto his board for the first rides. They took off among the inbound swells outside the break, with Bradshaw water-skiing at the end of a 40-foot rope waiting for the right wave. They had worked out hand signals. Two fingers up from Bradshaw meant “Not this one, the next one—maybe.” One finger up meant “This one!”
Moore’s role was to handle the intercept well, driving toward the shore while allowing the swell to approach from behind, and accelerating to match its speed even as it slowed and began to rear up over the reef. At the same time, he would place Bradshaw in the perfect position for the release, known to surfers as “deep,” meaning close to the peak, where the break would begin, the high-energy core of the wave.
For his first wave Bradshaw caught a 30-footer, and surfed the 60-foot face. It was smooth and fast and a good ride for a starter. Moore circled close around him to give him the rope, and towed him back outside. A third tow-in team arrived and stood aside to watch for a while.
The playing field was large. The biggest sets were coming in about 15 minutes apart. Bradshaw and Moore saw one developing in the distance, and they headed straight out to meet it, skimming fast across the water, with the wind in their ears.
These were big swells all right, in the 35-foot range, and, better yet, each one had a bigger one behind. Bradshaw kept signaling, “Next one!” and jacking up the sizes. He passed up the first three.
Then came the fourth, an absolute monster of 45 feet, maybe more. People may have seen larger swells before, but no one had ever tried to ride the sort of wave face it was about to become. Ninety feet? One hundred feet? Who could know?
Bradshaw wasn’t thinking about making history. He was shouting into the wind and signaling, “This one, this one!”
Moore turned the Jet Ski around and headed toward the shore, chased by the monster approaching fast from behind. Bradshaw signaled, “Faster, faster!” The boat was running wide open and doing about 40 miles an hour, but it was just too slow. They were going to lose the intercept. The swell was going to pass under them and leave them behind. Bradshaw kept shouting, “Come on!,” for all the good it could do.
He had the intercept he needed. The wave continued to rise beneath him, drawing water from ahead and below, steepening, and advancing toward the coast as he accelerated down its face. The ride was smooth for lack of chop. The board fluttered because of its speed.
He heard the wind, and then the thunder as the wave began to break to his left. He crouched low on the board, with his arms out for balance and his feet locked into the straps. He thought, O.K., don’t look left! Don’t fade! Don’t even think left!
Then the slope turned vertical beneath him and he went weightless as he began to drop straight down the face. Later he told me it was like skiing down an avalanche chute in the mountains. He said, “You know that feeling you get when you’re going over a cornice and it’s just straight down after that?”
He counted the seconds. He went, “One. Two. Three. Four!”
Already it was a long drop, and the wave kept rising higher. “Five! Six! Seven! Eight!”
He went, “Holy shit!,” and kept dropping. He went, “Don’t fade! Don’t even imagine it!”
He got toward the base of the face, still well above the bottom, and rounded out of the drop as the surface curvature allowed. Bradshaw had never seen such wave expanses before—huge fields of sloping water to the right. He was aware of the mass gathering above and behind him. He went, “I gotta get out of here, now!”
He dug his right rail in, banking the board hard against its will, and held it with all of his strength into a carving right turn. The turn was slow because the board was fast. Bradshaw kept at it, however, and went slicing up the wave face almost to the crest. He was briefly elated. Technically he had “made” the wave, but he wasn’t done with it yet.
From the crest he turned again and went angling back down the face. He intended to perform a full cutback toward the break, but no sooner had he started than a roar erupted behind him as the wave formed a giant barrel. The barrel spat spray at him from its throat. There was no way into that barrel from his position, and it blocked any turn back toward the core of the wave.
The ride was almost over for Bradshaw. It had lasted 30 seconds, or hardly more. He exited straight ahead and over the wave’s shoulder.
He was angry with himself. He thought that he should have been in that barrel, and that he would have been if he had not shied away from the peak at the start of the ride. He did not care about having made history—and did not consider it until others began to insist on it that night. He did not even think that this had been a great run. He thought, Shit, I should have faded.
Moore had a different idea. He motored up to him wide-eyed, shouting, “That’s it, man! That’s it! You should have seen what I saw! It was crazy! It was nuts! You were like a cartoon character on that face! You could have put houses in the barrel behind you!”
There were other eyewitnesses to the ride—some nearby in the water, and a few more on the shore. They agreed that the wave had been very large, though their estimates of its face height varied, ranging between 85 and 105 feet. Only one piece of visual evidence exists—an optically compressed low-resolution video, shot from shore, in which Bradshaw’s wave is at times obscured by other waves in the foreground, and Bradshaw appears about three pixels high. The number finally settled on was something less than 90 feet.
It was almost arbitrary, as Bradshaw knew, and for him it was a poor measure of the ride. The largest wave ever surfed? O.K., fine.
He regretted that the wave happened early and turned out to be by far the biggest of the day. He and Moore stayed on the water for six hours and were joined by other tow-in teams as they sliced repeatedly down 70-foot faces. It was the best surfing ever. But not once was there a wave like the one he had ridden in the morning—another monster that would have given him a second chance to fade, take risks, and correct the mistakes he had made.
Life can be like that, too. Bradshaw sank into a listlessness that lasted months. At last he understood why Greg Noll had walked away. What does record-breaking mean, anyway? Something, of course, but probably not a lot.
Still, there is great surfing to be done at the North Shore, especially at the outside breaks, and Bradshaw remains a surprisingly cheerful man. He told me that he takes life as he rides waves, one section at a time. Now he has a wife with whom he is deeply in love. Now they may have babies.
I asked him if he had regrets about the choices he had made. He said, “My life is full of ‘my faults’ because I chose passion over industry.” But a “my fault” is not the same as a regret.
He mentioned that he was going through a manic What’s-Ken-gonna-do-for-the-next-25-years? phase. I pitched him a smile. He laughed.