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. After three hours of relatively error-free bodysurfing, I’m here—the worst place imaginable.

I have seven freshly broken ribs, a cracked scapula, a punctured lung, and a small fracture in my neck. I’ve blown it and I’m in shock.

The wave that pile-drove me shoulder-first onto this gnarled bulb of reef carries onward through the Boneyard, oblivious.

A second, identical wave approaches. It roars as if birthing a new universe from the darkness.

My legs work, but there’s nowhere for them to take me. My mind winks open like an eye. For one calm moment, just before the savagery resumes, I experience clarity.

Ghost Tree, March 9, 2005

A giant wave warbles off Pescadero Point. Tow crews buzz around it like flies. As this great displacement of water hits the reef, it jacks up, blotting out the horizon.

A jet skis slings a surfer into it and escapes out the back, the machine teetering over the wave’s 50-foot face like a toy. Below, the tiny human speeds across the wave, making a desperate bid for the safety of the channel. Behind him, an entire kelp forest is suspended in the blue-green wall.

I swam out to the channel from Stillwater Cove a few hours earlier to experience Ghost Tree from ground zero. This was an absurd idea.

The swell has continued to build throughout the morning. So much water flows off the point. It ebbs and flows like a giant river. My position at the edge of the channel is tenuous.

An hour ago, the buoy I was using as a base was ripped from its mooring and dragged away. Now it bobs in the impact zone like a rotund imbecile. I swim hard, constantly kicking, to avoid joining it.

The next set arrives and a wave swings wide. Now I’m at the edge of the impact zone. I must plunge into the beast’s meaty shoulder.

I traverse its long, dark lower intestines, hear its head detonate up the line—a sound like Thor’s hammer cracking mountains of granite in two. The concussion reverberates in my bones. I torpedo out the back of the wave, the world impossibly bright and blue and wild around me.

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.

As a bodysurfer, I am free. The idea of shackling myself to a rock-hard chunk of fiberglass and foam in this environment seems crazy.

At Steamer Lane’s Middle Peak, waves flex at the sky like magnificent green tongues before splitting in two. The rights can carry you hundreds of yards—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, 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.

I spent the first hour or so swimming in the line-up, studying the waves as they rolled through. It was tense out there. Some of the best surfers in the world were giving me the side eye, suspicious of my motivations. But I loosened up after the first clean-up set. As the pack scratched for the horizon, I ducked all three waves without much of a problem. Yet it was clear this wasn’t Middle Peak or even Ocean Beach. This was a whole different animal. Something far more ferocious.

You can tell yourself Mavericks is just another wave, a wave that behaves in accordance with traditional wave physics, but it’s hard to reconcile this fact from the water, even on a small to mid-size day.

After ducking the clean-up set, I was in perfect position for the next series of waves. I let the first two go. On the third, I turned, kicked and went…late.

I air-mailed the drop 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. Lodged cleanly in the slot, I slid down the line, stretched out as far as I could reach. The wave barreled behind me. I could sense that the shoulder was tantalizingly close, but unreachable. 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. I’d bodysurfed Mavericks.

I decided I didn’t want to try to swim back in to the north. Instead, I opted to swim over to the flotilla of jet skis and boats in the channel and maybe hitch a ride in.

As I traversed the pack, I remember thinking I could catch one of the smaller rights to the channel. Was I tired? Overconfident? Maybe I liked the idea of someone taking my photo.

Regardless of why, a set appeared. I went for the first wave and missed it. When I turned around, I confronted a wave-face Grant Washburn would later gauge at 30 feet.

As the rest of the pack disappeared over it, I took three long, even breaths. I had ducked similar waves earlier in the day. Unfortunately, I was now in a very different section of the impact zone.

I dove for the bottom. When I was roughly 20 feet deep, the wave broke top to bottom, driving me another 20 feet down. My right shoulder hit the reef. Hard. The upper right side of my body shattered. My skull had missed the reef by a matter of inches.

After a two-wave hold down, I gimp-kicked to the surface and managed 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 performed a limp side-stroke 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 jet ski, 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.

Ultimately, it’s far too savage and unforgiving an animal to ride—at any size—without some kind of flotation device. A talented, committed bodysurfer might make one of every five waves at Mavericks. At those odds, he or she will eventually die.

Yes, I'll leave Pillar Point alone, but I’ll never be done bodysurfing big, deep waves. There are plenty of them out there; each one a new note in the key of heavy.

(A version of this story originally appeared in The Surfer’s Journal, 25.5)