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 am 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 broken scapula, a punctured lung and a small fracture in my neck. I am in shock. My mind wheezes in my skull like a deformed bubble of air; one last, tenuous scrap of consciousness to get me back to the surface. I have 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 on to this gnarled bulb of reef carries onward through the Boneyard, oblivious. Now 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 is 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.
Rumi, the Sufi mystic, is really good at expressing our desire as humans to return to a divine state. He recognized that the suffering we experience on this dirt-strewn earth is usually self-inflicted and always an illusion. His poetry frequently compares our human souls to animals locked in cages of their own making or drunks staggering blindly through life. Yet, according to Rumi, no return is necessary because we have never actually left: “You are not a drop in the ocean,” he says. “You are the entire ocean in a drop.”
Where has this wave energy come from? And what powered that power? What, after all, is the original source of all this energy transmuting and reflecting around us and in us? As Rumi suggests, it’s all one in the same. Who cares what it’s called.
Ghost Tree, March 9, 2005
Tow crews were whipping into 60-foot waves that warbled monstrously around Pescadero Point, blotting out the horizon. Ripped from their moorings, the cove's buoys bobbed into the impact zone like rotund imbeciles. To avoid joining them, I kicked constantly. 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 with the sound of a giant hammer cracking mountains of granite in two. My bones hummed with the concussion. I torpedoed out the back of the wave, the world suddenly impossibly bright and blue and wild around me; the impact still reverberating through my body.
I didn't catch a wave that day, but I caught something else: a sustained note. A treasure 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 ostensibly 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 deepwater 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; a bodysurfing wave. I did not miss a swell during the El Nino winter of 2015-2016, many of which were gargantuan, stormy affairs straight out of the west. It was not 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 in the line up for company. So when I drove north out of Santa Cruz toward Half Moon Bay on the morning of Saturday, Feb. 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. At first, I spent more than an hour swimming in the line-up, studying the waves as they rolled through. After the first clean-up set sent the pack scratching for the horizon and I ducked it without incident, I loosened up. 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 landed slammed me, shoulder first, onto the reef and I felt the upper right side of my body shatter like a cartoon. Eight inches to the right, of course, and that would have been my head.
After the two-wave hold down, I gimp-kicked to the surface and gasped air moments before a wall of white water blew me ass over teakettle into the Boneyard. Eventually I reached the relative safety of the lagoon. For an undetermined amount of time, I limply side stroked across the surface of the gray lagoon like Charon across the Styx. I told myself to keep breathing, keep moving. 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 had become dreamy and apathetic. These guys were a Godsend. 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 is 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 The Surfer’s Journal, 25.5)