Rare Birds: Ghost Tree | The Surfer's Journal

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“Some lucky day each November great waves awake and are drawn Like smoking mountains bright from the west And come and cover the cliff with white violent cleanness.”

—Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) “November Surf ”

PATRICK TREFZ

“It’s a hanging tree,” Don Curry concludes. “Riding the thing is a near-death experience every time.”

Erik Landry, in a position to agree.

D

uring a strong fall swell in 1879, a young Robert Louis Stevenson wandered out of Monterey and made his way south along the fierce, jagged coast of Pacific Grove into Pebble Beach.

“The Pacific licks all other oceans out of hand; there is no place but the Pacific Coast to hear eternal roaring surf,” the author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped would later write. “When I get to the top of the woods behind Monterey, I can hear the seas breaking all ’round….”

Wandering south through dunes and windswept trees, Stevenson’s excursion brought him to an eerie forest of bonewhite cypress trees perched on a dramatic bluff overlooking the northern tip of Carmel Bay. Bleached and twisted by ages of sea spray and wind, the trees seem to writhe amid shadowy thickets of bishop pine.

“Ghosts fleeing before the wind,” Stevenson wrote, “welcome you to Pescadero Point.”

Centuries-old middens of shell are all that physically remain of the native Esselen people here, but anyone who’s spent any significant time on this wild coast will tell you their spirit remains a powerful presence. Furthermore, a “lady in lace”

by Ryan Masters

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has historically freaked out motorists on 17 Mile Drive by wandering down the middle of the famous road where it winds past this promontory.

Yet, the supernatural hubbub is by no means restricted to terra firma. When the air chills and the great ocean swells awake, a much deadlier apparition is known to lift from the waters just off the point.

Ghost world Ghosts exist. Perhaps only as rumors first, whispers of some titanic pitch out in the fog, up the coast, far offshore. Perhaps never breaking at all, existing only as theoretical combinations of submarine topography, wind, and swell. But sometimes the real thing materializes, standing up out of the sea, once, twice, maybe a half-dozen times a year like some beautiful myth come to life.

When Billabong began posting photos of the XXL Biggest Wave Award Nominees for 2003/2004 on its website last winter, the contenders were a rogue’s gallery of the world’s most notorious waves: Jaws, Todos Santos, the Cortez Bank, Teahupoo,

Anatomy of a ghost “Yeah, I was bodysurfing Pescadero Point in the early ’60s,” says Fred Van Dyke. “I’d come down to the Monterey Peninsula a lot of the time when it was too flat or windy in Santa Cruz, although I wasn’t particularly thrilled by the cold water welling up out of that deep trench. This was before wetsuits, of course.

“It could be huge. It was not unusual for 10- to 12-foot waves off the point. It was like Sunset Beach or any island break.

It broke hard and was unpredictable,” Van Dyke remembers.

“I was always looking for a big, tough wave, and Pescadero

appealed to me in the same way that Steamer Lane did.”

There are only a few surfers in every generation with the wherewithal to attempt a wave like Ghost Tree. As Peter Mel says, “It’s really not even a so-called wave, it’s more a phenomenon.”

Yet the few men with enough guts and water sense to paddle out from Stillwater Cove and attempt the foreboding righthand break have become part of local legend over the decades, inspiring each successive generation’s hell-men to re-pioneer the place.

“We looked at it as far back as ’66 or ’67,” says Mike Curtice, a longtime surfer from Monterey. “We’d be surfing the wave in Stillwater and use the point wave as an indicator. The first guys I remember actually paddling out there were John Clancy and Dan Robinson, and then some of us followed a couple months later. We’d ride the corner in only the five- maybe six-foot range, but I really wasn’t too into it. It was thrilling just to survive the thing.”

“The first time I saw Ghost Tree break was in 1974 when I watched Joey Lynch and Mashmakhan on a big, big Thanksgiving Day swell,” says Don Curry, the 45-year-old Carmel charger who named the place.

D. WITT

Mavericks…and then in early March something new appeared: a grainy shot of a monster right with the caption, “Don Curry.

Ghosttrees.”

It was a dark, spooky image with a weird, purplish tint shot from an odd, outlying perspective that depicted Curry cranking a huge bottom turn as a 40-foot bomb plunged into the frame from stage left. Before long, other photos of Russell Smith and Brian Gorrell joined the shot of Curry on the site and everyone was asking, “What the hell is Ghosttrees?”

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The ultimate water hazard, Ghost Tree breaks off the 18th hole of the world famous Pebble Beach golf course.

“Oh yeah, Michoacan,” Curtice laughs. “His real name was Mike Harris. He was into surfing all the huge mysto breaks.

He was like a lysergic Jeff Clark, just nutty as a fruitcake. I remember watching him take off on big, perfect rights at Carmel and go left into these gaping close-out barrels.”

“The first time I saw Pescadero break was in the mid-’70s,” remembers Frank Ono, one of the few surfers to ever make a habit of paddling into the spot. “I just saw this…BIG TUBE. It was so heavy. This big west swell had just created this huge hole. I’d heard stories of people surfing it. Michoacan surfed it and then Robin Jeffers was surfing it.”

“It’s amazing that people should remember that,” laughs Robin Jeffers, the grandson of the great poet and a world-class sailor. “The wave is big and round, but it broke way too close

to the rocks for me. I paddled out when it was huge in ’77 and went for it, but never caught anything. I was only 18 and my skill level was never up to that wave.”

Then, in the ’80s, a crew of young Pacific Grove surfers began to lay the groundwork for Monterey Peninsula rock surfing by seriously campaigning some of the hairier breaks around Point Piños such as Freights, Boneyards, Ulus, and Cats.

“Mike Bauer was definitely a major impact on his generation,” Don Curry explains. “A really hard-charging guy.

Super comfortable at the rock breaks—a lot of those PG guys were—they grew up dodging rocks.”

Mike Bauer, generally regarded as the finest wave rider in a group that included Bo Hickman, Brent Bispo, Scott Vucina, Billy Brewer, Rick Firpo, Jimmy Schallerer, and John “DeFlo”

and surfed it regularly for much of the last decade. As a result, he knows the place intimately.

“The swell comes out of the deepwater trench at a really high velocity and hits this shelf, and it’s not a true shelf, it’s actually a series of rock pinnacles. Because the shelf isn’t uniform, all these boils and eddies throw ribs of waters up the face of the wave. But these pinnacles still stop all this swell at once and the bottom of the wave sort of drops out while the top’s lifting, so if you’re not really moving fast when you go to drop in, you become part of the lip.”

To summarize: A surfer dropping into Ghost Tree must negotiate (a) the ledging slab lip; (b) the minefield of boils; (c) any sort of side current drawing off the point; (d) the bull kelp; (e)the seam of rocks that lines the inside; and (f ) the intimdating knowledge that a pachinko ride through an underwater landscape of pinnacles awaits those who fall. “Plus,” adds Dan Glispey, who served as harbormaster in Stillwater Cove in the mid-’70s, “there are some really big fins out there.”

“The wave doesn’t seem that big until after you’ve committed to the drop,” Ono continues. “Then it starts to grow and you’re, like, ‘Sumbitch, man, this is the real deal.’ The wave is so thick that it puts the light out.

“This one time I stroked for the first wave of a set. That’s a big no-no. It’s building and growing and it won’t let me in, so I whirl around and start paddling as hard as I can back out toward this 15-18' wall of water, which is coming at me in slow motion. I’m thinking, ‘Should I paddle up the face? No. Should I turn around and paddle in? No. Should I just wait, ditch my board and dive under it? I guess so.’ I got heavily rag-dolled until my lungs were bursting. I tried to relax and get my bearings, but it was as black as a cave down there. Finally, I catch a glimpse of light maybe 12 feet up, so I start kicking as hard as I can. Anyway, I pull a hamstring on my way up and take this huge breath of foam just as another huge set wave lands on my head and drags me mercilessly through the inner series of pinnacles. I just went pinballing through them,” Ono laughs.

“Man, you can’t buy those kinds of thrills.”

TREFZ

Ghost Tree is frequently a very ugly wave against a very gorgeous background. Adam Repogle admires the view.

DeFloria among others, remembers how the tight-knit crew challenged each other to ever-greater extremes, a process that eventually led them to Ghost Tree.

“We started surfing Pescadero around 1989-1990,” Bauer says. “We’d been riding all these other breaks bigger and bigger and moving south to Point Joe and Big Reef…it was a natural progression that finally led us down there. It’s a hairy, hairy place. Really scary. If you make a mistake at the takeoff, you’re into the boulders. It’s a lot more dangerous as a smaller wave, because it doesn’t clear that nightmarish boneyard. We surfed it at 10-15', maybe close to 20'. That’s paddling into 25-28' faces.

I tell you what, it’s a tough place to paddle into.”

Frank Ono, a longtime fixture in the Moss Landing lineup who will be 54 this year, first paddled into Ghost Tree in 1996

Ghost in the machine In December of 2001, Ono was on his sailboat when he got a call from his buddy Rob telling him someone was towing Pescadero.

“I just wanted to puke,” Ono says. “It was such an intimate thing, this relationship we had with Pescadero. I was bummed, then a bit jealous, I guess. Then, I just let it go, figuring there are plenty of places around here to kill yourself.”

Don Curry remembers the day as well. “I felt kind of bummed because it wasn’t one of the boys. None of us had the equipment to do it at the time, but it was bound to happen. I don’t know how Peter found out about it or who tipped him off.”

“Funny thing is, I actually saw it on TV while I was watching the Pro-Am at Pebble Beach,” Peter Mel explains.

“I was, like, ‘Whoa, it’s only a six-foot swell and there’s a wave breaking out there.’”

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Interest piqued, Peter Mel and Adam Repogle drove down and mapped things out during the next significant swell. On their third try, they caught it under the right conditions and the day quickly turned historic. Patrick Trefz captured startling images of the surfers dwarfed by the Ghost’s thick, glacial, avalanching lip that landed Mel on Quiksilver’s infamous “18th Hole” poster and Repogle on the cover of Surfer Magazine.

“It’s funny, I’m reading about it now and it’s like a whole new spot. Where’s Ghost Tree?” Mel laughs. “There was a couple shots they called the 18th Hole, but it never stuck.

Which is okay with me. It’s Curry’s spot. Let him name it.”

It’s a generous attitude from a genuinely magnanimous guy, but Mel also recognizes that Curry is big-wave surfing in Carmel and the Ghost Tree’s planted right in his backyard.

Curry, after all, grew up monitoring giant reef breaks from

Investing in a PWC, Curry and his close friend, Armin Yeager, disregarded Maverick’s, choosing instead to concentrate on big waves around the Monterey Peninsula. The gambit paid off, and before long, Curry and Yeager were charging huge waves at Ghost Tree. Yet on January 12, 2004, their new venture almost turned tragic.

“Armin didn’t really get into the wave, but he let go of the rope,” Curry says. “He wasn’t able to cut back and keep his speed, so he exited the wave before it broke. I didn’t realize it, so I kept following the wave, thinking he was on it. Next thing I know, Pete’s pointing at the outside and yelling, ‘Hey, there’s Armin!’ So I look out there just in time to watch him take another huge one on the head.”

“Armin took it so gnarly,” Mel remembers, shaking his head. “I thought he was…it was so scary. I was bummed. It was the first time I’d ever seen something like that. I mean, I’ve seen guys get held down but this was like held down and going into this No Man’s Land of rock. No one could help him.”

Despite the dangers, a handful of tow teams from both counties began to appear at Ghost Tree during promising swells.

The break proved to be fickle, however, and often the 14-mile ride around Point Piños from the Monterey wharf was rewarded with barely rideable slop. On one forgettable day, a star-studded lineup including Garrett McNamara, Flea, and Barney rode bumpy eight- to 10-foot “crap.”

On a west swell, the Ghost gets “big and round.”

Ken “Skindog” Collins ponders exit strategy while dodging boils, rocks, and bull kelp at 30 mph.

TREFZ

Giving up the ghost

the bedroom window of his boyhood home in the Carmel Highlands. Today, at 45 years old, Curry is still built like an NFL fullback. He’s spent the last 30 years riding everything from Moss Landing to Big Sur, and his extended campaigns at Maverick’s throughout the ’90s culminated with an invitation to the inaugural “Men Who Ride Mountains” contest.

Yet Mel and Repogle’s groundbreaking session was a huge wake-up call and Curry realized he needed to re-prioritize.

Yet, a month later, when 60-plus-foot wave faces began heaving off the toothy submarine lip of Carmel Canyon and spilling with a terrible ferocity into Stillwater Cove, the pros were nowhere to be found. The Monterey buoy was recording a 24.5-foot west swell at 17-second intervals, but the Santa Cruz crew made the wrong call and went north, leaving Ghost Tree to only three teams.

“That day was mental,” Mel remembers. “We drove in the other direction to check Mavs because Jeff [Clark] had green-lit the contest for the next day. We thought, you know, south winds don’t like that place. Then, I saw the footage and I was kicking myself.”

The first team into the water was Russell and Tyler Smith of Santa Cruz and Randy “Flintstone” Reyes, a Watsonville charger “who’s been around forever.” The three surfers set out around Point Piños on two PWCs at noon and endured 30 minutes of torture in the rough seas.

“My brain was so joggled by the time we got there I thought I had a concussion,” Russell says.

“I was so seasick I was puking,” Tyler admits. “Then we turned the corner toward Pescadero Point and there’s just this huge bombie, a 60-foot closeout. It was becoming whitewater, then it would back off, then double up again and go top to bottom. Half the wave was the big barrel and half the wave was the lip.”

“It looked like Teahupoo but right and just bottoming out.

Just going square,” his brother adds.

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WITT

As Ghost Tree pioneer Peter Mel says, “It’s really not even a so-called wave, it’s more a phenomenon.

Exercising extreme caution, the trio towed each other into the giant ledging monsters while a crowd began to gather on the adjacent bluff for a visceral perspective on the waves’ spray and roar.

“That first one, I was just bouncing down the face doing five-foot airdrops the whole way. Bouncing down and down and down,” Russell remembers. “At the bottom, it kept bottoming out, getting bigger. Twenty-footer, 25-footer…it just kept getting bigger and bigger.”

Surfing in survival mode with one eye on the horizon, the three surfers skirted disaster again and again, executing the hairiest rides and pickups of their lives.

“I got Flintstone into one that he had to straighten out on and the whitewater sandwiched him,” Tyler says. “As I went in for the pickup, I somehow lost my board off the machine, but I still got him on the sled. When I turn us around, there’s 10 feet of whitewater bearing down, so I just try to bronco up it. As we’re going up and over the foam, I see my board and I think, ‘Oh there you are, you’re in the lip.’ Well, my board hits me in the head and knocks me off the ski. DONK. Flintstone, who was on the Boogie, jumps up onto the driver’s seat. With one hand on the throttle, he grabs me by my wetsuit, throws me onto the back and gets us out of there. It was insane.”

Thankful to be alive, the Smith brothers and Reyes began the long, arduous trip back to Monterey just as Don Curry, Ed Guzman, and Dougal Hutchinson arrived around two p.m.

“Don is like The Terminator,” Tyler laughs. “We’re halfdead on the ski, barely hanging on from the chop, and Don just goes by standing! Doing like 40, going chgg-chgg-chgg over the chop.”

With assistance from Guzman and Hutchinson, wellrespected, underground veterans from Santa Cruz, Curry towed into what many considered the wave of the day, a seismic displacement of water that had spectators (and even the sheriffs who showed up to chase them off Del Monte Forest Foundation land) gasping and shouting.

Considering the size of his achievement, Curry was fairly nonplussed. “Until we actually have a good day out there, it hasn’t really been ridden. The optimal day’s going to be 35-45' at 17-22 seconds on the Monterey buoy with glassy or east winds from 295-310 degrees. We’re really looking at a northerly direction. February 26 was marginal. It was all west and the wind was wrong.”

The wave of the day may have belonged to Curry, but 21-year-old Brian Gorrell gets an award for the hairiest takeoffs.

Arriving with Kelly Sorenson shortly after Curry, Hutchinson, and Guzman, Gorrell was charging into the wave behind the main boil, significantly deeper than any other surfers on this day.

“That boil is my nemesis. I took off deep and tried to make it through the boil. When I saw it wasn’t going to barrel, I straightened out and the thing caught me from behind. It just freight-trained me. I was doing flips and rolls underwater all the way into Stillwater Cove.”

“It’s a hanging tree,” Curry concludes. “Riding the thing is a near-death experience every time.” j

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