When The Surf's Way Up

No one monitors Surfline more closely than Bill Sharp, who conceived the Billabong Odyssey 100-ft.-wave project and runs it from his office in Newport Beach, Calif. If conditions look right, Sharp, 43, is ready to fly a team of the four best surfers available at the time along with four support personnel wherever in the world big waves are developing. "Big waves need a big storm with winds preferably over 70 m.p.h., and you want it to last two to three days, ideally blowing toward you," he says. The best waves come from fierce winter storms in the north Pacific that can cover thousands of square miles. Hurricanes in the Atlantic can pack much faster winds, but they cover only a couple of hundred square miles and blow in a circle, generating short, choppy waves, not the long, sustained swells that surfers need.

With surf forecasting in place and the new tow-in technique being steadily refined, the records have started to pile up: in 1998 Ken Bradshaw from Sunset Beach in Hawaii rode the first wave over 60 ft.; in 2002 Brazilian Carlos Burle surfed a 68-ft. swell; and this year Cabrinha reached the 70-ft. threshold. Sharp says storm patterns have been relatively subdued in the past few years, but he thinks that when the next El Nino warming of the Pacific happens, adding 20% to 30% to the power of storms likely to impact prime surfing sites, surfers will have a chance at 100-ft. swells. Two jet skiers claim they saw 100-ft. waves breaking several miles outside San Francisco's Maverick's reef in 2002, and Hamilton says he has seen 100-ft. waves on the outer reefs between Hawaii's Oahu and Kauai islands. "Using these machines and the little boards, we're going into outer space," says Clark, pioneer of the big swells of Maverick's reef. "We don't know where it's going. It is the new frontier."

Not everyone is happy with this ever expanding frontier. Critics say the jet skis, which can dump up to one-third of their unburned fuel into the water, are major polluters. Environmentalists in California are engaged in a battle to have jet skis banned from Monterey Bay, which would include the big reef break at Maverick's. The surfers, meanwhile, are seeking an exemption for their favorite reef.

Others question whether the pressure of sponsorship and competitions is pushing some big-wave surfers dangerously beyond their abilities. Hamilton, who surfed Jaws reef the same day Cabrinha set the record, thinks he might have ridden some even higher waves. But he declines to enter the big-wave competitions because he thinks they are bad for the sport. "I resent the whole concept of a bounty to try to ride an 80-ft. or a 100-ft. wave. You are provoking people that maybe shouldn't be out there."

Maybe no one should be out there in surf that is as high as an eight-story building and breaks every 20 seconds with the force of a Union Pacific train. But, as Hamilton would be the first to say, big-wave surfing is not about playing it safe. It's about the thrill of taming that killer wave.