SURFER - July / August - 2017

The Original Since 1960 Volume 58, Number 4

Life & Death of Waves

GRIFFIN COLAPINTO RYAN CALLINAN ETHAN EWING KAI HING JACK FREESTONE CREED MCTAGGART ITALO FERREIRA JACK ROBINSON T YLER WARREN

ONEILL INC. 2017 US.ONEILL.COM CORY LOPEZ PHOTO: LUGO

ONEILL INC. 2017 US.ONEILL.COM BRETT BARLEY PHOTO: LUGO

Mason Ho

Editor’s Note I remember changing into my wetsuit on the sidewalk in the twilight, watching lanky egrets stand statuesque in the Oneonta Slough, a winding offshoot of the Tijuana River that fronts the southern stretch of coastal Imperial Beach, California. The quiet of that predawn hour, coupled with the stillness of the marshland, gave the normally tedious act of climbing into neoprene an almost meditative quality.

This was a ritual my friends and I repeated frequently, as we’d become deeply enamored with the powerful lefts that tore across the nearby beach on south swells. We’d paddle out along the vast, empty beach fronting the slough, where we’d get into a leg-burning rotation of riding a dozen or so lefts up the beach, then jogging back to whichever peak we started at to do it all over again.

There was a catch to surfing IB, however: Despite the seemingly pristine nature of the beach and surrounding marshland, it was often contaminated by urban runoff and sewage from the Tijuana River. Returning home surfed out and satisfied from a session, only to get a sinus infection or low-grade fever within 24 hours, was par for the course.

According to the San Diego County Department of Environmental Health, the stretch of coast from the Imperial Beach Pier down to the Mexican border has been closed due to contamination more than 1,800 times since 2006. (For comparison, nearby La Jolla beaches have been closed 10 times in that same time frame.) The worst of Imperial Beach’s pollution woes happened in February, when, according to an investigation by the International Boundary and Water Commission, a sewer pipe in Mexico broke, allowing 28 million gallons of sewage to enter the Tijuana River and local lineups shortly thereafter. The same investigation revealed that up to 256 million gallons of wastewater from Tijuana may also have entered the river system.

Watching aerial footage of the effluent entering the ocean, curving in the current like an enormous brown snake, was a sobering moment. I realized that it would be a long time before I considered paddling out at what was once my favorite wave in San Diego, and it brought the subtle vulnerability of surf spots into sharp focus.

Surfers often think of breaks as static, inert entities, but, in truth, surf spots are in a constant state of flux, and the story of a wave can occasionally take on a dramatic arc resembling life. Each break has a beginning, both in the geological sense and in terms of when surfers first pioneer it. Each spot also undergoes changes over time, whether it’s a fluke swell creating a once-in-a-decade sandbar, an earthquake altering a section of reef, a toxic-waste spill rendering the wave temporarily unsurfable or a lineup becoming vastly more populated

Imperial Beach, California. Photo by WALLIS

as it gains acclaim among surfers. You could say that, in a way, surf spots lead lives just as dynamic as those who ride them.

This issue is all about the lives of waves — how we affect them and how they affect us. Features editor Justin Housman recently traveled to Nazaré to better understand how an obscure Portuguese fishing town became the coliseum of modern big-wave surfing, and how that shift has affected the town and its residents (“Embracing Colossus,” pg. 96). Managing editor Ashtyn Douglas trekked to the South Pacific to report on the unique challenges facing the coastline and inhabitants of the Solomon Islands as accelerated sea-level rise rapidly encroaches on their land (“The Drowning Isles,” pg. 76). And senior writer Kimball Taylor pieced together the incredible story of Harry’s, a former secret slab in Northern Baja that was revealed to the world only on the eve of its destruction by a San Diego–based energy company (“Of Waves and White Elephants,” pg. 86).

As surfers, our lives and the lives of the waves we ride are deeply intertwined. We’re acutely aware of changes occurring in our lineups and the implications that those changes have both in the natural environ12

ment and within coastal communities.

In the case of Imperial Beach and the surrounding areas, surfer-led groups like Surfrider, Wildcoast and the Coronado Surfing Association reacted to recent contamination by organizing marches and cleanup efforts in Imperial Beach, encouraging residents to contact their representatives and demanding that the International Boundary and Water Commission investigate the origin of the spill. While their fight to clean up Imperial beach is far from over, it’s important for all surfers to follow their example and do what we can to protect our waves and coastal communities, both at home and abroad. Because while waves may have lives of their own, they do not have voices — unless we speak for them.

TODD PRODANOVICH, Editor

Masthead Editor TODD PRODANOVICH

Contributing Editors Ray Bergman, Steve Hawk

Photo Editor GRANT ELLIS

Senior Writers Sean Doherty, Steve Barilotti, William Finnegan, Matt George, Sam George, Derek Hynd, Janna Irons, Drew Kampion, Ben Marcus, Brad Melekian, Jeff Mull, Joel Patterson, Lewis Samuels, Gabe Sullivan, Kimball Taylor, Matt Warshaw

Art Director DONNY STEVENS

Features Editor JUSTIN HOUSMAN

Contributing Writers Will Bendix, Chris Dixon, Rob Gilley, Ashton Goggans, Bruce Jenkins, Andrew Lewis, Andrew Kidman, Maxwell Klinger, Shea Lopez, Kirk Owers, Dave Parmenter, Harrison Roach, Matthew Shaw, Ben Weiland

Managing Editor ASHTYN DOUGLAS

Surfer Photographers Ryan “Chachi” Craig, Todd Glaser

Online Editor DAVIS JONES

Senior Photographers Erik Aeder, Kirk Lee Aeder, Bernie Baker, Chris Burkard, Jason Childs, Jeff Divine, Steve Fitzpatrick, Jon Frank, Pete Frieden, Anthony Ghiglia, Rob Gilley, Dylan Gordon, Ted Grambeau, Tony Heff, Peter “Joli” Wilson, Rob Keith, Jason Kenworthy, Kin Kimoto, Nick Lavecchia, Morgan Maassen, Tim McKenna, Dick Meseroll, Mike Moir, Jason Murray, Brian Nevins, Zak Noyle, Yassine Ouhilal, Frank Quirarte, Jim Russi, Daniel Russo, Tom Servais, Andrew Shield, Bernard Testemale, Patrick Trefz, Alan Van Gysen, J.P. Van Swae

Digital Director PETER TARAS

Video Director ALEX KILAUANO Video Editor SEAN BENIK Social Media Manager ADAM JARA

Contributing Photographers Branden Aroyan, Don Balch, Cole Barash, John S. Callahan, Tom Carey, Sylvain Cazenave, Mike Coots, Ray Collins, Donald Cresitello, Juan Fernandez, Mike Findlay, Ryan Foley, Russ Hennings, Pete Hodgson, Devon Howard, Kenny Hurtado, Timo Jarvinen, Matt Lusk, Myles McGuinness, Don Montgomery, Naki, Mike Nelson, James Parry, Dane Peterson, Mike Smolowe, Bryan Soderlind, David Sparkes, Ben Thouard

Field Editor ZANDER MORTON Copy Editor KIM STRAVERS Interns CARTER ROTE JACKSON VAN KIRK RIDGE BEN BEN

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surft ec h. c o m

Photo by CRAIG 18

Lining Up

“The loss of a wave due to human influence is a sad event. We all need to embrace our shared responsibility in protecting the future of our ocean and that begins with education followed by action.”

— Greg Long 19

Photo by FERNANDEZ 20

Contents

Life & Death of Waves

Volume 58, Number 4

Sea Change

Sections

Five waves that prove surf spots are anything but static

34 36 38 40

The Drowning Isles

42

The Solomon Islands are an archipelago filled with idyllic beaches and perfect waves, but as temperatures and sea levels rise, much of their pristine coast is disappearing

132

Culture More (or Less) Core Division Wisdom Rizal Tanjung, 42, Bali, Indonesia Archive Psychedelic Musings and Surfboard Revolutions Design Forum The Featherweight Future Our Mother Ocean South Florida’s Toxic Summer In Remembrance SURFER Founder, John Severson

Of Waves and White Elephants How one of Northern Baja’s best waves was pioneered by California surfers, only to be destroyed to construct an unnecessary natural-gas terminal

Embracing Colossus The enormous surf of Nazaré, Portugal, was once greatly feared by the townspeople, but now it’s becoming their greatest resource

On the cover: Our idea of what is surfable is constantly evolving. Decades ago, a wave like the one Jay Davies is deeply slotted inside might have seemed like an impossibly steep, unrideable slab.

Peaking

But now, after years of intrepid chargers and shapers collec-

Standout moments in the lives of waves (and the surfers who ride them)

tively pushing the limits in tube-riding technique and board design, surfers like Davies are able to redefine what is possible and write new chapters in the lives of the world’s most intimidating waves. Photo by KIM FEAST

21

1973

Patagonia is Founded IN VENTURA, CALIFORNIA 1984 For the love of waves and oceans, our support of the Surfrider Foundation begins

1992 We write the mission statement that still drives everything we do:

"Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis."

1996 WE COMMIT TO USING ONLY 100% ORGANIC COTTON IN ALL OF OUR COTTON PRODUCTS

1997

FLETCHER CHOUINARD DESIGNS IS FOuNDED

®

Y UL

E

S

OUI N A R DE SI G

N

S

E

D

HER C TC

WET

ITS

H

X

U

BUILDING BOARDS FROM STARt TO FINISH IN VENTURA, CA

2002 Patagonia becomes the first member of 1 % for the Planet®

FL

2006 OUR FIRST BOARD SHORTS MADE FROM 100% POSTCONSUMER RECYCLED POLYESTER

2006

We make our first wetsuits:

Looking for ways to minimize the environmental impact of wetsuit production, we line our suits with chlorine-free merino wool to reduce the amount of neoprene required

2012

We introduce Yulex wetsuits ®

that blend in natural rubber derived from guayule, a desert plant native to the American Southwest 2013

®

WORN WEAR :

’S B R O

, FI X

IT

WE’RE OUT TO CHANGE THE INDUSTRY.

IT

KE

IF

We repair people's busted clothes so they don't have to buy more

2014 OUR Yulex ®/Nexkin ® suit is named “Wetsuit

of the Year” and “Environmental Product of the year” at the SIMA Awards 2017 2016

2016

WE GROW OUR OWN:

We make all of our board shorts and bikinis in Fair Trade Certified™ facilities

A

DE

CER IF IE D ™

E

OS PO

2017

Another world first:

T

W OU O

OWN

SIE M P

Patagonia employee Dave Rastovich leads our “Tools for Grassroots Activists” seminar at the Byron Bay Surf Festival

R

R

Dave Rastovich COMES ON BOARD

R

All of our full suits are made with Yulex Natural Rubber, From sources® that are FSC Certified by the Rainforest Alliance

to help Ramón Navarro and Save The Waves protect Punta de Lobos. Over $370,000 has been raised to date

2017

B

HA

I N T OW

N

W

2014 NETS TO DECKS: We invest in Bureo, a company turning discarded fishing nets into skateboard decks

We match $100,000

$10 M

E GR W

2015

B E S T WE

D

E

On Black Friday, we donate all sales to Grassroots environmental groups, raising $10 million for the people doing the hard work of defending the Earth

2015 Our environmental team commissions UCSB to study microfiber ocean pollution from synthetic textiles

LO

E

E

VE T H

We offer our Yulex rubber to other companies to help the surf industry kick the neoprene habit

After five years of R&D, we release our PSI (Personal Surf Inflation) vest and share the patent with other manufacturers in exchange for licensing fees that will go to the Lobos Por Siempre campaign

FA I R T R

2014 We have the best weed in town :

REDEFINING THE POSSIBLE:

100% for the Planet:

© 2017 Patagonia, Inc.

ANYWHEREALOHA

®

TERRAIN TESTED, HAWAIIAN LIFEGUARD APPROVED. Footwear punished and proven, researched and refined, by the world’s best watermen. The 450+ guards of the Hawaiian Lifeguard Association each proudly wear OluKai footwear as they patrol the rocky cliffs and riptide ravaged shores of the islands. A portion of the proceeds help support Hawai’i’s Junior Lifeguard Program, inspiring and training the next generation of guards. O‘ahu – Hawai‘i

OLUKAI.COM/HLA

Follow Us!

SALTLIFE.COM

34

More (or Less) Core Division

Culture —

Can you still be considered a hardcore surfer if you don’t ride large waves?

I recently sat down at a bar in the San Diego airport while waiting for a flight to San Francisco, and the bartender and I got to talking about surfing. He asked me what my home break was, and when I told him Ocean Beach, his eyes widened. “Whoa, you surf OB?” he said. “You must be pretty hardcore. Every picture I’ve ever seen of that place, it’s, like, at least 10-foot and heavy. You’re gnarly.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. The thing is, I’ve been a surfer for over 20 years, ridden waves on four continents and have been barreled over tropical reefs and frigid sandbars alike, but I’ve never ridden a proper 10foot wave. Oh, I’ve been steamrolled by a few during rapidly increasing swells in Northern California and Hawaii, but I’ve never intentionally paddled out in solid surf with the aim of scratching into a 10-footer. A hair over 8 feet or so is pretty much my limit, and I don’t even remotely care what anybody thinks about that.

Or so I thought.

Speaking with the bartender made me think about the concept of the hardcore surfer in our culture, and how your willingness to charge heavy waves seemingly sits at the heart of the core question. Can you still be a “core” surfer if you opt out of oversized sessions? Is there a “You Must Have Ridden Waves This Tall” sign you need to measure up to in order to earn core credit?

On one hand, I can certainly understand why somebody would suggest that riding well-overhead waves should be in the hardcore-surfer criteria. Drawing beautiful, swooping lines on a wave that’s head high is impressive, but if you can draw those same lines on a wave that’s double overhead, you’ve sprinkled fear into the equation, overcome it and ascended to a much higher plane of surfing existence. And on an even higher plane, the madmen who ride maxing Mavericks and Jaws have overcome the most terrifying challenge surfing can possibly offer, so it’s no surprise that these surfers

By JUSTIN HOUSMAN

are often considered the core-est of the core.

On the other hand, I don’t think core-ness should hinge upon overcoming a fear barrier or tackling a particular-sized wave, for a couple of reasons.

First, your willingness to charge doesn’t necessarily say much about your skill as a surfer, or how much time you put in in the water — which should be at the core of the core question. There are plenty of people who surf bombing Ocean Beach who may have the constitution to endure the awful paddle out, the courage to take endless sets on the head and the tenacity to track down one of the demented, shifting peaks and throw themselves over the ledge, but when it’s mortal-sized? Let’s just say that there are plenty of hard-charging surfers who struggle to engage their rail when it’s 3 feet.

On the other side of the spectrum, you’ll find incredibly talented, dedicated surfers like Filipe Toledo, who nearly won the world title a couple of years back, but isn’t exactly known for charging substantial surf. You’d be hard pressed finding somebody who eats, sleeps and breathes surfing more than Toledo. Because of that dedication (and a whole lot of freakish natural talent), there are only two, maybe three surfers on Earth who are as skilled on a surfboard as he is. But if we’re using the big-wave yardstick, does that mean Toledo is less core than the unknown guy who surfs once a week, but waxes up his 8'0" when Blacks gets 12-foot?

The thing is, core-ness should be a measurement of your dedication to surfing, and if you’ve made it to the WCT, odds are you’ve spent more time riding waves, thinking about riding waves and talking about riding waves than any civilian surfer who’s ever lived.

But even at that rarified level, everyone has a different threshold for what size surf they’re comfortable riding.

Remember the Fiji Pro debacle of 2012, when a 20-foot swell chewed up the Cloudbreak reef and the event was put on hold until the surf calmed down? Some 35

surfers were stoked on the size, some were on edge but cautiously ready to paddle out and a few ashen-faced rippers straight-up said, “No way.” Were the guys waxing up their 9'0"s more core than those who were frantically making up excuses about not having flotation vests or surfboards bigger than a 6'8"? I don’t think so.

Besides, if you tried to establish a minimum-size wave you had to surf before you could officially be considered hardcore, that line would be both arbitrary and totally relative. Who decides which wave is big enough to sufficiently bestow core-ness? If I were to overcome my sketchiness limit and paddle out on a bombing 10to 12-foot day at Ocean Beach, I’d feel like the bravest surfer who ever lived — as core as humanly possible.

Meanwhile, that same day there might be a whole crew taking on 20-foot Mavericks who would consider double-overhead beachbreak surf to be “fun-sized.” If you jump across the pond to 40-foot Nazaré or Jaws, the scale can slide even farther, and eventually the only core surfers left are Garrett McNamara and Aaron Gold.

Miki Dora once called himself a “4-foot-and-under man,” and I have no idea whether he was referring to comfort or ability, but either way, the guy clearly didn’t consider riding larger waves a requirement to be a dedicated surfer (though he did enjoy brief successes on the North Shore). Yet Dora, Mr. 4 Foot and Under, just might be the core-est surfer who ever rode a wave.

He earned that title by turning his back on society and foregoing a conventional lifestyle to live a life devoted to surf, by any means necessary. If there actually was a sign somewhere that read “You Must Have Ridden Waves This Tall” to determine whether or not you were core, Dora would have probably sharpened the fin on his small-wave Malibu log and used it to chop that sign down. S

Rizal Tanjung,

Wisdom —

Indonesian surf icon Bali, Indonesia

As told to ZANDER MORTON

“People are aware of the issues the environment is facing now and are working to help. But this problem isn’t going away easily. All of us need to act.”

Having a career in surfing is a surreal thing. I first realized that it was possible when I was 15 years old.

Back then, once a year in Bali, we had a big international world junior contest at Kuta Beach. I won the under-16 division, and that was the moment I realized I was a good surfer. At that time, pro surfers from all over the world were starting to come to Bali every summer, and I wanted so much to be a part of that.

The friendships you make are the most important part of surfing. My first sponsor was Quiksilver, and I rode for them for 10 years. Then, in 1999, when Bob Hurley started Hurley, Paul Gomez called me up and said, “We want you to be the first international team rider for this brand, and you can just be who you are.

Surf, have fun and keep a smile on your face.” That was a good deal. [Laughs.] Bob was my boss, but we got along super well, and we got really close. Now we’re like family.

Trust is the most important thing in any relationship.

When you can trust someone 100 percent, everything else will fall into place.

Bali has always had a lot of great surfers. But we’ve never had a local surfer make the World Tour. All of the surfing industry is here, we have surfboard factories and obviously we have great waves. What would really help Indonesia get a surfer on the Tour is more government support of surfing. Look at Brazil: The government in Brazil got behind competitive surfing and helped make it one of the biggest sports in the country. Now they have highly rated Qualifying Series events, so the surfers from Brazil have more opportunities to compete at a high level and get big points. Now Brazil has two world champions, and a lot of successful pro surfers, because surfing is taken seriously in Brazil.

That same thing happened with surfing in Australia in the ’80s, but it hasn’t happened here yet. We have

some of the best waves in the world, but not a single major [World Surf League] event.

Kids need to be open-minded. I always tell the upand-coming surfers from Indonesia that they need to make friends overseas so that they have support when they are trying to travel and compete around the world.

Traveling is expensive, but the next generation of kids from Indonesia should do what they can to go out and see the world. Home will always be here. When you’re young and you have the opportunity to travel, just go.

Don’t look back.

The environment is the No. 1 concern here right now.

Bali has exploded in the last 20 years. More rubbish.

More traffic. More pollution. More everything. It’s a huge problem.

People are aware of the issues the environment is facing now and are working to help. But this problem isn’t going away easily. All of us need to act — the government, the local people and, most importantly, the big companies. They need to stop making plastic or start to pay heavy taxes that can fund the cleanup process. Companies that produce plastic bottles should be paying for the cleanup because they are a huge part of what’s killing the environment.

It’s important to remember that you are always voting with your money. These companies don’t care about the environment. They care about profits. But we can let them know how we feel about that by not purchasing their products and cutting off the demand. That’s the simplest way for surfers to make a difference.

Indonesia’s problems go beyond the environmental issues. There are so many poor areas in Indonesia, and 36

a lot of people without access to clean water at all.

Waves for Water is a good example of another way people can help — just by bringing over water filters to help give people access to good drinking water.

Waves can disappear if you let them. All of the new development in Indonesia has definitely changed a lot of waves. A couple have been completely ruined. And that goes back to the government. They need to consult with the surfing association before they issue permits for big projects that could potentially ruin waves. We need to be able to offer insight. But they don’t care about us.

We’re too small. They care about the money. Just look at Nikko Right: They allowed the Kempinski Hotel to build a seawall and destroy that wave. It happened just like that. Nobody even knew it was going to happen.

The lessons we pass to our children will determine the future. Now that I’m raising children, I’m trying to show them how to take care of their environment.

For example, we have a place in Java now, and I’ve said to them, “One day this place is yours, so take care of it.” I’ve learned from Bali, and now I want to preserve Java and make sure we don’t make the same mistakes over there. I want to make sure we have better trash infrastructure and we don’t overbuild. I want it to be a retreat, a little heaven.

Politics are so dirty. I try to just focus on what I can control at home. Surfing has given us such a great life, and we need to protect that where we can.

When you have power and influence, you should use it in a positive way. You should use it to make a difference — to speak up. One person can start a big change if they use their powers properly. Our surf world needs those people right now. S

Photo by REPOZAR 37

The Challenge from Down Under Remembering psychedelic rants at the dawn of the shortboard, from SURFER Volume 9, Number 3

“The Challenge from Down Under”: This is a mad piece, in every sense of the word. Mad-angry, mad-crazy, mad-funny. It is nine pages of barbed wire dipped in psilocybin, wrapped in a gorgeous afternoon of waves at Honolua. You know the day: Bob McTavish and Nat Young on their vee-bottom Plastic Machines, Dick Brewer on the cliff quietly seething that he didn’t make those boards first. This was the moment, if you had to pick a moment, when the shortboard blew past the longboard.

I’ve read this article a hundred times, quoted from it, would rank it as one of the Top 5 essential documents of the shortboard revolution. But boy, it is a hot mess. Starting with authorship. Flamethrowing Aussie surf writer John Witzig got the byline, but most of the article was written by shortboard surfer-designer-stoner-revolutionary McTavish. Young also gets a paragraph or two, as does Midget Farrelly. At first Witzig asks, “What’s happened in Australia in the last 12 months?” then follows with a quick review of recent board-design changes. Witzig is less combative here then he’d been a few months earlier, when, in response to SURFER shamelessly stonewalling Australia’s rise to dominance after the 1966 World Championships, he roasted the entire purblind Dana Point Surf Establishment with

Archive —

By MATT WARSHAW

“We’re Tops Now”—still the best, most righteous “fuck you” surf article ever published. But if he’s cooled down a bit for “Challenge,” Witzig still carries the colors, and proudly. “There is greater experimentation being done in Australia,” he writes, talking about both equipment and performance. He name-checks Wayne Lynch, a hot 15-year-old junior from Victoria whom nobody in America has yet heard of, and says, rightly, that “Australian surfers appear to hold the key to the future.”

Then McTavish drops onto the page, all froth and pixie dust and good cheer and boldface-type paragraphs, to literally and figuratively give us a view from inside the revolution. We’re back at Honolua Bay on that perfect afternoon. Atop his “inner-space probing zapper”—also known as a “surfboard”—McTavish eyeballs an approaching set wave, swings around, and…

Woo!! Bowling slightly even here on the takeoff! Now… easy…two paddles…liftoff ! Drop!! Down into that curve. Bring it up on edge. GET IT ON!! Thrrrust!

Move it out! Up. Under. Curl. Coming over! Right over! (that noise) Inside! (that feel) A GIANT GREEN CATHEDRAL AND I AM THERE! Positive—Negative.

Pow!! Infinity. Curl just going further ahead of me, 38

but it’s right! Can’t see out, but who needs to because time is gone. Seconds? Minutes? A lifetime. Crystals.

Soundsmells. Tastefeels. Forever. Now. The door is open. The wave laughs, board breathes, sun smiles, cruise out into…peace.

McTavish, today, would laugh at his younger self, and be humble and proud at the same time. He remains a man of multitudes. He most certainly knows what he did 50 years ago, and what it meant to surfing, and how much fun he had doing it. And the whole thing—the whole explosive first act of shortboard surfing—was in fact distilled in that Honolua tube. In that “GIANT GREEN CATHEDRAL” with a “Positive— Negative. Pow!!” Futuristic equipment under his feet.

Perfect late-afternoon waves. Good friends in the lineup.

McTavish was 23, happy and high and moving forward.

Moving the whole show forward. If ever a man deserved to gibber, and if ever that gibbering deserved to be enshrined in print, to be read and laughed at and envied 50-something years later, this was the moment. McTavish’s froth is timeless. It will outlive us all. S

Leila Hurst S I G N A T U R E

S E R I E S

Featuring the Medium Time Teller Leather, Kensington, & Base Tide

nixon.com/Leila

The Featherweight Future

Design Forum —

Varial’s Infused Glass is the latest and lightest way to build a surfboard

Surfers often follow a herd mentality. (Haven’t you noticed that every time you pick an empty beachbreak peak to paddle out at, someone will paddle up right next to you rather than to the identical empty peak down the beach?) For better or for worse, we tend to pick surfcraft the same way: by riding whatever looks safe and familiar instead of experimenting with exotic shapes and materials.

Former aerospace engineer Edison Conner and business wiz Parker Borneman have been doing their best to change that mindset by reimagining the way surfboards are engineered from the inside out. You’ve probably heard of their company, Varial Surf Technology, which made a splash in the industry a few years ago with the release of Varial foam, a strong, lightweight, stringer-less blank that caught the attention of many of the world’s top surfboard manufacturers, including Channel Islands, …Lost, Sharp Eye and more.

But Varial is more than just a foam company. Their latest technology? Infused Glass.

“Basically, we figured out how to vacuum bag a surfboard all in one shot. And while vacuum bagging itself is nothing new, we’re able to do 100 percent vacuum-bag infusion with either polyester or epoxy resin,” explains Borneman. “The vacuum-bag process gets the fibers in the cloth really flat, which in turn provides a lot more strength. It also significantly reduces the amount of resin used, so you’re getting a ton of liveliness in a board with way less weight.”

“The quality and level of technology in these boards is comparable to any aerospace structure,” says Conner.

“And when we infuse with polyester resin, there are almost no styrene vapors released into the air, meaning there are also significant safety and environmental upsides to glassing a surfboard this way.”

Lighter. Stronger. Safer for the environment. The Infused Glass process checks three important boxes.

But how do the boards actually work in the water?

According to World Tour competitor Caio Ibelli, who’s been riding Xanadu boards made from Varial foam and finished with Infused Glass for the last seven months, they work extremely well. So well, in fact, that he’s collaborating with Xanadu and the guys at Varial to build a quiver exclusively using this tech. According to Ibelli, these craft are so strong and reliable that he’ll be able to dramatically reduce the number of boards he has to drag around the world on Tour — no small feat, considering most Tour surfers lug eight to 12 boards to each event.

“Once we can get my quiver completely dialed, I

By ZANDER MORTON

Caio Ibelli. Photo by MORAN

won’t have to travel with two boardbags anymore,” Ibelli explained shortly after finishing runner-up to Jordy Smith at Bells. “I’ll be relying on one or two boards for an entire event, which is huge and something that I’ve never been able to do before.”

For Conner and Borneman, having a Tour surfer of Ibelli’s caliber providing feedback is invaluable when it comes to honing the process and getting the desired results. And not just for Ibelli — their goal is to bring something to the surf industry that not only helps shapers make better boards, but also gives those same boards a much longer life expectancy.

“Caio has been so articulate with his feedback,” says Conner. “And though his boards can be made extremely 40

light, strong and flexible, that’s really just a base to work off of to create the optimal board for all different types of waves. Caio has helped us really understand that for a powerful surfer in waves with a lot of push, you actually want the board to be a little stiffer and heavier.

And we’re now able to precisely customize the weight of each board to whatever he wants, so it’s opened up another element of board design for him.”

With Ibelli putting on some of the best performances of his career on Tour this year, Conner and Borneman are hoping surfers everywhere will see the potential benefits of this technology, giving the rest of the herd a new example to follow. S

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South Florida’s Toxic Summer Coastal communities brace for another algal bloom while local activists are changing the political tide

Our Mother Ocean —

By MATTHEW SHAW

Photo by SANDERS

Last summer, Florida’s Treasure Coast found itself under siege by an unusual enemy: a noxious, guacamole-like cyanobacterium, more commonly known as blue-green algae, which had overrun waterways and contaminated many local beaches.

The invasive algae showed up after a particularly rainy El Niño winter, when billions of gallons of water from Lake Okeechobee were released into the Indian River Lagoon System, eventually entering the St. Lucie River Estuary en route to the Atlantic. Fresh nitrogenand phosphorous-rich water coupled with increasingly warm summer temperatures created the ideal conditions for algal growth. Within months, putrid-smelling slime was washing up onto Treasure Coast beaches, prompting Florida Governor Rick Scott to issue an executive order declaring an emergency in Lee, Palm Beach, St. Lucie and Martin counties.

Aside from emitting an atrocious smell, blue-green algae created a human health catastrophe for the area.

Residents of the affected counties reported increased cases of MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant staph infection linked to algae exposure. And while scientists believe exposure has the potential to cause any number of issues in humans, from skin rashes to respiratory problems to neurological disorders, the algae is even more harmful

to marine life. It’s estimated that nearly half of all sea grass in the St. Lucie estuary — which serves as a lynchpin to the local aquatic ecosystem — was killed during the 2016 crisis, causing a chain reaction up the food chain.

In an area where summertime beachgoers serve as a cornerstone of the economy, beach closures also had a tremendous impact on local businesses. Weeks of surf camps — which represent a large revenue source for local surf shops — were cancelled. Fishing charters never left the marinas. Bait-and-tackle shops, as well as paddleboard rental companies, were shuttered.

“These coastal communities have been sacrificed by the state of Florida for over 90 years, but 2016 was the worst,” says Dr. Gary Goforth, an environmental engineer who has testified in front of the state legislature about the need to stop water releases from Lake Okeechobee into the surrounding estuaries. A longtime Martin County resident, Goforth raised his children in Stuart, diving and snorkeling the area’s offshore reefs and surfing the local breaks. He has 30 years of experience working on large-scale ecosystem restoration projects, including a stint as the chief consulting engineer for the South Florida Water Management District, a state agency that manages water resources in the area.

42

“The actual releases from the lake into the St. Lucie River totaled just about 220 billion gallons of polluted water,” Goforth says. “It pushed out most of the saltwater in the estuary, bringing salinity very close to zero. It also brought with it nearly 50 million pounds of sediment, over 2.5 million pounds of phosphorous and over 300,000 pounds of nitrogen.”

On a map, positioned in the south-central region of the state, the nearly 30-mile-wide Lake Okeechobee looks like the eye of Florida’s zoomorphic turtle head.

Despite being the largest freshwater lake in the Lower 48 states, Okeechobee is a mere 12 feet deep, and its propensity to overflow has both confounded environmental engineers and threatened the surrounding agricultural lands and estuaries for nearly a century.

In the early 1900s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) began construction on a system of canals meant to divert Okeechobee’s natural southward overflow to the west or east into the Caloosahatchee or St. Lucie estuaries, respectively. The lake is surrounded by land used for agricultural purposes, which means that rain pushes chemicals from pesticides and fertilizers into the lake, causing contamination. Still, if the water in the lake rises above 15.5 feet, the ACOE opens the floodgates.

Continued on page 44.

T HE R E ARE N O GUID ELINES to the EARN YOUR SALT motto,

for we are constantly searching for the wild unknown that scares us to the point of insanity.

Sure , we may seem a bit crazy to those observing

our kind with a land-based mindset, BUT IT IS THE MOMENT OF UNCERTAIN FATE THAT KEEPS US JUMPING BACK INTO THE OCEAN LOOKING FOR MORE. When we are in the ocean our thoughts do not wander on about the tribulations of everyday life, for we seek the

ocean to cleanse our body, minds, and souls.

THE OCEAN GIVETH AND THE OCEAN TAKETH AWAY is our mantra and every time we are pushed to the brink of panic and letting go, we fight to stay calm and conquer our fear. It is in moments like these, that no matter how salty, seasoned and experienced we may be, we become even more humbled and gain a deeper respect for the majesty of the ocean that time and time again lets our tired minds and bodies know we have EARNED OUR SALT.

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Continued from page 42.

Our Mother Ocean —

Photo by THURLOW-LIPPISCH

Algae outbreaks following discharges are nothing new — there were toxic blue-green algae outbreaks in 2004 and 2013 — but the scope and scale of last year’s crisis was unlike anything previously seen in the area.

Experts like Goforth say large-scale blooms could potentially become the new normal.

“With global temperatures rising and the frequency of heavy storms increasing, you have this combination of meteorological and political conditions that will create more detrimental outbreaks,” Goforth says. “The lake is likely to need more releases, and that places a greater urgency on the need to act.”

In April, the Florida legislature approved Senate Bill 10, which includes a nearly $2 billion project to build a reservoir to capture discharges south of the lake, treat the water and send it into the Everglades. The bill was proposed by Senate President Joe Negron (R-Stuart) and garnered a broad coalition of support, from environmental advocacy groups like the Indian Riverkeeper to public health institutions like Martin County Memorial Hospital. But SB-10 would likely not have earned such widespread backing if it weren’t for grass-

roots activism from Treasure Coast surfers like Evan Miller, whose non-profit organization Citizens for Clean Water staged massive rallies to raise awareness for the issue.

“All the surfers in Martin County have become experts on the discharges,” Miller says. “Surfers, fishermen and the people who spend the most time in the water understand the situation better than anybody else.”

Miller started C4CW after the algae outbreak of 2013, using social media and his connection to the local surf community to raise awareness about how the lake discharges were hurting the region. At a C4CW rally this winter, an aerial shot was taken of a group of several thousand Treasure Coast activists spelling out “Buy the Land” — a reference to the SB-10 proposal to purchase acreage south of Lake Okeechobee for a reservoir.

“Ultimately, I feel like we are protecting our way of life,” Miller says. “We are nothing without clean water.”

A successful approval of SB-10 offers a path to solving the toxic-algae problem, but it won’t be a simple overnight fix. Construction will take years and won’t be completed without financial assistance from the federal gov44

ernment, which previously committed to pay half of the necessary $2 billion for the project. Residents are concerned, however, that the funding may be more difficult to obtain under the new, less environmentally friendly Trump administration.

In the meantime, many climate models are predicting another El Niño cycle to develop in late 2017, and if Lake Okeechobee waters reach 15.5 feet or higher, discharges will occur. If that happens, scientists like Mark Perry, executive director of the Florida Oceanographic Society, say that the Treasure Coast should brace for the worst.

“Could the situation that occurred last summer be the new normal? Absolutely,” says Perry. “What we need is good leadership in our state. We have a lot of work to do. For those of us who surf or spend a great deal of time in the water down here, the situation hits particularly close to home. But everyone should be concerned. We have over 8,000 miles of tidal shorelines and estuaries. Our fishing and tourist industries generate over $109 billion a year. The water is our future and we have to protect it.” S

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Five waves that prove surf spots are anything but static

Sea Change —

By ZANDER MORTON

LAGUNDRI BAY

Tyler Reed. Photo by LOSFOTO

On May 28, 2005, an 8.6 magnitude earthquake struck just west of Sumatra. It was the third-most-powerful earthquake in Indonesia since 1965, wreaking havoc throughout the country and killing almost 1,000 people on the island of Nias. In the immediate aftermath, surfing was the last thing on anyone’s mind. But when

a semblance of normalcy finally returned to the Indonesian isle, along with traveling surfers, it became clear that the earthquake had affected local lineups as well.

The reef at Lagundri Bay — a wave that was already considered one of the best barreling right-handers in the world — had been raised nearly 10 feet from the quake, 56

and the right had actually gotten better. The takeoff is now steeper, the barrel is longer and the wave requires much less swell to start breaking. But Nias is likely the exception to the rule when it comes to the fateful 8.6 earthquake, with many waves in Indonesia disappearing completely or becoming much worse after 2005.

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Five waves that prove surf spots are anything but static

Sea Change —

SKELETON BAY

Alex Smith. Photo by VAN GYSEN

In late 2008, Surfing magazine ran a cover image of what appeared to be an endless left-hand sand-bottom barrel, accompanied by a blurb that read, “20-Second Tubes: On Location in Africa.” The story inside introduced the world to what might be the best wave on the planet, and it inspired tube hounds everywhere to seek out the racetrack left. But perhaps what is even more incredible than

Skeleton Bay’s shapely lip line is its origin story. While it’s widely believed to be one of the best waves in the world now, it didn’t even exist until the late ’70s, when Namibia’s predominant southerly winds fluctuated by 20 degrees, altering nearshore currents and sand flow, which created a kink in the coastline for sand to collect, forming the freight-train left. Unfortunately, the same 58

winds that created the bank in the first place are also slowly killing it, as the collecting sand is likely to eventually fill the inside of the point completely, straightening out the coastline and ruining the break. Some estimate that the wave as we know it today will disappear in the next decade. So, if Skeleton Bay is somewhere on your bucket list, you might want to bump it to the top.

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Five waves that prove surf spots are anything but static

Sea Change —

NEW PIER

Photo by PATTERSON

Would Kelly Slater have won 11 world titles if not for his formative sessions at Sebastian Inlet? Could John Florence have become the best surfer in the world if Pipeline didn’t exist? It can’t be overstated how much influence one wave can have on a surfer’s trajectory.

Take Jordy Smith and New Pier, for example. Before New Pier was the dependably rippable right sandbank

it is today, it was nothing more than a junky closeout, not even registering in the hierarchy of Durban beachbreaks. But in the mid-’80s, around the same time Smith was born, a fishing pier was erected, sand began to fill in around the pylons and a new wave had arrived. Now, New Pier offers some of the region’s best surf year-round, ranging from playful, short-period rip 60

bowls to grinding overhead barrels at peak season in the winter. And clearly it’s played a large part in molding one of the world’s best surfers. “New Pier is the spot,” says Smith. “You don’t have to go anywhere else.

Surfing that wave when I was growing up, those were some of the best times of my life. No way would I be the surfer I am without New Pier.”

Five waves that prove surf spots are anything but static

Sea Change —

SEBASTIAN INLET

Photo by MEZ

Of all the waves that have been dramatically altered over the years, perhaps none has had a larger impact on surf culture than Sebastian Inlet. In the late ’60s, when the Army Corps of Engineers went to work extending the small jetties at Sebastian to prevent erosion and keep the channel clear for boats, they inadvertently created the best sandbar in Florida. In the decades that

followed, Sebastian became ground zero for high-performance surfing — not just in Florida, but in the entire United States. On a good day, First Peak was a thick, wedging right with hundreds of talented surfers in the water abiding by a pecking order not dissimilar to the one at Pipeline. Sebastian was the venue for one of the first airs completed on a surfboard in the ’70s, and it 62

groomed surfers like Kelly Slater, Lisa Andersen and CJ Hobgood, who would go on to win 16 world titles combined. Unfortunately, in the early 2000s, repairs and renovations to the jetty caused First Peak to disappear. “I miss Sebastian, truly,” Kelly Slater told SURFER. “I’d do anything to bring it back to its glory.”

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Five waves that prove surf spots are anything but static

Sea Change —

UNNAMED SLAB

Roberto D’Amico. Photo by MAURIZI

While details are vague concerning which swell direction and conditions are required to bring this rare righthand barrel to life in Italy, it’s clear that the break was first created by a freak accident roughly five years ago.

“They were working on the highway, building a new tunnel,” says Italian surfer Roberto D’Amico, pictured here. “The workers left all the rocks in front of a park-

ing lot beside the river, but a huge rain came, causing the river to blow out, the parking lot to collapse and the rocks and rebar to pile up in the perfect place to create the slab that’s there now.” D’Amico explains that before this bizarre event happened, there wasn’t even a surf spot where the slab currently sits. But before you go jumping a plane to Italy, know that it’s an incredi64

bly fickle wave, and likely more dangerous to surf than even the sketchiest reef passes. “When it does break, it breaks over the worst bottom I’ve ever surfed. Not only is there concrete and rebar, but it has other refuse, like road signs, just sitting on the bottom,” says D’Amico.

“It sounds crazy, but it would be even more crazy to not at least try to surf it when it’s on.” S

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THIS IS

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By A S SH H TY T YN Y N DO DOU UG G LA LAS Phoottos Ph os by RYA YA N CR C R AI AIG

(Previous spread) Stylish twin-finner Torren Martyn, dropping in deep at one of the Solomon Islands’ many perfect reef setups.

(Left) Throughout the Solomon Islands, many homes skirt the shoreline and are vulnerable to impending sea level rise. During extreme high tides, this dock becomes level with the water line.

(Right) The landscape of the Solomon Islands is the stuff of travel brochures. But as beautiful as the scenery may be, the country is steadily losing land to rising sea levels. Not far from this island, five other islands have been completely swallowed by the ocean.

FROM the window seat of our small aircraft, the islands 13,000 feet beneath us looked like uncut emeralds poking out of a vibrant azure pool. I pressed my nose up against the Plexiglas to study the contours of each one. Dense forests blanketed the isles, bisected by brown, winding rivers. On their perimeters sat palm-fringed, white-sand beaches. The only signs of human development here in this remote, northern region of the Solomon Islands — a 1,000-island archipelago located just northeast of Australia, between Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu — were small clusters of houses settled along the coastlines, their corrugated tin roofs reflecting the sun back up at us.

Across the aisle from me, surfers Torren Martyn and Leila Hurst and photographer Ryan Craig had their eyes glued on trails of whitewater below. They were pointing out the seemingly endless number of breaking waves, feverishly tapping on the windows at the sight of any potential setup.

“Mate, look at that one over there,” yelled Martyn over the roar of the engine, spotting an offshore reef pass that was reeling amid the solid north swell. Whitewater spilled over a chunk of reef, tracing what looked to be an empty A-frame.

Much of the Solomon Islands are remote and hard to access, leaving large swaths of coastlines — mainly along two of the biggest north-facing islands, Choiseul and Santa Isabel — empty, unexplored and full of surf potential.

From cruising altitude, the Solomon Islands looked like a Technicolor slice of untouched paradise, a tropical playground for visiting surfers. But as plentiful as the waves appeared to be, getting barreled in empty lineups was only half the reason we were here. The other was to visit these islands before any more of them disappeared into the ocean.

A few months prior to our visit, I came in contact with Dr. Simon Albert, a marine scientist at the University of Queensland. He and his colleagues had recently discovered, using time series and satellite imagery, that five Solomon Islands had been swallowed by the sea over the last 70 years, and another six islands had severely eroded. The cause was determined to be accelerated sea-level rise.

“Over the last 20 years, the rates of sea-level rise in the Solomon Islands have been three times higher than the global average,” said Albert. “That’s about an 8 or 9 millimeter rise each year.” Half of that number, he explained, is the result of

El Niño cycles, which naturally siphon the world’s water into the South Pacific. The other culprit is climate change.

In some parts of the country, this rapid sea-level rise, combined with high wave intensity, has eroded beaches and destroyed people’s properties. Even over the short span of five years, many have watched the ocean come into their villages and carry homes away.

“The changes have been really swift,” said Albert. “People living on those islands are feeling very physically and psychologically insecure because they’re feeling like their entire foundation of life is washing away.”

Albert sent me two photos to help illustrate the problem. One was a snapshot of a thatched-roof house tipped over on its side, collapsing into the ocean, the high tide rushing into where the living-room windows used to be. The other was an aerial shot of Beneamina, a small, circular island near Santa Isabel jam-packed with about 30 houses, many of them sitting on the water’s edge. This island, Albert explained, is now only half the size it was 10 years ago. “When I was there in December, an island nearby had one house on it,” he said. “By the time we returned in February, that house had been washed away.”

The majority of seaside villages in the Solomon Islands, explained Albert, are fairly young. Before the 20th century, most natives were fierce headhunters and engaged in intense tribal warfare. They lived in the hills for security, so they could easily spot invading tribes. But when Christian missionaries arrived in the early 1900s, they encouraged the Solomon Islanders to come down to the coast, build churches and live their lives by the ocean. Now almost 85 percent of the population lives along the coastline, and, ironically, many communities are now being chased back up into the hills — not by spear-wielding warriors, but by an intruding ocean.

Most people talk about sea-level rise and other consequences of climate change using the future tense — as something our coastal-dwelling grandchildren will have to deal with 100 years from now. But according to Albert, that dystopian future has already arrived in parts of the Solomon Islands.

“The rates we’re seeing there are the rates we’re likely to see over the next 50 years around the world as things get worse,” says Albert. “In a way, the Solomon Islands provide a window into the future.”

78

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(This page) This region of the South Pacific hosts a bevy of waves and many of them remain unsurfed. This particular left, commonly referred to as Titiana, is home turf for the Western Solomon’s Surfing Association and is one of the more populated breaks in the country.

Martyn, sitting stylish on a low-tide runner.

OVER the course of his life, the ocean will likely chase Jeremy Baea farther and farther inland. But for now, the 25-year-old spends most of his days running toward it.

We first met Baea inside the mobile phone store where he works, located along the main road in Gizo, a bustling tourist and commercial center in the southwestern region of the Solomon Islands. The chatter of vendors selling fresh fish and vegetables nearby at the lively waterfront market poured into the store, along with the whirrs of motorboats unmooring from the wharf. Behind the counter, two surfboards leaned against the wall near the shop’s computer.

When Baea, who is half Solomon Islander and half Australian, isn’t busy at the shop, he serves as the founding president of the nascent Western Solomon’s Surfing Association, which he established a few years ago with his younger brother Shemiah.

One morning before work, Baea, along with Shemiah and their father, Patson, took us surfing at Titiana, a hollow, freight-train left that breaks over shallow reef.

The sun had just peaked over the horizon and the soft, pastel colors of dawn still lingered in the sky. The waves were only about chest high — small by Solomon standards — but the conditions were oil glass and the lefts perfectly shaped.

Shemiah had broken his board a few months prior, and since surf gear is nearly impossible to come by in this corner of the world, he and Baea were taking turns on an old, rockered-out 6'2". While Shemiah was in the water schooling our crew with his local knowledge, I asked Baea and his father about the effects of sea-level rise in the local area.

According to Baea, although Gizo has suffered less-drastic coastal erosion than islands in the northern region of the country that are exposed to larger surf, this area has still seen its fair share of change. “I think in the next 10 years things will look completely different,” he explained.

Baea’s family owns a small bed-and-breakfast on a tiny island not too far from

Gizo. Back in the 1950s, Baea’s grandfather purchased their island, along with two others, for a mere 15 British pounds. All three of their islands are now smaller than they were back then, and they’re shrinking more each year. “We’re starting to look at other options, like building seawalls or moving to the mainland,” said Baea.

It wouldn’t be the first time Baea and his family were forced to flee their home.

Back in 2007, a massive earthquake triggered a tsunami that struck the Solomon Islands and wiped out more than 13 villages, killing 52 people. “It was about seven in the morning,” said Baea, remembering the day. “We had just woken up and I was sitting outside by the water when everything started shaking.”

Located along the Pacific Ring of Fire, the Solomon Islands are seismically active and they experience half a dozen tremors each year. Baea initially thought it was just a small quake, “but it wouldn’t stop shaking,” he said. “It just kept going and going and going. When it stopped, that’s then we noticed the water started sucking out.”

Baea and his family quickly piled into their boat. They picked up his grandmother, who lives on a neighboring island, raced out to deep waters and waited for the first surge to pass. “Riding out the tsunami was very scary,” said Baea. “The water out there is usually very calm, but it was like a washing machine, with really strong currents, waves and whitewater everywhere.”

Once the first surge passed, they made a mad dash to Gizo, where they could run for higher ground before the next surge. “The boat ride to Gizo was surreal,” said Baea. “We watched entire houses float by in the water; rubbish was everywhere.

The whole time, we knew that we had probably lost our home too.”

When Baea and his family finally returned to their island, their beautiful wooden bungalows were completely demolished. It took them three years to rebuild.

Patson remembers the community’s collective fear following the tsunami. “Even 80

(Above) Just a couple decades ago, this tiny, barren sandbank was a tree-laden island the size of a football field.

(Right) “If we stop being friendly to the environment, the future is going to be really bleak,” said Patson Baea, a 58-year-old local who’s lived in the Solomon Islands his entire life. “But one island or country can’t really do anything about it. It has to be all of us.”

three months after, people still weren’t out fishing or doing things in the ocean,” he said. “We never thought about the sea that way before, that it could come up and take all of your belongings. It was the first time we looked at the ocean differently. We’ve always known that the sea belongs out there; it doesn’t belong up here on land.”

Patson, who’s 58 and sporting a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, has also seen the ocean engulf entire islands, one in particular where he would take the kids when they were little.

After our session, Patson took us to this vanishing island. As we neared it, Shemiah jumped off the boat and paddled up to what was just a tiny sandbank. The island, Patson told me, used to be the size of a football field and was filled with large trees that were surrounded by a pristine ivory beach. They would camp out, play soccer and picnic beneath the trees’ shade. Now, less than a decade later, the island was no bigger than an end zone, with rotting tree trunks lying in the middle.

“If we don’t behave in the next 50 years, all these islands will be gone,” Patson said, motioning to the 10 or so small islands in our view. “I’m always trying to picture what the scenario will be when the kids are older. But I think it’s very hard to imagine.”

81

(This page) Leila Hurst, banking hard off the bottom on one of the country’s finest gems.

BY Solomon standards, the people living in Gizo are the lucky ones. The town and surrounding villages are built along the coast of a mountainous island, so when oceans expand and storms become more frequent as a result of climate change, people can move to higher ground. But not everyone in the Solomon Islands has an easy escape route. For the 600 residents that inhabit Taro Island, a low-lying, kilometer-long atoll that sits no higher than 6 feet above sea level, their only option is relocating their entire village, which is exactly what they plan to do.

Despite its small footprint, Taro Island serves as the capital of Choiseul province and contains a hospital, grass airstrip, courthouse, schoolyard, police station, government buildings and a few churches. The leaders of Taro have developed plans to build a similar town from scratch on the nearby mainland — one that will be better positioned to survive the future perils of sea-level rise and climate change. But according to Taro’s deputy provincial secretary, Geoffrey Pakipota, relocating an entire town, even a modest one like Taro, is easier said than done.

We met Pakipota in front of the main government administration building, a raised, single-story wooden structure encompassing a manicured courtyard.

Across the dirt road, a school bell rang and throngs of children poured out of their classrooms into the large grass field that sits in the center of town. The midday heat was sweltering, so he led us into an air-conditioned conference room.

Pakipota, who is soft-spoken and has an affinity for Hawaiian-print shirts, told me he’s been working on the plans to relocate the island since 1994, when the town decided to expand to accommodate a growing population. But after the 2007 tsunami, the leaders of Taro realized a more urgent reason to move: their vulnerability to extreme weather events and rising sea levels.

“There’s nowhere to escape on this island,” said Pakipota. During tsunami events, like the one in 2007, it takes about two hours to evacuate everyone and get them across the bay to the mainland, a process that would leave them little chance of survival if the tsunami were more intense or originated closer to their island.

In the time that Pakipota has been in government, he’s noticed huge changes to

the shape of Taro. He led us out of the conference room and toward the shore, just a short distance from his office. We stood on the beach next to a huge fallen tree with gnarled roots sticking up out of the ground, the latest victim of saltwater intrusion.

He pointed to a string of buoys about 20 feet out to sea. “Fifteen years ago, that’s where our main market was,” he said. It was completely submerged and a small dock had been built in its place.

Pakipota then pointed across the bay, toward the mainland. “That’s where the new township will be,” he said. “It takes about three minutes by boat to get there.” Taking into account future sea-level predictions, the proposed settlement will sit about 1 or 2 miles inland. “It will be away from the sea,” explained Pakipota. “We’re trying to build a modern, green, climate-proof town. The whole coastal strip will be preserved as a buffer.”

The plans for the proposed new settlement had recently been approved by the national government, but securing the property was a huge hurdle. The majority of the land in the Solomon Islands, Pakipota explained, is owned by villages or families and is passed down only within communities. In other villages that have been forced to hastily relocate because of rising sea levels — like an island nearby that had been split into two by water — arguments over rightful land ownership have caused internal strife. For Taro, it took them almost 20 years of negotiations and roughly $1.1 million to acquire the land they needed.

Even though the plans have been rubber-stamped and the project is moving forward, everything will likely come to a standstill if Taro can’t procure enough financial support (an estimated $50 million will be needed for the construction of the new settlement and relocation of Taro’s residents) from the national government, which will be the biggest obstacle yet.

“We love this place, but people are getting impatient and are pressing the government to do something,” said Pakipota. “Whatever the investment, people need to be safe. If we spend billions of [Solomon] dollars on taking care of this town where it sits, if anything happens, it will all be gone. Instead, we need the government to invest money in a safer place.”

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(Above) From this perspective, Taro’s quickly changing coastlines can be difficult to detect.

To combat sea-level rise, people are planting mangroves, constructing seawalls and moving to higher ground. But none of these methods, Boseto explained, are perfect solutions. Mangroves can be planted only in areas with low wave intensity.

Seawalls are good short-term solutions, but when built haphazardly, they protect one man’s property while transferring that blocked wave energy to a neighbor’s.

Plus, seawalls prevent the natural buildup of sand during storm events, which normally helps rebuild lost beaches.

Moving uphill and building on steep, rocky land has its challenges as well.

“Low-lying areas are more suitable for island living because you have access to the sea for transportation — to travel to school and clinics and to have access to food sources,” said Boseto. “But when people move uphill, they’re far from those things, and they’re subject to landslides during earthquakes and heavy rains.”

The Green Climate Fund, a financial reservoir created by the United Nations, was designed to mobilize $100 billion a year to help developing countries like the Solomon Islands cut emissions and adapt to the risks of climate change. But in order for people in smaller villages to benefit from this fund, they need their central government in the capital of Honiara to apply for this money on their behalf. According to some, there’s a substantial disconnect between villagers on smaller islands and those who decide how to best disburse the money from the Green Climate Fund.

In the early 2000s, Honiara was embroiled in ethnic violence and political upheaval, which left the capital in a state of chaos and economic disarray. Many believe that in the years since, Honiara has been so focused on reassembling itself that it’s overlooked the needs of people in more-remote villages who are dealing with acute sea-level rise. For example, just a month ago the Solomon Islands acquired an $86 million subsidy from the Green Climate Fund for a hydro-development project that will provide cheap electricity for the capital’s denizens. Meanwhile, people in places like Taro, who are watching their coastlines vanish, are having a difficult time procuring the necessary capital to relocate.

As good-natured as it may seem for developed nations to donate money to smaller nations that feel strangled by the chokehold of climate change, Boseto believes the Solomon Islands need more than guilt money.

“This is just a Band-Aid solution,” said Boseto. “Bigger countries are saying, ‘OK, we’ve emitted this much, so we will pay you this much money to help you adapt to what we’ve done.’ But that’s not what we are saying we need.”

What they need, Boseto explained, is for big, industrialized countries to address the root problem and reduce their output of greenhouse gasses. They need the rest of the world to collectively commit to turning down the global thermostat.

But in the next century, these homes could be entirely underwater. To prepare for that day, the local government is planning to relocate the island’s residents.

(Above, right) The majority of Solomon Islanders depend on the sea for their food and their livelihood, which makes moving farther inland or uphill more difficult for residents.

THE global sea level is now 5 to 8 inches higher than it was in 1900, primarily due to man-made climate change, and it’s rising at a faster rate than it has in the previous 6,000 years. In the Solomon Islands, sea level is rising even quicker. Just in the past 25 years, the ocean surrounding the Solomon Islands has risen about 6 inches.

Those numbers might not seem significant at a glance, but one vertical inch of sea-level rise equates to about 100 inches of land loss on a flat beach. And according to scientists like David Boseto, who does environmental consulting and auditing throughout the Solomon Islands, every inch means destruction throughout his home country.

I met Boseto in his small, halogen-lit office tucked away from the main road in Gizo. Science textbooks, nature manuals, a Ben Carson autobiography and the Bible were piled on his desk. Old and current maps of the Solomon Islands hung on the walls. He invited me to sit down and explained the details of his job, which includes surveying the impact of climate change throughout his country and helping people adapt to the threat of sea-level rise.

“There are a lot of cross-sectional issues we are facing throughout the country related to climate change,” said Boseto. He began listing them off like a narrator in a late-night infomercial citing all the side effects of a new medication: In the Solomon Islands, climate change has caused an increase in malaria, earthquakes, tsunamis and cyclones; it’s led to more-irregular seasons, leaving people confused as to when they should plant crops; the soil isn’t as fertile as it used to be and crops are now yielding fewer fruit and vegetables; fish are moving farther and farther from shore and are less abundant than they were 10 years ago; coral reefs are dying. But the most visible symptom of climate change is the rising ocean and the littoral erosion that accompanies it.

“Most of the communities near the ocean are having to move back 10, 15 meters because their beach is eroding,” said Boseto. “Village drinking wells along the coast are becoming too salty to consume. Now when there is an extended dry season, people have to boil their salty well water and drink that.”

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(Right) Martyn, below sea level. Although the waves in the Solomon Islands are often perfect, there’s a chance that the waves here could change shape under forecasted sea levels. “We could definitely hypothesize that as sea levels rise faster than coral are able to grow—which is the case in Solomon Islands— breaks are going to become deeper and wave intensity might decrease,” says scientist Javier Leon.

LIKE most Solomon Islanders, almost everything 30-year-old Eric Waiara’a does revolves around the ocean. After working as a science teacher near the capital for many years, he moved to the small coastal village of Kolipakisa to be with his wife and two sons. Now he spends most of his time fishing, diving for sea cucumbers and chauffeuring visiting surfers around in search of waves.

We conscripted Waiara’a to help us hunt down one of the best breaks in the region, near the island of Santa Isabel, where Dr. Simon Albert had found the five sunken islands. A midday thundershower had just cleared and billowy, soft-hued storm clouds hung in its wake like unfurling cotton candy. With Waiara’a at the helm of the boat, we zipped through the warm, glassy waters while flying fish skipped along the ocean’s surface next to us. In the distance, we could see whitewater lining up on the horizon.

We arrived at a shallow offshore reef where double-overhead waves were marching in from deep water, hitting a shelf and folding over themselves, forming shifty, powerful tubes. It looked every bit as good as the most popular Indonesian breaks, but without another boatload of surfers anywhere in sight.

Martyn began frantically waxing his board and screwing in fins. It took only about 20 seconds before he was over the side of the boat and scratching into the lineup.

He passed on the first wave of a thundering set, trying to gauge its power. When the next one came through, he paddled deep and swung underneath it. Sucking up off the reef, the wave seemed to drop out beneath Martyn, but his fins gripped the face and he stood tall with his trailing hand skimming the inside of the crystal-clear cylinder. As he kicked out amid a cloud of spit, Waiara’a let out a bellowing laugh from the boat, exposing his gap-toothed smile.

Watching the scene in the lineup, and the distinct natural beauty that surrounded us, it was hard to reconcile the area’s idyllic appearance with the increasingly challenging reality the environment and local communities face. The International Panel for Climate Change reports that sea-level rise is likely to increase by 3.22 feet by the end of this century. Greenland and Antarctica are melting quicker than ever before. Recent studies point to a segment in Antarctica called the Amundsen Sea sector that has gone into “irreversible decline.” The body of ice there holds enough water to raise sea levels by another 4 feet, and its eventual melting could destabilize other parts of the adjoining ice sheets. The effects of this would spell disaster not only for the oceanfront settlements in the Solomon Islands, but for coastal areas worldwide.

Experts believe curbing climate change will require unified action from the international community, which has proven difficult due to the politicization of the issue. Back in 2015, 197 countries signed the Paris Climate Agreement, promising to limit emissions in an effort to keep global warming at or below 2 degrees Celsius.

But many critics believe that the Paris Climate Agreement is nothing but empty promises, and that governments aren’t taking aggressive enough measures to stop the burning of fossil fuels.

Waiara’a told me about how much his village has changed over the years, and how he and his neighbors have to wade through thigh-high water during extreme tidal floods in order to get to their homes. Some people even paddle their dugout canoes straight to their front doors.

I asked if there was any controversy within his village about whether or not climate change was real, explaining that in other parts of the world, people are still skeptical about its actuality. Waiara’a furrowed his brow and shook his head.

“Of course we believe in climate change. We see our beaches eroding, we see the saltwater ruining our coconut trees and we see the small islands beside us disappearing,” he said. “We see it happening all around us.” S 84

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OF WAVES

AND

WHITE ELEPHANTS

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How one of Northern Baja’s best waves was pioneered by California surfers, only to be destroyed to construct an unnecessary natural-gas terminal

By KIMBALL TAYLOR

Between the Northern Baja cities of Rosarito and Ensenada lies a stretch of coast wholly unrelated to either municipality. For the traveler heading south on Mexican Federal Highway 1, on crossing a bridge at the south end of La Fonda, this stark region of agave and yucca appears to ascend, rising to a small rancho called Salsipuedes and ending in a slow descent as one approaches the last tollbooth before the port of Ensenada. Visitors have called it the Big Sur of Baja California, as corniced summits of red rock cascade into headlands and on to the sea itself. Like its Alta California counterpart, the highway feels tenuously secured to occasional perches, a thread floating between the peaks above and the depths below. The feeling of vulnerability this inspires is not without merit. The terrain is sheer and unstable.

Massive sections have detached, taking out lengths of Highway 1 before crumbling to the water’s edge.

Surfers have made pilgrimages along this coast to points farther south for 60 years. In the 1960s, old-timers have claimed, intrepid surfers would slide a few at Punta San Miguel (the site of the Baja Surf Club Invitational, and now within view of the Ensenada tollbooth), pack up, head north and eventually dip their boards into the breakers of Rincon all in a single day. Traffic, development and the border industrial complex have made such a feat all but impossible today.

Those same forces may have allowed the Costa Azul region to remain raw while other parts of Baja have been tamed. The terrain’s inhospitality, of course, certainly lent another layer of protection. The name of the zone’s extremely fickle pointbreak translates to “get out if you can.”

The dramatic scale of the coast seemed to obscure potential waves in plain view.

Although members of the La Jolla Surf Club day-tripped to Todos Santos in 1965, visible just 8 miles off the coast, its big-wave break, Killers, wasn’t regularly challenged until the mid-’80s.

Two decades later, that feeling of untapped discovery may as well have been riding shotgun with photographer Jason Murray and surfers Rusty and Greg Long as they made their initial forays into the region. Rusty was just a year out of high school. His younger brother Greg was months away from winning the NSSA National Open Men’s title at Trestles, an event that would change both of their lives. Rusty described himself and his brother as “ambitious surfers.” They weren’t yet the bigwave chargers they’d become, but Murray, a former photo editor at SURFER, says, “They were headed that way.”

A lookout is nestled in a particularly daunting curve on the highway. Rusty says they’d stop there, pull out the binoculars and glass not only the known spots, but another prominent feature up coast. “This was the most exposed headland,” Rusty says. “We could look up and see whitewater exploding off of it.”

“We always wondered what was beyond Salsipuedes,” says Murray. “There just didn’t seem to be any way to access it.”

Who knows how many passing surfers wondered the same thing? But for this crew, an answer was not too far off. A 15-foot swell loomed in the forecast, and the Longs, who were edging their way up the big-wave spectrum, planned a “two-day strike” on Killers. Their father, Steve Long, and his good friend Captain Bob Harrington volunteered to boat from Southern California down to Ensenada. The plan was to

meet the boys at the marina there and then head the 8 miles out to Todos Santos. On the way down, Steve and Harrington navigated close to the coast. Just a few miles out from Ensenada, they made a point of investigating the headland that had lit the boys’ imaginations. Off of a black tongue of rock projecting into the ocean, on a stretch of coast virtually off the map, Steve and Harrington spotted the backs of waves roiling upon what looked to be a legitimate break. Steve had spent his career as a state lifeguard at Trestles; he knew what a promising setup looked like. And, on closer inspection, this one was impressive — spitting and exploding onto exposed rock. The swell was a bit jumbled, however, and it was hard to assess the wave from behind. But it looked to have potential. Harrington and Steve took GPS coordinates.

Rusty and Greg surfed Killers from Harrington’s boat as planned. They wanted to get comfortable paddling into big waves even in the tow-in era. But as the swell backed down, the crew hatched a scheme to return to Ensenada, employ the GPS device in Murray’s vehicle and pinpoint their father’s coordinates from land. Other than the coordinates, Murray says, all they really had was a hunch.

“We crept all along that coast, poking around,” Murray remembers. They were able to find a track that paralleled the highway. When this ended, they found themselves at a creek bed. There were indications that vehicles had used this dry arroyo at some point. “It wasn’t even a road — just a dirt-and-cobblestone path.” This access eventually opened up on what Murray describes as “pastoral meadows,” with agave spears springing up as far as the eye could see. “The kind of raw, old-time Mexico that had been removed from the rest of Northern Baja,” he says. “It was just so pristine.”

The road, Rusty remembers, was “as bad as any Baja road I’ve ever traveled.”

There was a hill that required a running start and “just pinning the engine” to get up. “It definitely had the wilderness feel,” he says. “It felt like you were out there.”

Nearing the ocean, they spotted a ranch house on a rise. A fishing camp lay along the shoreline. It was helter-skelter, comprised of a dozen or more rough structures built by itinerant fishermen as well as lobster traps, foam floats, engine parts and gear.

Then the surfers spotted the wave. The swell was still 12 feet on the buoys. “It was just kegging,” Murray says. A right-hand slab at the top of the reef eventually connected to a reeling point-like section. “The way the wave broke suggested that it was coming from deep water. It was spitting and doing all of the things you’d want a wave to do.” Rocks protruded extremely close to the takeoff zone. After suiting up, the surfers realized the challenge of even getting out. There didn’t seem to be access points. The reef was covered with spiny urchins. Rusty thought, “You could get hurt surfing this wave.”

“I’d be lying if I said it was perfect,” says Murray.

Rusty describes their first session as sketchy. “We were really cautious,” he says.

If they fell at any point, they were sure to end up on the rocks.

Slab surfing was becoming the vanguard at that time. And this wave was not only a slab, but a pointbreak as well. Rusty figured it was the only wave like it in all of the Californias. Rather than an identifying or regional moniker, the crew decided to name the wave after the boat captain who’d helped discover it: Harry’s.

They agreed to keeps its existence an absolute secret.

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(Previous, left) After Sempra Energy took ownership of the land fronting Harry’s, the arrival of dump trucks and construction equipment signaled the end for the wave.

Photo by LONG (Previous, right) In the early 2000s, before the destruction of Harry’s, Greg Long’s white van was a fixture on the hill during many of the best winter swells. Photo by MURRAY (Left) Before the construction of Sempra’s energy project, a fishing village and a ranch house skirted the shoreline of Longs and Murray’s discovery. Now the unique wave and pristine land have been replaced by a little-used liquid natural gas terminal.

Photo by DEDINA (Opposite) It’s easy to understand why Greg Long (pictured) and his brother kept this gem under wraps for so long. But once they heard about Sempra’s plans to demolish the wave, the crew was quick to publicize the spot in hopes of saving it from destruction.

Photo by MURRAY

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or decades, energy companies had sought viable West Coast locations to build liquid natural gas (LNG) receiving stations. The idea was to ship cheap natural gas in condensed liquid form from countries like Indonesia and Papua New Guinea across the Pacific to California, Oregon or Washington. The liquid could be heated into a gas and then injected into domestic pipelines for distribution. Historically, these projects faced vehement opposition because of the dangers they posed to people and the environment. Environmentalists cited air pollution and marine degradation as certain outcomes. They also feared that an accident at such a plant could ignite vast areas with a flammable gas cloud. Activists fought LNG terminals on the premise that the U.S. didn’t need to develop yet another fossil-fuel habit.

Another problem for LNG developers was that the U.S. market didn’t need those imports anyway. By the early 2000s, the Department of Energy (DOE) was forecasting modest but steady increases in domestic production of natural gas. An industry association called the National Petroleum Council agreed, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. A surge in renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power was also expected to reduce demand for natural gas. In such a scenario, to build an environmentally disruptive LNG import hub in the highly regulated Western states of California, Oregon and Washington appeared to be a nonstarter.

Mexico, on the other hand, had begun to privatize its gas industry in the mid1990s. At that point the nation had no infrastructure to move the product, and there was no oversight or permitting norms regarding LNG. Despite these challenges, the mere possibility of building a terminal in coastal Baja California, and piping that gas across the border to U.S. markets, ignited a race among energy companies. In the early 2000s, at least six were vying for position in Baja, according to Bill Powers, an engineer and energy activist who followed these developments. By 2004, a company out of Texas called Marathon Oil seemed to be leading the pack; it had won the first permit from the Mexican government and had purchased land for

what it called an “energy center.” Along with an LNG terminal, the center included two items useful to the city of Tijuana: a wastewater-treatment plant and a desalinization plant. Plus, its 3.2 acres were located about as close to the border as possible, just south of Playas de Tijuana, nearly within view of the U.S. San Diego–based Sempra Energy, owner of power utility San Diego Gas & Electric, was not about to give up the race to Marathon Oil. Sempra had recent experience building a natural-gas pipeline in Mexicali. It was politically connected in both countries, and Mexico’s opening market was an obvious opportunity.

Producing its own supply-and-demand forecast, Sempra launched a publicity campaign in 2004 to warn of drastic shortages of natural gas in Southern California 15 years hence. Despite DOE and industry forecasts to the contrary, then-president of Sempra Energy LNG Darcel Hulse told the Union-Tribune, “There is no way we can reverse the decline.” Production would plummet and demand would soar, he said. Sempra employed this argument to win approval from the California Public Utilities Commission to pipe LNG from Baja into California. The ace up Sempra’s sleeve was that, to some extent, the DOE’s forecast of ample natural gas supplies was irrelevant. Sempra profits would come not through selling gas, but by leasing the option of moving LNG through its plant. Come push to shove, according to Powers, Sempra could simply sell the imported gas to its own utilities — SDG&E and SoCalGas — thus putting Southern California ratepayers on the hook no matter what happened to the price of domestically produced gas.

Then, in the spring of 2004, something mysterious happened: The governor of Baja California, Eugenio Elorduy Walther, ordered Marathon Oil’s Tijuana property to be expropriated by the state of Baja California, effectively killing the project that would have rivaled Sempra’s.

By this time, Sempra had chosen a site farther down the coast, in an area that seemed too remote to trigger serious opposition.

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o get to know the many faces of their new discovery, Murray says, “We knew we’d have to sacrifice swells and pay our dues.” Around 2001, the crew committed to return to Harry’s on every good-size swell. Their van was well known among Baja surfers, and they were leery of being spotted turning off of the highway or along the stretch of track that paralleled it, so Murray and the Longs always entered the dirt road in the pre-dawn hours.

The sun rose over the peninsula at their backs. The landscape began to seep into them as much as they it. “It was an untouched environment,” Rusty says. “Nobody went in there except for the fishermen. It was just a stunning place.”

The fishermen said that they’d never seen surfers on this point, and they paused in their work to watch the Longs try to figure it out. With time, the crew found two keyholes they could use to enter and exit the surf. On a 6-foot swell, the top section was its own distinct wave, a barrel that Rusty, in his understated manner, called “pretty exciting.” At 10-foot, the slab ran into the next section of reef and then all the way down the line.

“There was no hesitating,” Murray says. “As soon as you took off, you were in the barrel.”

Rusty experienced a particularly nasty spill — one of those wipeouts where he knew it was going to be bad even before he lost his feet. In free fall, he covered his head with his forearms. The bounce off the reef was “really hard.” He was then rag-dolled across the urchin-covered reef, speared with spines on each brush with the bottom.

When he swam out to get water shots, Murray managed a different set of dangers. “It was definitely spooky out there,” he says. “It’s as close as land can get to deep water.”

There were tuna farms offshore, giant netted enclosures that were sometimes penetrated by white sharks. Rusty says he felt more exposed to the elements at Harry’s than sitting out at Todos Santos. It was easy to connect the feeling of deep water just beyond the reef with the abundance of sea life. “Schools of yellowfin, dolphin, whales. Crystal-clear water. Kelp in the bay. I’d never seen so much marine life before. It was a sanctuary,” he says.

Murray remembers talking it over with the brothers: “This is where we want to spend our surf lives: off the grid, on the frontier, searching for discovery.” The idea of uncovering a world-class wave two hours from their doorsteps, virtually under the noses of so many passing surfers, made them wonder what else was out there.

“We were over the moon,” Rusty says.

In the end, however, the trio couldn’t keep that kind of enthusiasm to themselves.

As the photo editor of SURFER, it was Murray’s job to create content for his publication. As budding professional surfers, it behooved Rusty and Greg to draw attention to their feats. And here they were, sitting on the gold standard of surf editorial: a secret world-class surf spot. It was probably inevitable that they would eventually introduce Harry’s to the world.

In the winter of 2002-03, the explorers invited surfers Brad Gerlach and Brian Conley on one of their missions. This strike was timed to meet prime conditions.

Murray created imagery that seemed to dwarf the participants on an outsized landscape, at the edge of an eternal ocean, in the curl of overhead tubes. The article Murray wrote to accompany the photos was brief and intentionally empty of detail.

Conley earned the cover shot with a midline drive through an azure tube. According to Murray, Conley had taken to the wave, enough to return with his own photographer soon after — just one signal that word was about to spread.

But this wave discovery was not going to play out as so many others had.

Toward the end of that first full season surfing Harry’s, the crew spotted outsiders on the point. Rusty describes them as “engineer types.” On the next visit, the surfers noted survey stakes upon the landscape. Then they saw the heavy equipment, bulldozers and dump trucks.

“It just happened that quick,” Murray says.

In order to save their secret spot, its discoverers believed they had to reveal it to the world and hope that it wasn’t too late for others to care. The Longs’ profiles had been heightened due to their success in big waves. Murray’s imagery was proof of Harry’s quality and the inherent value of its pristine environment. They used these assets to engage surf-related environmental organizations Save the Waves and Wildcoast. These organizations mobilized their supporters and launched a media campaign and protest tour from Ensenada to Oxnard. The environmental organizations also asked the California Public Utilities Commission to reconsider its approval of Sempra’s plan to pipe in gas from Baja.

A joint press release quoted then-20-year-old Greg Long: “Harry’s is an epic, backdoor barrel that will go the way of Killer Dana if we don’t stop it from being destroyed.”

But Harry’s was unlike Killer Dana in that nobody knew it existed before the campaign to save it. For Murray, it seemed that as soon as they had become aware of the Sempra development, the “ship had already sailed.”

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(Opposite, left) The Longs, along with Brad Gerlach and Brian Conley, on a strike mission in the winter of 2002-2003. Photo by MURRAY (Opposite, right) When Murray and the Longs stumbled upon Harry’s, they found a relatively untouched environment and an urchin-covered reef churning out some very intimidating waves. Photo by MURRAY (Right) This wave, no more than 2 hours from the Longs’ home in San Clemente, was one of the most unique and harrowing in Baja. Unfortunately, the Longs had little time to enjoy their find. Photo by MURRAY

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ecause it was being built in a country that previously had no regulations regarding LNG import, the Sempra Costa Azul terminal progressed extremely fast, despite the fact that it was a one-of-a-kind facility planned for a wild and unstable coast. By 2002, Sempra had designated a site and managed to get a decades-old zoning ordinance changed from protected to a status that would allow for the unprecedented terminal. In 2003, the company picked up the last of several permits it needed to build the plant. It inked deals with LNG suppliers, and by March 2005, Sempra broke ground on the Costa Azul facility.

Fishermen and ranchers were evicted from the land. Contractors leveled the fishing camp, bulldozed a ranch house and installed roads. Thousands of temporary workers descended on the site. The round casings for the storage tanks rose skyward, reminiscent of another twin-domed facility up the coast at San Onofre. The point at Harry’s was reshaped by a jetty. The seabed was reconfigured in preparation for a breakwater meant to withstand a hundred-year storm. Mexican president Felipe Calderón attended the plant’s inauguration in August 2008. The complex was set to process a billion cubic feet of LNG per day.

But the inertia of the project would not last.

Allegations of corruption began to emerge in 2010. In a lawsuit and to the media, a former Sempra executive-turned-whistleblower alleged that he had unknowingly participated in paying a bribe to Mexican officials and that he had been fired for asking too many questions. A rancher also sued, claiming that Sempra had taken his land. In 2011, the FBI opened an investigation into possible violations by Sempra of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. In 2015, investigative journalism site Voice of San Diego probed Sempra’s bid to launch its LNG terminal in Baja. Reporter Liam Dillon dug up and published key doc-

uments. One was an internal Sempra memo describing a $7 million trust funded by Sempra that was set up to benefit the city of Ensenada. The then-mayor of Ensenada, Jorge Catalán Sosa, would be president of the trust’s committee. The memo states, “As a result, on August 12, 2003 the Land Use permit was signed by the Mayor.”

The Voice of San Diego also published the FBI’s investigation reports, titled “Sempra Energy; Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.” This document called the trust agreement described by the memo as a “quid pro quo arrangement.” In summary, investigators wrote, “… there are ample facts and indicators which reflect that Sempra and its business executives may have engaged in criminal activity …”

Sempra denied allegations of wrongdoing to the authorities and to the media.

In 2011, shifting politics in Mexico made for drama at the actual plant as well. According to the Union-Tribune, the new mayor of Ensenada, Enrique Pelayo Torres, ordered Ensenada police to shut the plant down. In a statement, Pelayo said that the land-use permits authorized by the previous administration were improperly issued. The move to close the plant, however, was thwarted by state and federal authorities, who stepped in to keep the plant running. The Union-Tribune called the event a “showdown.”

In the end, the terminal was not shuttered, and Sempra battled its detractors in court.

According to the FBI investigation reports, Sempra was allowed to hire its own investigators and to essentially investigate itself for wrongdoing. In a follow-up meeting with the FBI, Sempra’s counsel stated that their own investigation proved it had broken no laws. It remains unclear whether the FBI agreed with Sempra’s self-assessment, but the bureau has yet to file charges against the company.

Yet the ensuing quiet at the Costa Azul facility may have indicated the biggest problem of all.

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(Left) Shortly after the Longs found it, Harry’s became an industrial eyesore. When Murray visited the spot in 2005, he watched dump trucks unload huge boulders over the reef he used to surf. Photo by DEDINA (Right) What made this wave so powerful and so suitable for the Sempra energy project was its closeness to deep water. Brian Conley, enjoying what happens when a strong swell meets an abrupt shelf. Photo by MURRAY

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fact that deepens the loss of Harry’s is that the early DOE forecast for increased domestic production of natural gas was accurate. Further, demand has leveled, sources of renewable energy have expanded and the development of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have revealed that the United States is sitting on a 100-year supply of natural gas. In 2008, the year the plant became operational, estimates of U.S. reserves jumped 35 percent.

According to Powers, this may not matter to Sempra. Due to investments and leases it locked in before development, he says, the plant has remained profitable while processing a mere fraction of its capacity. Powers called Sempra’s LNG plant a “white elephant,” because it never needed to do any work.

According to Powers, utility companies’ real efficiency lies in the political realm.

“This is where Sempra is the best in the business,” he says.

At the time of its construction, the Costa Azul LNG terminal was not the only controversial development planned in Baja. Speculators bought the land surrounding Salsipuedes and planned to build a massive suburb, including a mall, on the unstable cliffs. A Mexican government project called Escalera Nautica attempted to build 22 marinas and resorts on top of some of the coast’s prime surf breaks. These developments shared similar qualities: suspect forecasts, little oversight, political wrangling.

Unlike the LNG plant, almost all of them have been stalled.

In 2005, during the initial phase of the construction, Murray traveled back to Harry’s with Wildcoast executive director Serge Dedina. They took photos and video. In a clip uploaded to YouTube, heavy equipment leveled the terrain and dumped massive boulders directly onto Harry’s reef to make a jetty. This would extend out to a docking site for LNG shipments. Murray realized that the very thing that made Harry’s so powerful — its proximity to deep water — also made it a target for Sempra’s plans to bring large ships so close to land.

Long after construction of the LNG terminal was completed, Rusty would stop at the lookout off Highway 1, pull out his binoculars again and have a look at what Harry’s had become.

“That place should have been a designated nature preserve. That’s how beautiful it was,” Rusty says. “It’s a tragedy.” S 92

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(This spread) Although Murray and the Longs tried their best to stop Sempraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s development, Harryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s natural beauty and raw energy now only live in the memories of the few who witnessed it. Photo by MURRAY

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EMBRACING COLOSSUS

The enormous surf of Nazaré, Portugal was once greatly feared by the townspeople, but now it’s becoming their greatest resource

By JUSTIN HOUSMAN 96

(Opposite) The colossal waves fronting Nazare look slightly more manageable when printed on souvenir coffee mugs. Photo by GRAMBEAU (This page) Since 2011, Praia do Norte has drawn thousands of visitors to witness Portugalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s newly-famous big-wave break. Photo by GRAMBEAU

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JUST offshore of Nazaré’s bustling beachside promenade of bars, souvenir shops and restaurants, there swirls a feared patch of ocean known to locals as the Widow’s Rip. In the years before the town’s harbor was built, fishermen used oxen to pull their brightly colored boats across the beach before rowing bravely into the surf.

When seas were rough, as they almost always are in the winter, the small vessels would sometimes flip in the angry shorebreak. Any fisherman tossed from their boat would inevitably be carried out to sea by the Widow’s Rip, where they would sometimes drown in full view of their horrified wives. If you visit Nazaré today, you’ll see dozens of old women shuffling through the streets and along the beach, wearing black frocks in mourning for husbands lost at sea.

“When I was little, everybody always said, ‘Don’t go in the water over there or you will die,’” local bodyboarder Dino Casimiro told me last April as we shared beers at a small restaurant above Nazaré’s golden-sand beach. “Over there” meant Praia do Norte, a windswept crescent of sand on the other side of a towering rocky headland that separates the wild, raw North Atlantic from the more protected seas to the south.

“But ever since I was able to leave the house as a child,” Casimiro said, “I would walk to the cliff to look at the big waves. I always hoped that one day someone would surf them.”

That just about sums up the small town of Nazaré’s complicated relationship with the ocean. The centuries-old fishing community has always depended on the sea while at the same time greatly fearing and respecting its tremendous power.

Nazaré sits about as far west into the Atlantic as you can get while still being part of the European continent. It’s positioned to absorb the brunt of any North Atlantic swells, and the massive Nazaré Canyon just offshore funnels, strengthens and shapes the enormous waves that unload on Praia do Norte’s shifting sandbars.

Until 2011, if you’d heard of Nazaré at all, it was probably because you’re a big fan

of religious tourism and knew that the town’s imposing church, the Igreja de Nossa Senhora da Nazaré, features a celebrated black Madonna statue, which has been in Nazaré since the eighth century. Or perhaps you’d taken a day trip up from the far more renowned surf destination of Peniche, some 25 miles to the south, chasing rumors of a quaint fishing village with incredible seafood nestled at the foot of towering cliffs. In recent years, however, the small town has grown an oversized reputation for enormous surf.

“You’ll love Nazaré,” said an elderly American man on my flight to Lisbon when I told him where I was headed. “You’re going to look at the huge waves, I imagine?

I went last winter to see them.” Hearing this, a Midwestern woman in the seat in front of us perked up. “Oh, Nazaré?” she said. “I’m going there too! That’s where the biggest waves in the world are, right? I’m hoping to see them.” She explained that she’d watched videos of Garrett McNamara streaking down the dark green faces of monstrous waves on television. It was enough to put the small town on her Portuguese itinerary.

Strangely, surfers around the world and landlocked Midwesterners seemed to have learned about Nazaré’s world-class big-wave potential at the same time: in 2011, when McNamara set a world record there for the largest wave ever surfed and began appearing on CNN and the BBC. Nevertheless, I was astounded that people who lived hundreds of miles from the ocean were fascinated by this wave and were drawn to this tiny town in the middle of Portugal in hopes of glimpsing it.

Of course, I, too, was heading to Nazaré because of the giant surf. But more than witnessing waves, I wanted to meet the local surfers who called Nazaré home long before McNamara had ever heard of it, and find out what it means for the small Portuguese fishing town to become famous for holding what could be the largest surfable waves on the planet.

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(Opposite) The view from Sitio, looking down on Nazaré’s beachside promenade and more tranquil surf zone. On big winter swells, though, water will cross the sand and pour into the streets. Photo by GRAMBEAU (This page) Lucas Chumbo, pinning the throttle to get Pedro “Scooby” Vianna out of harm’s way. “It’s not so much riding the waves that is dangerous at Nazaré,” says British charger Andrew Cotton. “It’s driving the jet skis that’s frightening.” Photo by FERNANDEZ

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(Left) Besides the addition of an exhibit dedicated to the brave souls who take on the ferocious surf at Nazaré, most of the town has remained unchanged for decades, if not centuries. Photos by FERNANDEZ (top left, bottom right) and GRAMBEAU (top right, bottom left) (Opposite) Praia do Norte, where old-world transportation methods meet state-of-theart, big-wave surfing equipment. Lucas Chumbo, connecting with the locals.

Photo by FERNANDEZ

DRIVING into Nazaré from bustling, cosmopolitan Lisbon is a little like drifting backward through time. After flying along the A8 freeway in a modern rental, streaming music via Bluetooth, passing newly built gas stations and convenience stores, I exited and immediately drove right into the time capsule of Old Europe. Small farmsteads.

Women and men wearing frayed wool caps, tending little gardens. Oxcarts piled high with hay. A castle in the distance.

Eventually, rural, old-world Portugal gives way to occasional modern houses, then a subdivision or two, before a winding road deposits you right into the center of Nazaré. Driving through the narrow streets, you find old men sitting on curbs smoking cigarettes and women in black shouting “Need hotel?” Soon you emerge at a wide-open beachside boardwalk facing the Atlantic. The beach is shaped like a big fishhook: a long, straight section with the massive, curving headland to the north.

Around the corner, the fearsome peaks of Praia do Norte clash and churn in big winter storms. When the surf is large enough, it will often wash over the beach and through the street fronting the sea, swirling at the foot of seaside buildings as if to remind the town of who exactly is in charge.

Nazaré is essentially one town divided in two. There’s Praia, the larger, beachside district full of hotels and restaurants, and Sítio, the old town perched 100 meters above, along the promontory that leads to the famous lighthouse and fort from which nearly every photo of the surf at Nazaré is taken. A charming funicular ferries visitors up the steep cliffside between the two sections of town, while locals typically take the walking path that ascends the cliffs in a series of switchbacks.

On the surface, there’s very little about the town that suggests Nazaré has become synonymous with big-wave surfing. A single surf shop sits just off the main beach promenade; otherwise you’ll find little overt evidence of surf culture. Yet the tourists are coming, drawn to the spectacle of the massive waves. As I approached the counter to check out of my hotel at the end of my stay, I had to wait while a literal busload of tourists checked in, many of them asking the receptionist where they could witness the notoriously large surf.

Only six years ago, the waves here were largely unknown to surfers outside Portugal. Traveling surfers did occasionally pass through, even as far back as the ‘60s. (The 1968 American surf film Follow Me has a brief Nazaré sequence, though the surfers appear to be riding the mellower waves to the south of Praia do Norte.) Bodyboarders, however, have long known the powerful surf in and around Nazaré. The town has produced a handful of world-class pros, including Dino Carmo and Antonio Cardoso, both of whom finished in the top 20 of the pro bodyboarding tour last year. The pounding, experts-only shorebreak around these parts of Portugal has limited the amount of standup surfers in the region.

On my first day in town, I met up with 36-year-old Nuno Santos, a handsome, beret- and sports-coat-wearing musician and sports science professor who is also one of the few local surfers who challenge Nazaré at its fiercest. Despite learning to surf only when he was 20 years old, Santos is pretty at ease in Nazaré’s snarling winter conditions. This comfort is particularly obvious when he brings a violin with him into the surf, calmly drawing the bow across the strings while coming off the bottom of a 20-foot wave. (You can find evidence of his criminally underappreciated feats on YouTube.)

Santos becoming a talented enough surfer to take on maxing Nazaré is almost as impressive as his playing a stringed instrument in massive surf. He began his surf life as a bodyboarder, as many do in Nazaré, not just because the heavy shore-pound makes learning to standup surf difficult, but because of the prohibitive cost of a surfboard.

The Portuguese economy has begun to rebound in recent years after the ‘08 recession, but it’s never been nearly as prosperous as its Western European neighbors, especially in rural areas like Nazaré. Expensive gear like surfboards and wetsuits puts surfing out of reach for many locals.

“Guys start bodyboarding here because it’s so much cheaper,” Santos told me. “I couldn’t afford a surfboard until I was 20 years old. And I definitely couldn’t afford a wetsuit for the wintertime.”

Santos picked me up in a dusty SUV to check out the beachbreak setups north of town that he frequently surfs. I climbed into the passenger seat amid a stack of 100

self-produced CDs Santos had made of his classical music. He plays a full range of stringed instruments and the piano (he plays the violin only in massive surf — for now, anyway), and we listened to his recordings on the drive to Praia do Norte with Santos weaving quickly through narrow streets.

Over the small, twisting road that leads to Praia do Norte, the town has erected an arch that reads, “WELCOME TO THE BIGGEST WAVES IN THE WORLD.” The fort perched above the surf hosts an impressive display of surfboards left behind by many of the surfers who have challenged Praia do Norte at its most defiantly large.

There’s a small space devoted to the impressive history of the fort itself, built in the 16th century, but it’s relegated to a dimly lit corner, overshadowed by video monitors running loops of surfing footage, models of the Nazaré Canyon and stunning photos of unimaginably large waves. There’s an appreciation of the old here, but the town is clearly aware of what’s fueling its tourist economy these days.

Though the surf report for that morning listed a barely perceptible 1- to 2-foot swell, the shorebreak at Praia do Norte was unlike anything I’ve seen before. The flow of sand down the coast had altered the beach so it extended at a nearly 45-degree angle in relation to the cliffs, forming a long sandbar that almost could have passed for a reverse Skeleton Bay. Except the only waves were grotesque shorebreak monsters surging onto the beach in about 2 inches of water, where you could potentially stand on nearly dry sand and be enveloped by a well-overhead barrel.

“That sandbar is pretty new,” Santos told me when I pointed out the potential for a phenomenal right churning below us. “It actually didn’t look like that at all a couple weeks back. The sand in this whole zone shifts so much.”

The surf zone at Praia do Norte is a complex medley of crossed-up swells and ever-moving sandbars. The bathymetry of the area suggests the handiwork of an omnipotent obsessed with creating the world’s largest A-frame waves. Nazaré Canyon, just offshore, is nearly 125 miles long and more than 16,000 feet deep. It points directly at Praia do Norte like a severe, craggy finger. The end of the canyon forms an abrupt headwall that shoves approaching swells straight up just a few hundred

feet from the shoreline. When standing on the fort above the wave, you can actually see the line of much darker, bluer water that delineates the canyon from the shallower waters around it.

The canyon supercharges long-distance swells churning out of the North Atlantic and also coaxes them to wrap into the canyon and take aim directly at the coast of Nazaré. The canyon’s shallow sections bend and refract swells into ugly, wedging peaks that maintain nearly the same shape at 6 feet as they do at 60. It’s that wedging formation that provides all of Praia do Norte’s drama. When nearly every other beachbreak on Earth would be overwhelmed by 50-foot surf and reduced to shapeless closeouts and seemingly endless fields of whitewater, Praia do Norte focuses all the energy of a given swell into a single point, turning the surf into unearthly big tepees. This is also what causes so much consternation in the surf world about how large these waves truly are.

Greg Long once called the spot a “novelty wave” because it formed a huge peak, but then usually backed off in underwhelming fashion. Surfers and journalists around the world criticized Nazaré for the apparent lack of a crest and trough. The angle at which photos are typically taken of Praia do Norte — from above, near the fort — tends to distort the size of the waves, stretching them out and making the waves appear cartoonishly large — though that doesn’t mean that the waves aren’t colossally big.

The surfers who’ve seen Praia do Norte at its meanest don’t hem and haw. They agree that it’s a freaky, massive wave, as dangerous as any big-wave break on the planet. Andrew Cotton, a U.K.-based charger who’s been surfing there almost as long as McNamara, told me that sure, sometimes it’s just a peak, but it can also be a heaving 50 feet from top to bottom. “You could absolutely get the wave of your life out there, but you never really know what the place is going to do, and that’s part of the draw and the danger,” he says. “At most big waves, when shit goes down you can head to the channel and get out of trouble.” But at chaotic, channel-less Nazaré, with peaks exploding seemingly everywhere, Cotton explains, “when shit goes down, the danger has really just begun.”

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ON the rocky promontory that leads from Sítio to the fort overlooking the surf at Praia do Norte, a 20-foot-tall man with the head of a deer stands guard, holding a surfboard and perpetually staring at the sea. This is a statue commemorating the Legend of Nazaré, a 12th-century tale of a nobleman who was hunting a deer from horseback along the sheer precipice over the beach. Just as he closed in on the deer, a fog obscured the nobleman’s view and he became disoriented. In the seconds before his horse careened off the cliff, the nobleman cried out to the Virgin Mary to save him, and his mount’s hooves sunk fast in the soil, locking both horse and rider in place.

Had the nobleman and his horse continued off the cliff, they would have met their grisly end right where Casimiro and I sat drinking Sagres, the most popular beer in Nazaré, at a small lunchtime restaurant just below Sítio. Casimiro, 39, is a fireplug of a man with an easy, disarming smile. He isn’t technically the mayor of Nazaré, but he may as well be. Nearly everybody who passed by — kids on skateboards, old men smoking cigarettes, delivery drivers leaning out of truck windows — stopped for a friendly chat with Casimiro.

McNamara gets most of the press for “discovering” the wave at Nazaré, but if it weren’t for Casimiro, you’d never have heard of the place.

A lifelong bodyboarder, Casimiro has run the town’s bodyboarding club — which produced talents like Cardoso and Carmo — for years. He’s also put on a series of pro bodyboarding events to showcase the serious surf at Praia do Norte. He showed me footage on his phone of the inaugural event, in 2003, in solid 12- to 15-foot surf.

Many of the competitors looked mortally terrified before they paddled out, but everybody survived, and the event was praised by the bodyboarding community.

Mike Stewart won the event a few years later in similar conditions and was intrigued by the potential for even bigger surf.

According to Casimiro, Kelly Slater started poking around Nazaré in 2010 when the WSL World Tour was in nearby Peniche. “You’d show up to look at the surf, and

you’d see a surfer on the beach running to the water by himself, and you’d realize, ‘Oh, it’s Slater,’” Casimiro said. “He wouldn’t even tell anybody he’d be coming; he’d just show up.”

At the time, Nazaré had the reputation as the place you’d go if Peniche was flat — an exposed beachbreak that got plenty of swell, but was otherwise nothing special. But Casimiro had busily been trying to change that.

In 2005, with the city council’s blessing, Casimiro decided to expand beyond bodyboarding contests to spread the word about Nazaré’s huge surf. He emailed the most famous big-wave riders he could think of, trying to lure them to his obscure fishing village. He first tried Laird Hamilton, but got no response. Thinking that the shared Portuguese language might be an icebreaker, he tried Brazilian big-wave hero Carlos Burle next. Nothing. Soon after, Casimiro saw footage of Garrett McNamara riding massive waves in Tahiti. He tracked down McNamara’s email address and sent him a photo of a giant peak at Praia do Norte, lip heaving forward into a massive barrel. McNamara responded less than 30 minutes later.

“Dino emailed me out of the blue, sent me a photo of this huge wave and asked, ‘Can you come to my town to tell me if this wave is good?’” McNamara says. “I’d been surfing Jaws a lot that year and all I could think was that this looked just like Jaws, but with nobody out.”

McNamara peppered Casimiro with questions: Are there Jet Skis nearby? A harbor to launch them? What’s the wind like? How often does it break like that? Casimiro did his best to assure McNamara that everything was in place. The town was eager for any attention that would draw much-needed tourism dollars, so whatever McNamara required, he would have.

But the emails continued back and forth for the next five years without McNamara making the flight over. “We’d email each other like crazy about swells,” McNamara remembers. “We’d call at all hours … One of us would pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, it’s 4 a.m. here, why are you calling me?’”

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(Opposite) Garrett McNamara, who first showed the world the big-wave potential of Praia do Norte, is a perennial standout at the ominous break. Here, he whips into a monster in 2014, during one of the biggest days ever surfed in Nazaré. Photo by MIRANDA (Clockwise from top right) Nazaré and Garrett McNamara: a match made in tourism and endorsement heaven. Photo by GRAMBEAU Australian charger Mick Corbett, choosing his weapon for Nazaré’s big-game hunt.

Photo by GRAMBEAU The town has had a harbor only since 1986—without it, Jet Skis would be forced to dodge 12-foot shore break to reach the colossal waves breaking outside. Alessandro Marciano and Garrett McNamara, prepping for the day. Photo by FERNANDEZ “The Legend of Nazaré” statue has stared out at plenty of unclaimed mountains of water over the years. Photo by GRAMBEAU

Finally, in the fall of 2010, during yet another marathon of email exchanges and phone calls, McNamara’s wife, Nicole, convinced him to fly out and give the place a shot. “If it wasn’t for Nicole, me and Dino would probably still just be emailing each other,” McNamara says. The two of them packed up and headed for Portugal. He still remembers his first view of the surf from the cliff above.

“I went down to the beach and stared right at the biggest waves I’d ever seen in my entire life. I felt like I’d found the Holy Grail.”

But McNamara didn’t have anybody to surf with. The local bodyboarders are courageous in their approach to Praia do Norte, but even they bowed out once wave heights approached 25 to 30 feet. They weren’t sure if the heaving peaks were even rideable at that size.

Santos remembers the first time he saw McNamara at Nazaré. Santos was surfing a smaller right that breaks around the headland from Praia do Norte, and McNamara came stroking by on a SUP, headed around the corner to try his luck in the massive, unsurfed peaks.

“Garrett was paddling by and he yelled over to me, ‘Hey, let’s go get a couple of the big ones,’” Santos said. “I wanted to, but I hadn’t yet started surfing big waves.

I’d never seen anybody surf over there, either. That side of the beach seemed way too big for me.”

Eventually, McNamara convinced two big-wave hellmen from the U.K. to join him: Cotton and his tow partner, Al Mennie. The two bailed on a promising swell at Ireland’s Mullaghmore Head to try out this new Portuguese behemoth. Cotton was hooked instantly.

“For the first few years we were there, nobody else really surfed when it was big,” Cotton says. “We’d drive the ski up and down the beach all day with nobody else in the water. It was heaven.”

Meanwhile, Nazaré’s city council had teamed up with ZON, a mobile phone company, to produce a video about the big-wave surfers’ attempts to ride the place,

all in an effort to boost tourism. Portuguese surfers José Gregório and Ruben Gonzalez joined the crew that McNamara had assembled, and the group made the first in a series of videos called “The North Canyon Project.”

Still, word didn’t reach the surf world about the massive waves at Praia do Norte until the following November, when video surfaced of McNamara towing into a massive left peak that, at 78 feet, set a new world record for the largest wave ever surfed. Images of the ride seemed to appear everywhere, all at once: social media, surf websites, television spots, newspaper articles and more. It was also probably the last big wave ridden there without scores of cameras trained on the place.

“Even when Garrett got his record wave in 2011, there was nobody on the cliff watching,” Cotton explained. “Nazaré was still empty in the winter.”

The media blitz later that fall didn’t happen by accident. “We focused on getting footage to CNN and the BBC,” McNamara told me. “The point was getting a ton of exposure to help boost tourism in the area.”

For the next few years, every winter at Nazaré produced a “biggest wave ever surfed,” with some touting a 2013 wave that Burle briefly rode before being consumed by a whitewater avalanche as being the first wave to break the mythical 100foot barrier. Six years later, McNamara’s 2011 ride still stands — according to the Guinness Book of World Records, anyway — as the biggest wave ever ridden.

In the span of only two years, Nazaré went from a beloved bodyboarding wave that most Portuguese surfers outside of the area weren’t even aware of to an internationally known destination boasting the world’s largest waves each winter, regularly featured on the nightly news.

“Nazaré has become a global name now whether you surf or not,” Cotton says.

“The town was forward-thinking and invested in its wave’s fame and has made the most of it.”

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(Right) Like Maui’s Jaws, Nazaré is often wind-torn and choppy on the largest swells, adding a complicated and often terrifying extra element for riders to deal with. Here, Francisco Porcella powers through the chaotic conditions during one of this season’s most monumental swells.

Photo by FERNANDEZ

DESPITE all the work he put into bringing McNamara out to Portugal, and the time he’s spent organizing prime-time bodyboarding events there, Casimiro is still genuinely surprised at how quickly Nazaré has become a household name. “We really didn’t expect that the wave would become as famous as it has,” he says. “Especially not in the mainstream media.”

He’s also quick to point out that while McNamara has the respect of the local surf community, if he hadn’t come to Praia do Norte, some other big-wave seeker surely would have. While it seems like a situation ripe for conflict — foreign surf star swoops into town, conquers giant wave, media gives him the glory — the locals I spoke with credit McNamara with opening their eyes to what is possible at Praia do Norte when it’s roaring.

Cardoso, who’s one of Nazaré’s brightest and most respected wave-riders in the bodyboarding-centric community, likes seeing foreign surfers at Praia do Norte. “I want to learn from these guys when they come here,” he says. “I want to draw from their knowledge of big waves.” McNamara has even started towing him into big Praia do Norte on a surfboard. Cardoso showed me photos on his phone of him at the bottom of a 15-foot wave, strapped onto a surfboard, even though he’s just learning to standup surf. “I don’t know how to turn, so I just ride these waves straight,” he laughed.

Originally, Casimiro just wanted surfers from all over Portugal to see how good — and how massive — the waves can be at Nazaré. After McNamara showed up, followed by the rest of the big-wave community, and then the flood of tourists, Casimiro felt vindicated. “We used to have two months of the year when we’d get tourists — just the summer. Now the hotels and restaurants are full five months of the year.”

As he told me this, I wondered how many of those hotel and restaurant patrons were there to surf rather than simply watch the oversized waves. Each winter, the lineups at places like Mavericks and Jaws become increasingly crowded, despite the obvious risks of pursuing such massive, powerful surf. Could Nazaré be close behind?

For many of the locals, it seems that the financial benefits of increased surf tourism outweigh the potential negatives of increasing crowds down the line. And as strange as it sounds coming from surfers, some locals said they believed it would be selfish to want to reduce tourism, which benefits the entire community, just to keep crowds down, which benefits only the very small group of local Nazaré chargers.

Casimiro points out that there are proposals in place that will regulate who can drive a ski at Praia do Norte and who can’t, which he hopes will serve as a cap to the amount of tow teams that show up on a given swell. Casimiro also posits that there simply aren’t enough people willing to surf maxed-out Nazaré for it to become a problem. But the same was surely said about Mavericks and Jaws a few years ago, before they started boasting crowds of over 50 people when the conditions are prime. It’s hard to imagine how Nazaré will be any different. In the meantime, however, Casimiro and the rest of the local community will relish Nazaré’s new place among the world’s most iconic big-wave breaks.

“There are maybe 100 people on Earth who can surf these waves,” Casimiro said, finishing his beer. “But everybody on Earth deserves to see them. They’re a natural wonder of the world.” S 104

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Lombok, Indonesia. Photo by Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;OREY 106

PEAKI N G Standout moments in the lives of waves (and the surfers who ride them)

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Rob Machado, San Diego, California. Photo by GLASER

Brendon Gibbens, Ericeira, Portugal. Photo by ELLIS 109

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Craig Anderson, South Coast, Australia. Photo by FRANK 111

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Mikey Wright, Western Australia. Photo by SHIELD 113

Joel Parkinson, New South Wales, Australia. Photo by GRAMBEAU 114

Tanner Gudauskas, Orange County, California. Photo by GLASER 115

Tyler Wright, Gold Coast, Australia. Photo by SHIELD

Yadin Nicol, Bali, Indonesia. Photo by FRIEDEN 116

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Mason Ho, Lombok, Indonesia. Photo by Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;OREY 119

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Peter Mendia. Photo by SPADARO

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Apex Dimensions: 5'9" x 18 3/4" x 2 5/16" 26L Fins: Thruster The Skinny: A versatile performance shorty that has more rocker through the middle of the board so it can run faster and cleaner through steeper transitions. Sometimes a good ol’ poly board still kicks major butt…especially in textured, good pushing waves. Know what to use and when.

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Mendia-71 Dimensions: 6'1" x 19" x 2 9/16" 31L Fins: ‘Power Broker’ free world map template The Skinny: You’ve seen this legend go berzonkular for eons now… and this is the latest version of a travel board I tuned up for Pete. I love how he surfs it. The original Mendia outline on the rocker of the SR-71. A gritty full throttle board.

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Channel Islands Twin Fin

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805.966.721 info@cisurfboards.com cisurfboards.com Shaper: Britt Merrick Dimensions: 5'9" x 19 3/4" x 2 1/2" (30.7L) Fins: Twin + trailer The Skinny: The Twin Fin has a retro ‘70s feel, with updated performance qualities. Comes with two CI Futures fins, perfectly tuned for the design, and an all-new CI trailer that we handshaped and foiled at the factory just for this board. Ride the Twin Fin 2 to 4 inches shorter than you are tall. #ciTwinFin

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Chemistry Surfboards 4x4 in Flextronic Tech 760.757.1432 sales@chemistrysurfboards.com chemistrysurfboards.com Shaper: Jason Bennett Dimensions: 6'0" x 20 1/8" x 2 5/8" (35L) Fins: 5-fin The Skinny: The 4x4 has slight double bumps and 4 channels, creating drive and maneuverability. A moderate rocker gives this model tons of down the line speed. This 4x4 is in our “Flextronic” tech, which can be applied to any model we make. Flextronic is lighter, stronger, and maintains a better flex due to its poly-vinyl stringer.

3

Sharp Eye Surfboards Disco E2

619.542.1088 sharpeyesurfboards.com Shaper: Marcio Zouvi Dimensions: 5'8" x 19.5" x 2.45" (27.8L) Fins: Thruster / FCS II The Skinny: This is the Disco model with our new E2 tech construction. It has an unparalleled resistance and return to static, due to our strategically placed combination of carbon and quad axis composites.

Spend a Day Catching Waves & Transform a Life.

What a Deal. Join me and a group of my mates on Saturday, September 23 at Mission Beach, San Diego for the 8th Annual 100 Wave Challenge. This event raises enough money for Boys to Men to provide in-school mentoring for over 700 fatherless teenage boys in San Diego County Schools. Sign up today and let’s paddle for this cause: www.100wave.com.

See you in the water!

Shaun Tomson

S O U T H E A S T

C H A M P I O N S

F O U N D E D : 1976 N U M B E R O F L O CAT I O N S: 1 W I N N I N G L O CAT I O N : JACKSONVILLE BEACH, FL NUMBER OF EMPLOYE E S: 18

PHOTO: RUDDY

(L- R) GARRETT CARMICHAEL EMPLOYEE CODY THOMPSON TEAM RIDER E VAN THOMPSON TEAM RIDER T R I S TA N T H O M P S O N EMPLOYEE

SOUTHWEST SUN DIEGO

SOUTHEAST SUNRISE

NORTHEAST APRIL 11

NORTHWEST MAY 25

Sunrise Surf Shop has done it again. After duking it out at Melbourne’s Paradise Park against Florida’s most-beloved surf shops, the Sunrise crew earned its 9th OSSC Southeast title since 2006. The four-man team of Garrett Carmichael and brothers Cody, Evan, and Tristan Thompson earned a ticket to the National Championships this Fall, where the in-form squad will vie for $5,000 and a year’s worth of bragging rights.

WEST JUNE 9

HAWAII J U LY 10/11

M I D - AT L A NTI C AU G U S T 16/17

SURFSHOPCHALLENGE.COM #SURFSHOPCHALLENGE

N AT I O N A L S FA L L 2017

N O R T H E A S T

C H A M P I O N S

FOUNDED: 1986 N U M B E R O F L O CAT I O N S: 4 W I N N I N G L O C AT I O N : O C E A N C I T Y, N J NUMBER OF EMPLOYE E S: 40

PHOTO: RUTKOWSKI

(L- R) KEVIN RICHARDS EMPLOYEE BRIAN LIESS TEAM RIDER R O B K E L LY TEAM RIDER N AT E G A RZ A EMPLOYEE

SOUTHWEST SUN DIEGO

SOUTHEAST SUNRISE

NORTHEAST 7TH STREET

NORTHWEST MAY 25

This April, eight talented surf shop teams gathered on the shores of 16th Avenue in Belmar New Jersey to vie for the 2017 OSSC Northeast Regional title, but only one walked away with the trophy. After taking a hiatus from the 2016 event, the 7th Street Surf Shop team showed up this year with renewed focus and took the crown over Brave New World and previous winners Heritage Surf & Sport (Margate). Kevin Richards, Brian Liess, Rob Kelly, and Nate Garza will be heading to the National Championship this )DOO ZKHUH WKH\·OO EH FRPSHWLQJ DJDLQVW VL[ RWKHU UHJLRQDO Ã&#x20AC; QDOLVWV IRU WKH coveted title of Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Most Core Surf Shop.

WEST JUNE 9

HAWAII J U LY 10/11

M I D - AT L A NTI C AU G U S T 16/17

SURFSHOPCHALLENGE.COM #SURFSHOPCHALLENGE

N AT I O N A L S FA L L 2017

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Photo by LOUISE SEVERSON

sending Severson a clear signal that he had tapped into something unique. Today, “The Surfer” is considered to be the first issue of this magazine, which became The Surfer Quarterly in 1961, then simply SURFER in 1964.

As the ’60s drew to a close, SURFER evolved to embrace counterculture ideals and Severson continued to evolve as a filmmaker, creating “Pacific Vibrations” in 1970, which served as a bold statement to surfers everywhere about the importance of protecting our oceans.

“As the decade went on, it became apparent that the environment was the most important issue, and that if I couldn’t go to all the [local government] meetings, perhaps 20 or 30 young surfers could, or 100 or 1,000,” said Severson. “We wanted surfers to know that their involvement could make a difference. That’s why I made the film.”

By 1971, SURFER had become a thriving busi134

ness with roughly 100,000 readers and plenty of willing advertisers. But Severson’s heart was still at the beach, and the growing responsibilities of being the publisher of SURFER no longer aligned with his desire to find those perfect moments alone with the surf.

“I was evolving into a desk-ridden businessman and wanted to get back to the creative parts of life,” said Severson. “I remember [being] stalled on the freeway, letting out a primal howl. It was time to get back to surfing, art and the land. I moved the family to Maui — gone surfing …”

That’s where Severson stayed, close to the surf with his beautiful wife, Louise, until his passing in May at age 83. And although the surf world has lost one of its greatest icons, Severson will always be remembered as an example of a surfer at their best: passionate, humble and committed to seeking out the next perfect day. S

corrections to Surfer, P.O. Box 421289, Palm Coast, FL 32142-6221.

The quote on the previous spread, from the very first issue of SURFER, is easily the most iconic line in the magazine’s history. It says a lot about what surfing is all about; it also says a lot about what John Severson was all about. Severson was a lot of things: artist, writer, photographer, filmmaker and, of course, the founder of the magazine you are holding in your hands. But more than anything else, Severson was a surfer. As such, he had a deep appreciation for those perfect moments that happen when a person finds themselves alone with their thoughts in the surf, undistracted by the chaos of life on land.

Severson fell hard for surfing in his early teens when his family moved to San Clemente, California, and his passion couldn’t be confined to the lineup. He studied art — earned a master’s degree in art education, in fact — and used his considerable skills as a painter and illustrator to create what is widely considered the first surf art. He regularly photographed his friends surfing and eventually began making surf films after trading his trumpet for a Keystone 16 mm camera.

“Surfing was my passion and naturally it became my subject,” Severson said matter-of-factly in his 2014 book, “John Severson’s SURF.” After being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1956 and stationed at Schofield Barracks on Oahu, Severson suddenly had access to the greatest subject in surf at the time: the thundering reefbreaks and world-class surfers of the North Shore. He shot and released his first film, “Surf,” while still enlisted.

Once Severson was discharged, he fully committed himself to his art and filmmaking, releasing “Surf Safari” in 1959 shortly after his return to California. Severson created beautifully illustrated handbills and photo prints to sell at his premieres, and for his third film, “Surf Fever,” he decided to make something even more ambitious: “The Surfer,” a 36-page promotional booklet filled with enlarged images from “Surf Fever,” a few short articles and some illustrations. “‘The Surfer’ was friendly, authentic and handcrafted,” said Matt Warshaw in his book, “The History of Surfing.” “Anything more sophisticated would have been out of sync with what was happening on the beaches, in the surf shops and at the high school auditoriums where ‘Surf Fever’ was playing.”

That first, humble booklet was a smash hit among young surfers, selling 5,000 copies and

Magazines, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Printed in the USA. Periodicals Postage Paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Subscription rates for 1 year (8 issues): U.S., APO, FPO and U.S. Possessions $24.99, Canadian orders add $8.00. Foreign orders add $16.00 (for surface mail postage).

—

By TODD PRODANOVICH

Payment in advance, U.S. funds only. For a change of address, six weeks notice is required. Send old as well as new address to Surfer, P.O. Box 421289, Palm Coast, FL 32142-6221. POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS. (See DMM 707.4.12.5); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: send address

In Remembrance

Surfer (ISSN # 0039-6036), August 2017, Vol. 58 No. 4. Published eight times a year (February, April, May, June, August, September, October, December) by TEN: The Enthusiast Network, LLC, 261 Madison Ave. 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Copyright © 2017 by TEN: The Enthusiast Network

John Severson

The moments in between

being John John Florence

nixon.com/JJF

Be yourself.