What Lies Beneath: Bodysurfing in the Key of Heavy
"What Lies Beneath: Bodysurfing in the Key of Heavy" outlines bodysurfer Ryan Masters' first-person account of riding massive waves during the El Nino season of 2016 and a near-fatal mauling at Mavericks.
by Ryan Masters, April 15, 2016
Mavericks, Feb. 27, 2016
I’m deep beneath the surface, wallowing in the Cauldron, a chunk of dark, pitted reef associated with the wave called Mavericks. I have seven freshly broken ribs, a cracked scapula, a punctured lung and a small fracture in my neck. I’m in shock. I’ve blown it.
After three hours of relatively error-free bodysurfing, I’m here. The exact wrong place. The wave that pile-drove me shoulder-first onto this gnarled bulb of reef carries onward through the Boneyard, oblivious.
A second, identical wave roars out of the dark with the all-consuming gnash and grind of a universe being born. My legs work, but there’s nowhere for them to take me. My mind winks open like an eye. For a moment, just before the savagery resumes, I experience great clarity.
Ghost Tree, March 9, 2005
Sixty-foot waves warbled around Pescadero Point, blotting out the horizon. Tow crews buzzed like flies around these great displacements of water, now and again slinging a surfer into its turquoise maw.
So much water moved across Stillwater Cove. My position at the edge of the channel was tenuous. The buoys had already been ripped from their moorings. They bobbed in the impact zone like rotund imbeciles. I swam hard to avoid joining them.
Every so often, a wave swung wide and I plunged, piercing its impossibly meaty shoulder. While traversing the long, dark lower intestines of this beast, I heard its head detonate up the line. It sounded like a giant hammer cracking mountains of granite in two. As I torpedoed out the back of the wave, the world impossibly bright and blue and wild around me, that profound concussion reverberated in my bones.
I didn't catch a wave that day, but I caught something else: A sustained note. A song in the key of heavy.
Steamer Lane, Dec. 2015 to Feb. 2016
From Lighthouse Point, a keen-eyed spectator might mistake me for a deranged sea lion sliding down the 20-foot face of a wave on Middle Peak's outer reef. Between sets, I'm as visible as a kelp bulb. Some would say as smart.
From my experience, most surfers consider bodysurfing big waves considerably more dangerous than what they're doing. Underwater is generally not a surfer's happy place—especially in Northern California where the water is cold, dark and inhabited by everyone's very worst nightmare.
I fell in love with kelp young. I've been diving and bodysurfing the waters between Big Sur and Sonoma for more than three decades. In my mind, bodysurfing big waves is a radical form of free diving. At a deep-water spot like the Lane, you can navigate any impact zone like a native mammal. If you dive deep enough, the violence is audible overhead, but the turbulence is little more than a convulsion. At certain intervals, I can thread waves like a needle, sewing the back of one beast to the belly of its brother. When the crosshairs align, I turn and go. The idea of shackling myself to a rock-hard chunk of fiberglass and foam in this environment seems crazy.
On the outer reef of Steamer Lane, waves flex at the sky like magnificent green tongues before splitting in two. On a board, the rights can carry you all the way to Cowells if you let them. The lefts produce a far steeper, more hollow and decidedly more critical cannon shot toward the Point. It’s a bodysurfing wave.
I didn’t miss a swell during the El Nino winter of 2015-2016, many of which were gargantuan, stormy affairs straight out of the west. It wasn’t unusual for me to spend seven hours in the water. I dwelled beneath huge, heaving lips. I skittered down endless faces. I lost my way in ginormous barrels. I could slow down my heart rate and lounge at depth. I could swim hard enough to compensate for Middle Peak's notoriously shifty peak. I caught the largest wave of my life in dense fog with nothing but a giant tree stump for company. So when I drove north out of Santa Cruz toward Half Moon Bay on the morning of Saturday, February 27, I felt prepared.
Mavericks, Feb. 27, 2016
I swam out to Mavericks from the north. Fifteen surfers were posted up along the trailing southern edge of the peak. Beyond the pack, two water safety skis and a smattering of boats patrolled the channel. I set up for the lefts and waited. Years earlier, I'd decided the left at Mavericks could be bodysurfed because of its short porch. There was no way to outrun the right without a board, but the left looked squeezable with a strong drop. It had taken me this long to prepare physically, mentally and emotionally for that drop.
I spent more than an hour swimming in the line-up, studying the waves as they rolled through. I loosened up after the first clean-up set sent the pack scratching for the horizon and I ducked it without incident. While you can tell yourself Mavericks is just another wave, a wave that behaves in accordance with traditional wave physics, it is hard to reconcile this fact from the water, even on a small to mid-size day. I air mailed the drop on my first wave and skipped down its face. The subsequent beating nearly tore my thigh out of my hip and left my ears thundering like timpani, but didn't quite push me into the Boneyard, which I considered a small victory.
My second wave was as close to perfect as I had reason to hope for. I tore down the line, lodged cleanly in the slot. Yet even at warp speed, I didn't make the last section and it snuffed me. That was enough, I decided. After nearly three hours and two waves, I was satisfied.
The distance between the peak and the channel at Mavericks is deceiving. I remember thinking it didn't seem far. I remember thinking I could catch one of the smaller rights to the channel instead of taking the long way around. Was I tired? Overconfident? Maybe I liked the idea of someone taking my photo. Regardless of why, I missed the wave I stroked for, turned around and confronted a wave face Grant Washburn would later gauge at 30 feet. As the rest of the pack scratched over it, I took three long, even breaths. I had easily ducked similar waves earlier in the day. Unfortunately, I was now in a very different section of the impact zone. As I dove for the bottom, the wave broke top to bottom, driving me shoulder-first onto the reef. The upper right side of my body shattered, but my head missed the reef by inches..
After the two-wave hold down, I gimp-kicked to the surface and managed to gasp one breath of air before a third wall of white water blew me ass-over-teakettle into the Boneyard. When I reached the gray lagoon, I limply side-stroked across its surface like Charon across the Styx. Keep breathing, keep moving, I told myself. To stop is to sink.
By the time photographer Todd Turner and Matt Cavaco, an EMT on water patrol, spotted me from their PWC, my progress across the lagoon had slowed to a crawl. Unaware of the extent of my injuries, they dragged me to the beach behind their jet ski. I collapsed on the wet sand like a jellyfish and Cavaco kept me stable until help could arrive. Twenty minutes later, a Life Flight helicopter lifted me up over the Santa Cruz Mountains to Stanford.
Stanford Medical Center, March 1, 2016
When Jeff Clark heard what had happened, he called me in the hospital. He's a good enough of a friend to refrain from calling me an idiot while I still had a catheter jammed up my urethra. Instead, he simply agreed that bodysurfing Mavericks is an exercise with marginal returns. At any size, it’s far too ferocious and unforgiving an animal to ride unsuccessfully. I figure an excellent, committed bodysurfer might make one of every five waves at Mavericks. At those odds, he or she will eventually die. So while I'll probably leave Pillar Point alone, I will never be done bodysurfing big, deep waves. There are plenty of them out there; each one a new note in the key of heavy.
(Originally appeared in a slightly different form in The Surfer’s Journal, 25.5)