It’s 6 AM, high tide, and I’m a thirty-minute, eucalyptus-dense drive south of San Francisco in Princeton-by-the-Sea, a tiny village with some of the biggest waves in the world and not much else. Shadowy figures are perched in the beds of pickup trucks; they speak in low voices and occasionally take sips of coffee. I’m sitting on the ground in the near dark, waiting for a surf contest to begin.
An unusually steep, unusually deep Pliocene-epoch sedimentary reef rises half a mile offshore. This is where Mavericks breaks, where from November to March waves can top out at 100 feet, making them roughly ten times the height of what most surfers would consider “big.” Sharks are common, as are riptides and exposed rocks. Accomplished big-wave surfers — famous ones — have died here.
Some years — when tides and swells and winds and storms combine infelicitously — the waves here fail to break at anything above twenty feet, which means for Mavericks that they are hardly waves at all. If the conditions aren’t right, the contest doesn’t happen. When it does happen, the Mavericks Invitational is announced a few days ahead of time, and even in this case the plan is provisional at best. The inconvenience is unavoidable; one elemental change can ruin the wave.
It’s Sunday, and the Mavericks Invitational was announced on Thursday, which means that twelve of the twenty-four competitors had to buy plane tickets — from Los Angeles, Hawaii, Brazil, and South Africa — fast. The other twelve live less than an hour’s drive away, and would probably be surfing here today, contest or no contest. They all know each other, and most surf together regularly. On this winter morning, it’s been three years since the last invitational.
Compared with most professional athletes, these guys are ancient. Matt Ambrose of Pacifica is 40. Shane Desmond and Ken “Skindog” Collins, both from Santa Cruz, are 42 and 43, respectively. At 31, Shawn Dollar, also from Santa Cruz, is one of the youngest competitors. He also holds the world record for the biggest wave ever paddled into (sixty-one feet, a scale at which almost every other surfer would opt for tow-in). I ask Dollar why the surfers at Mavericks are so old. “It’s scary as shit,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “It takes you years and years and years to break down fear. Put a 16-year-old kid out there? He’s probably going to drown.”
Surfers have the odd habit of saying “I drowned” when they mean “I almost drowned.” Drowning, after all, feels like almost drowning until it feels like nothing. When I ask Dollar to explain the sensation of almost drowning, his answer, and the way he holds his face as he says it, makes me feel that the question is an intrusive one. “It’s just depressing and lonely,” he says, not making eye contact. “The lights start turning off, literally. It blinks in your mind and goes black. Pretty soon, it’s just lights out and you’re done.” He pauses awkwardly. “It’s really fucking weird.” (...)
The crowd contains a lot of stupidly handsome Australians, even more obese adults in 49ers gear, and a good number of cruel-seeming young boys. Their mothers, though irresponsibly tan, appear attentive. They wear flared jeans, snug tank tops, and platform flip-flops. They have French manicures, puka-shell necklaces, and toe rings. Either their taste has not changed since spring break 1998 or they’ve just decided, dispassionately, that this is the hottest way to dress.
A lot of the people here — both men and women — possess all the features that constitute a modern, normative standard of beauty, but exaggerated to a ghoulish degree. They’re so blond and so tan and so lean that it all actually starts to look like one big mess of congenital disorders. A towheaded guy kisses his towheaded girlfriend, and it’s shocking — seconds before I had assumed they were fraternal twins.
by Alice Gregory, N+1 | Read more:
Image: uncredited
