{"product_id":"the-wave-isbn-9780767928854","title":"The Wave","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eNEW YORK TIMES \u003c\/i\u003eBESTSELLER • In this \"wonderfully vivid, kinetic narrative\" (\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e), the bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eVoices in the Ocean\u003c\/i\u003e captures colossal, ship-swallowing waves, and the surfers and scientists who seek them out. \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003eFor legendary surfer Laird Hamilton, hundred foot waves represent the ultimate challenge. As Susan Casey travels the globe, hunting these monsters of the ocean with Hamilton’s crew, she witnesses first-hand the life or death stakes, the glory, and the mystery of impossibly mammoth waves. Yet for the scientists who study them, these waves represent something truly scary brewing in the planet’s waters. With inexorable verve, \u003ci\u003eThe Wave \u003c\/i\u003ebrilliantly portrays human beings confronting nature at its most ferocious.\u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003eNotable Book\u003cbr\u003eA \u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle \u003c\/i\u003eBest Book of the Year\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Examines big waves from every angle, and goes in deep with ... mariners, wave scientists and extreme surfers.... [A] wonderfully vivid, kinetic narrative.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Immensely powerful, beautiful, addictive and, yes, incredibly thrilling.... Like a surfer who is happily hooked, the reader simply won’t be able to get enough of it.” —\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[An] adrenaline rush of a book.... As terrifying as it is awe inspiring.”\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePeople\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Casey’s descriptions of these monsters are as gripping in their own way as any mountaineering saga from the frozen peaks of Everest or K2.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Susan Casey's white-knuckle chronicle ... delivers a thrill so intense you may never get in a boat again.” —\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Reading \u003ci\u003eThe Wave \u003c\/i\u003eis almost like riding one, paddling in the expositional surf of vivid imagery and colorful description thrown at you in ever-escalating surges.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Plain Dealer \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Casey does an exceptional job of explaining the natural forces (winds, currents, ocean-bottom shape) that create these daunting, at times fatal, surfing spots.... Terrific.” —\u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Extraordinary.... I’m only allowed 800 words for this review. Here are a few: fascinating, heroic, dazzling, terrifying, amazing, unbelievable, mesmerizing, instructive, enlightening, superb. This is a ... powerful, articulate ride into a world you never knew existed but that you will never, never forget.” —Richard Ellis, \u003ci\u003eThe Globe and Mail \u003c\/i\u003e(Toronto)\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Utterly engrossing.” —\u003ci\u003eSalon \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Something is stewing in our seas, and Susan Casey—traveling, and in some cases \u003ci\u003eswimming,\u003c\/i\u003e all around the world—is eager to find out what it is. Both a rollicking look at the ocean’s growing freakishness and a troubling examination of our ailing planet, \u003ci\u003eThe Wave\u003c\/i\u003e gives new meaning to the term ‘immersion reporting.’” —Hampton Sides, author of \u003ci\u003eHellhound on His Trail \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[Casey] is a powerful voice in adventure writing.... Masterful.” —\u003ci\u003eOutside\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Like the surfers and scientists she profiles, Casey lived and breathed giant waves for years. Casey combines an insane passion for craft with an uncanny ability to describe the indescribable. In \u003ci\u003eThe Wave\u003c\/i\u003e she whisks the reader off to unimaginably surreal settings and puts them in the middle of mind-blowing scenarios. This book sucked me in like the undertow at Pipeline.”  —Mary Roach, author of \u003ci\u003eStiff\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003ePacking for Mars\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] breath-snatching thrill ride.” —\u003ci\u003eElle\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Compelling and wonderfully detailed.... An engrossing set of stories about the quest for bigger, stronger, more dangerous.” —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A fabulous page-turner.” —NPR\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This book is adrenalin. You don’t want to surf the waves described herein. Read the book. It’s safer that way.” —Eddie Vedder\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Reading \u003ci\u003eThe Wave\u003c\/i\u003e is the closest most of us will ever come to the sensation of riding, or even seeing, one of these towering monsters of the sea. It’s exhilarating, astonishing, and, not infrequently, terrifying. Brace yourself.” —Candice Millard, author of \u003ci\u003eThe River of Doubt \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A probing look at both the passionate and the pragmatic sides of these oceanic wonders.... Casey’s curiosity in learning about every conceivable aspect of waves makes for compelling reading, regardless of whether you look at waves as a great ride or with great concern.” —\u003ci\u003eBookPage \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“At once scary and fun, \u003ci\u003eThe Wave\u003c\/i\u003e surprises at every turn.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of \u003ci\u003eField Notes from a Catastrophe\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[A] captivating hybrid—an intro to the mind-melting physics of waves and a ride-along with the scientists and surfers who chase after them.” —\u003ci\u003eMen’s Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Wave \u003c\/i\u003eis an amazing look at humble yet larger-than-life people who live by daring feats, honorable acts, and selfless denial.... Terrifying, beautiful, her prose is shot through with the haunting half-light of a storm.” —Doug Stanton, author of \u003ci\u003eHorse Soldiers\u003c\/i\u003eSUSAN CASEY, author of \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestseller \u003ci\u003eThe Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks\u003c\/i\u003e, is editor in chief of \u003ci\u003eO, The Oprah Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e. She is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist whose work has been featured in the \u003ci\u003eBest American Science and Nature Writing\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBest American Sports Writing\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eBest American Magazine Writing\u003c\/i\u003e anthologies; and has appeared in \u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eSports Illustrated\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eFortune\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eOutside\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eNational Geographic. \u003c\/i\u003eCasey lives in New York City and Maui.\u003cb\u003e57.5° N, 12.7° W\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e175 MILES OFF THE COAST OF SCOTLAND\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFEBRUARY 8, 2000\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThe  clock read midnight when the hundred-foot wave hit the ship, rising from the North Atlantic out of the darkness. Among the ocean’s terrors a wave this size was the most feared and the least understood, more myth than reality—or so people had thought. This giant was certainly real. As the RRS \u003ci\u003eDiscovery \u003c\/i\u003eplunged down into the wave ’s deep trough, it heeled twenty-eight degrees to port, rolled thirty degrees back to starboard, then recovered to face the incom- ing seas. What chance did they have, the forty-seven scientists and crew aboard this research cruise gone horribly wrong? A series of storms had trapped them in the black void east of Rockall, a volcanic island nick- named Waveland for the nastiness of its surrounding waters. More than a thousand wrecked ships lay on the seafloor below.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eCaptain Keith Avery steered his vessel directly into the onslaught, just as he ’d been doing for the past five days. While weather like this was common in the cranky North Atlantic, these giant waves were unlike anything he ’d encountered in his thirty years of experience. And worse, they kept rearing up from different directions. Flanking all sides of the\u003cbr\u003e295-foot ship, the crew kept a constant watch to make sure they weren’t about to be sucker punched by a wave that was sneaking up from behind, or from the sides. No one wanted to be out here right now, but Avery\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eknew their only hope was to remain where they were, with their bow pointed into the waves. Turning around was too risky; if one of these waves caught \u003ci\u003eDiscovery \u003c\/i\u003ebroadside,  there would be long odds on survival. It takes thirty tons per square meter of force to dent a ship. A breaking hundred-foot wave packs one hundred tons of force per square meter and can tear a ship in half. Above all, Avery had to position \u003ci\u003eDiscovery \u003c\/i\u003eso that it rode over these crests and wasn’t crushed beneath them.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eHe stood barefoot at the helm, the only way he could maintain trac- tion after a refrigerator toppled over, splashing out a slick of milk, juice, and broken glass (no time to clean it up—the waves just kept coming). Up on the bridge everything was amplified, all the night noises and motions, the slamming and the crashing, the elevator-shaft plunges into the troughs, the frantic wind, the swaying and groaning of the ship; and now, as the waves suddenly grew even bigger and meaner and steeper, Avery heard a loud bang coming  from \u003ci\u003eDiscovery\u003c\/i\u003e’s foredeck.  He squinted in the dark to see that the fifty-man lifeboat had partially ripped from its two-inch-thick steel cleats and was pounding against the hull.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eBelow deck, computers and furniture had been smashed into pieces. The scientists huddled in their cabins nursing bruises, black eyes, and broken ribs. Attempts at rest were pointless. They heard the noises too; they rode the free falls and the sickening barrel rolls; and they worried about the fact that a six-foot-long window next to their lab had already shattered from the twisting.  \u003ci\u003eDiscovery \u003c\/i\u003ewas almost forty years old, and recently she ’d undergone major surgery. The ship had been cut in half, lengthened by thirty-three feet, and then welded back together. Would the joints hold? No one really knew. No one had ever been in conditions like these.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eOne of the two chief scientists, Penny Holliday, watched as a chair skidded out from under her desk, swung into the air, and crashed onto her bunk. Holliday, fine boned, porcelain-doll pretty, and as tough as any man on board the ship, had sent an e-mail to her boyfriend, Craig Harris, earlier in the day. \u003ci\u003e“This isn’t funny anymore,” \u003c\/i\u003eshe wrote.  \u003ci\u003e“The ocean just looks completely out of control.” \u003c\/i\u003eSo much white spray was whipping off the waves that she had the strange impression of being in a blizzard. This was Waveland all right, an otherworldly place of constant motion that took you nowhere but up and down; where there was no sleep, no comfort, no connection to land, and where human eyes and stomachs struggled to adapt, and failed.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eTen days ago \u003ci\u003eDiscovery \u003c\/i\u003ehad left port in Southampton, England, on what Holliday had hoped would be a typical three-week trip to Iceland and back (punctuated by a little seasickness perhaps, but nothing major). Along the way they’d stop and sample the water for salinity, temperature, oxygen, and other nutrients. From these tests the scientists would draw a picture of what was happening out there, how the ocean’s basic character- istics were shifting, and why.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThese are not small questions on a planet that is 71 percent covered in salt water. As the Earth’s climate changes—as the inner atmosphere becomes warmer, as the winds increase, as the oceans heat up—what does all this mean for us? Trouble, most likely, and Holliday and her colleagues were in the business of finding out how much and what kind. It was deeply frustrating for them to be lashed to their bunks rather than out on the deck lowering their instruments. No one was thinking about Iceland anymore.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThe trip was far from a loss, however. During the endless trains of massive waves, \u003ci\u003eDiscovery \u003c\/i\u003eitself was collecting data that would lead to a chilling revelation. The ship was ringed with instruments; everything that happened out there was being precisely measured, the sea’s fury captured in tight graphs and unassailable numbers. Months later, long after Avery had returned everyone safely to the Southampton docks, when Holliday began to analyze these figures, she would discover that the waves they had experienced were the largest ever scientifically recorded in the open ocean. The significant wave height, an average of the largest 33 percent of the waves, was sixty-one feet, with frequent spikes far beyond that. At the same time, none of the state-of-the-art weather forecasts and wave models—the information upon which all ships, oil rigs, fisheries, and passenger boats rely—had predicted these behemoths. In other words, under this particular set of weather conditions, waves this size should not have existed. And yet they did.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eHistory is full of eyewitness accounts of giant waves, monsters in the hundred-foot range and beyond, but until very recently scientists dis- missed them. The problem was this: according to the basic physics of ocean waves, the conditions that would produce a hundred-footer were so far beyond rare as to virtually never happen. Anyone who claimed to have seen one, therefore, was engaging in nautical tall tales or outright lies.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eStill, it was hard to discount a report from the polar hero Ernest Shackleton, hardly the type for hysterical exaggeration. On his crossing from Antarctica to South Georgia Island in April 1916, Shackleton noticed odd movements in the night sky. “A moment later, I realized that what I had seen was not a rift in the clouds, but the white crest of an enor- mous wave,” he wrote. “During 26 years experience of the ocean in all its moods I had not encountered a wave so gigantic. It was a mighty upheaval of the ocean, a thing quite apart from the big white-capped seas that had been our tireless enemies for many days.” When the wave hit his ship, Shackleton and his crew were “flung forward like a cork,” and the boat flooded. Fast bailing and major luck were all that saved them from capsizing. “Earnestly  we hoped that never again would we encounter such a wave.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThe men on the 850-foot cargo ship \u003ci\u003eMünchen \u003c\/i\u003ewould have seconded that, if any of them had survived their rendezvous with a similar wave on December 12, 1978. Considered unsinkable, the \u003ci\u003eMünchen \u003c\/i\u003ewas a cutting- edge craft, the flagship of the German  Merchant Navy. At 3:25 a.m. frag- ments of a Morse code Mayday, emanating from 450 miles north of the Azores, signaled that the vessel had suffered grave damage from a wave. But even after 110 ships and 13 aircraft were deployed—the  most com- prehensive search in the history of shipping—the ship and its twenty- seven crew were never seen again. A haunting clue was left behind: searchers found one of the \u003ci\u003eMünchen\u003c\/i\u003e’s lifeboats, usually stowed sixty-five feet above the water, floating empty. Its twisted metal fittings indicated that it had been torn away. “Something extraordinary” had destroyed the ship, concluded the official report.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThe \u003ci\u003eMünchen\u003c\/i\u003e’s disappearance   points to the main problem with proving the existence of a giant wave: if you run into that kind of night- mare, it ’s likely to be the last one you’ll have. The force of waves is hard to overstate. An eighteen-inch wave can topple a wall built to withstand 125-mile-per-hour winds, for instance, and coastal advisories are issued for even five-foot-tall surf, which regularly kills people caught in the wrong places. The number of people who have witnessed a hundred-foot wave at close range and made it back home to describe the experience is a very small one.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eEven if a ship does manage to survive a hundred-foot wall of water, there are no underwhelmed survivors. Big fish tales are human nature. Add to that a dose of mortal terror, honest confusion, a fear of being blamed for damage to the ship—if, say, the wave didn’t quite measure up to the “something extraordinary” test but managed to poleax the vessel anyway because the captain was below deck playing darts and drinking vodka at the time—and what you’ve got is less than the scientifically immaculate truth.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eBut there was a rare occasion in 1933, when a sharp-eyed naval offi- cer aboard the 478-foot oil carrier USS \u003ci\u003eRamapo \u003c\/i\u003ehappened to be up on the bridge as an astonishing wave lurched out of the Pacific and his response, rather than screaming and covering his eyes, was to make a trigonometric calculation using the ship’s dimensions relative to the wave ’s crest and trough. The result was a height estimate that, if not on par with the exac- titude of the \u003ci\u003eDiscovery\u003c\/i\u003e’s sensors, was at least defensible. And the officer’s measurement? The wave was 112 feet high.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eIf a 112-foot wave isn’t freakish enough, consider that this one had leaped out of 45-foot seas. Thus it was more than twice the average size of anything else in the \u003ci\u003eRamapo\u003c\/i\u003e’s path, which matches the scientific defi- nition for a freak (or rogue) wave. For centuries mariners had spoken of the “hole in the ocean,” a cavernous trough at the base of an abnormally large wave, and the “three sisters,” a series of freaks in rapid succession. To scientists this kind of folklore was a hard sell. The numbers didn’t add up. Maybe, just maybe, a once-in-an-aeon wave triple the size of its sur- rounding seas might exist—but there was no way traditional oceanogra- phy could accept this as a typical occurrence. As for the notion of mutant walls of water showing up in sets, that was not even worth discussing. Then something happened that no one could ignore.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eOn January  1, 1995, the North  Sea was feisty due to a pair of storms, a brutish one crawling northward and a smaller one moving southward to meet it. Statoil’s Draupner oil-drilling platform sat somewhere between them, about one hundred miles off the tip of Norway. For the crew who lived on the rig it was a New Year’s Day of thirty-eight-foot seas rolling by, as measured by the laser wave recorder on the platform’s underside. Unpleasant, perhaps, but not especially dramatic—until three o’clock in the afternoon, when an eighty-five-foot wave came careening over the horizon and walloped the rig at forty-five miles per hour. While the Draupner sustained only moderate damage, the proof was there. This wasn’t a case of laser malfunction or too many aquavit toasts the night before. It was the first confirmed measurement of a freak wave, more than twice as tall and steep as its neighbors, a teetering maniac ripping across the North Sea.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThey were out there all right. You could call them whatever you wanted—rogues, freaks, giants—but the bottom line was that no one had accounted for them. The engineers who’d built the Draupner rig had cal- culated that once every ten thousand years the North Sea might throw them a sixty-four-foot curveball in thirty-eight-foot  seas. That would be the maximum. Eighty-five-foot waves were not part of the equation, not in this universe anyway. But the rules had changed. Now scientists had a set of numbers that pointed to an unsettling truth: some of these waves make their own rules. Suddenly the emphasis shifted from explaining why giant waves couldn’t simply leap out of the ocean to figuring out how it was that they did.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThis was a matter of much brow sweat for the oil industry, which would prefer that its multimillion-dollar rigs not be swept away. It had happened before. In 1982 the Ocean Ranger, a 400-foot-long, 337-foot- high oil platform located 170 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, was struck by an outsize wave in heavy weather. We ’ll never know how big the wave was exactly, for there were no survivors. Approved for “unre- stricted ocean operations,” built to withstand 110-foot seas and 115-mile- per-hour winds, considered “indestructible” by its engineers, the Ocean Ranger had capsized and sank close to instantly, killing all eighty-four people on board.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eIn the nautical world things were even more troubling. Across the global seas ships were meeting these waves, from megaton vessels like the \u003ci\u003eMünchen\u003c\/i\u003e—oceangoing freighters and tankers and bulk carriers—down to recreational sailboats. At best, the encounters resulted in damage; at worst, the boat vanished, taking all hands with it. “Two large ships sink every week on average [worldwide], but the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to ‘bad weather,’ ” said Dr. Wolfgang Rosenthal, senior scientist for the MaxWave Project, a con- sortium of European scientists that convened in 2000 to investigate the disappearing ships.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eWhile Rosenthal’s numbers may be high, his point is well taken. Given the lack of survivors or evidence, exact statistics of ships scuttled by giant waves are impossible to come by; but it is clear that every year, on average, more than two dozen large ships sink or otherwise go miss- ing, taking their crews along with them. (If you also consider smaller ves- sels, the numbers are vastly higher.) In particular, a type of ship known as a bulk carrier is vulnerable:  on one infamous occasion in March 1973, two\u003cbr\u003ebulk carriers were lost within an hour of each other in the same area of the North Atlantic.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eWhen I first read about the missing ships, I was astonished. In the high-tech marine world of radar, EPIRB, GPS, and satellite surveillance, how could hundreds of enormous vessels just get swallowed up by the sea? And furthermore, how could this be happening without much media notice? Imagine the headlines if even a single 747 slipped off the map with all its passengers and was never heard from again.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eClearly, there \u003ci\u003ewas \u003c\/i\u003esomething extraordinary  going on out there. After the Draupner incident, it became undeniable: no one really had a clue as to how waves behaved in their most extreme forms. Yet lives depended on this information. As the scientists scrambled and the oil companies mobilized and the naval architects double-checked their calcu- lations and ship captains worried the horizon, I imagine they thought to themselves: \u003ci\u003eSo the old stories were true after all.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThe first time I saw a truly big wave was in December 1989. I hap- pened to be in Hawaii and my trip coincided with the Triple Crown of Surfing, a series of three competitions held on Oahu’s north shore. In order to have the events, though, first you must have the waves. Some- times the surfers had to wait weeks or even months for the right condi- tions to materialize, and so it was lucky and unusual that a good-size swell arrived during my visit. On the day the big-wave contest was called at Sunset Beach, I drove my rental car across the island and landed on that stretch of sand, along with about a thousand other people.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThe spectator scene was a riot of color, of neon pink bikinis and canary yellow surfboards and lime green banners and all the glimmering blues of the Pacific Ocean. It was a convention of gear-laden trucks, a bazaar of beach hair, from sun-bleached white to drip-dry dreadlocks. The nearest closed-toe shoe was at least twenty miles away. The sky was cloudless but a veil of mist hung in the air from the force of the waves slamming down. At first I found that startling because the Sunset wave itself—the face the surfers would be riding—broke  more than a half mile offshore. But then a set rolled in, a pulse of energy that caused several waves to jump up in size. I watched through binoculars as the waves began to build, ominous lumps in the ocean. The water rose and rose until a tiny rider appeared at the top and dropped onto the face as it exploded into a thirty-foot moving cliff. Whenever a wave broke, the beach shook with a little hum of violence.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eStanding on shore, I was scared. I’d witnessed avalanches, explo- sions, tornadoes, wildfires, and monsoons, and I’d never seen anything as intimidating as those waves. For all the gentle images evoked by the name Sunset Beach, in reality this was a different beast. One surf expert described this break as “the entire Pacific Ocean rearing up to unload on your head.” On big days at Sunset, people were often swept away by fero- cious currents and surges. Watching, I could easily imagine this. What I couldn’t imagine was why anyone would willingly insert himself into these elements.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eIt felt strange to be terrified of the water. After decades of competi- tive swimming I’m usually more at home in aquatic environments than I am on land. Over the years I’d done assorted damage to myself on solid ground—bruises, bumps, tears, a knee pieced together by titanium screws—but nothing bad had ever happened to me in the water. Then again, I’d never experienced the water in this particular mood. As I watched the surfers launch themselves into the churning ocean and pad- dle toward the break, I worried for each of them. Their sport seemed more gladiatorial than athletic, like showing up for work each day to grapple with bull elephants.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eWhich is why, a few years later, I was stunned to see a photograph of a man riding a wave more than twice the size of Sunset, somewhere in the sixty-foot range. The surfer was Laird Hamilton, a six-foot-three,\u003cbr\u003e215-pound twenty-eight-year-old from Hawaii who looked completely at ease inside a barrel as tall as an office building. His blond hair whipped\u003cbr\u003eback in the spray; his muscular arms were spread wide for balance as he plummeted down the wave on a tiny board. He had classically handsome features, chiseled and intense, but no fear showed on his face, only rapt focus. Looking at the picture, I didn’t understand how any of this was possible.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eSince surfing became popular in the mid-twentieth century, faces in the forty-foot range have represented the outer limits of human paddling abilities. Anything bigger is simply moving too fast; trying to catch a sixty-foot wave by windmilling away on your stomach is like trying to catch the subway by crawling. Never mind, though, because even if you could catch it, there would be no way to ride it. Too much water rushes back up the face of a giant wave as it crests, sucking you, the hapless human (not enough momentum), and your board (too much friction) over the falls. So while the most popular surf spots quickly became so overrun that fistfights erupted in the water, all over the world the most impressive waves were going to waste. To Hamilton and his friends, this was unacceptable. The rules had to change, and a new system invented. So they came up with a technique called tow surfing.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eBorrowing ideas from windsurfing and snowboarding, they created shorter, heavier surfboards with foot straps, and thinner, stronger fins that sliced through the water like knives. Then they added Jet Skis and water-ski ropes to the mix, using them to tow one another into perfect position at thirty miles per hour. In the optimal spot, just as the wave began to peak, the rider would drop the tow rope and rocket onto the face. The driver, meanwhile, would exit off the back. Using this method, with its increased horsepower and redesigned gear, a surfer could theoretically catch the biggest waves out there. Riding them—and surviving if you fell—was another story.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eHamilton was the test pilot, followed immediately by other surfers and windsurfers in his circle: Darrick Doerner, Brett Lickle, Dave Kalama, Buzzy Kerbox, Rush Randle, Mark Angulo, and Mike Waltze. Nicknamed the Strapped Crew, they experimented on the outer reefs of Oahu and Maui, far beyond the crowds. “No one was there,” Hamilton said. “No one had ridden waves this size. It was the unknown. It was like outer space or the deep sea. We didn’t know if we were going to come back.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eAnything involving giant waves qualifies as a risky pursuit, but tow surfing seemed to invite disaster. The sport ’s learning  curve was a series of hard lessons, and the price of falling was high. It included dislocated shoulders, shattered elbows, and burst eardrums; broken femurs, snapped ankles, and cracked necks; lacerated scalps, punctured lungs, and frac- tured arches; hold-downs that Brett Lickle described as “sprinting four hundred yards holding your breath while being beaten on by five Mike Tysons.” As for stitches, Hamilton “stopped counting at 1,000.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eRegardless of its dangers (or maybe because of them), tow surfing’s popularity and visibility grew throughout the 1990s, the surfers venturing onto more treacherous waves every year. They tinkered with equipment. They refined their techniques. Working in teams of two—a driver and a rider—they figured out how to rescue each other in behemoth surf. As the stakes got higher and the margin for error got slimmer, a kind of nat- ural selection occurred. Riders who’d glimpsed their own mortality a lit- tle too closely drifted to the sidelines. At the other end of that spectrum was Hamilton. Watching him, you got the feeling that no wave was out of reach. The more intimidating the conditions, the more he seemed to thrive in them.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThen in July 2001 a surf impresario named Bill Sharp issued a chal- lenge. “For 2700 years,” his press release read, “the Homerian  [\u003ci\u003esic\u003c\/i\u003e] epic known as the \u003ci\u003eOdyssey  \u003c\/i\u003ehas been associated with beautiful-but-deadly temptresses, forgetful lotus-eaters, and scary, one-eyed monsters. But now thanks to surf wear giant Billabong, it ’s associated  with an even scarier monster: the elusive 100-foot wave.” The company, the press release continued, would offer a prize of $500,000 to any man who rode one. This payday was exponentially larger than anything surfing had\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eseen; millions more would come from sponsors in the wake of the tri- umph. A select group of tow teams would be invited to participate, a crew Sharp referred to as “the Delta Force of surfing.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eIt was a sexy frontier, defined by a nice round number. Marketing that number was Sharp’s intention; he noted that he ’d sold the hundred- foot-wave Odyssey contest, originally named Project Sea Monster, to Billabong in less than fifteen minutes. Prone to flourishes of hype, Sharp delivered vivid sound bites: “The Odyssey is Jacques Cousteau meets Evel Knievel  meets \u003ci\u003eCrocodile Hunter \u003c\/i\u003emeets \u003ci\u003eJackass\u003c\/i\u003e,” he said. And almost overnight the idea of the hundred-foot wave became the media grail, tow surfing’s equivalent of a moon landing.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThere were a couple of snags. First, was it physically possible? No one knew how riding a hundred-foot wave might differ from, say, riding a seventy-five-foot wave. As they grow in size, waves increase dramati- cally in speed and energy. At what point would the forces overwhelm the equipment, or the surfers? “The 100-foot wave would probably kill any- one who fell off it,” \u003ci\u003eTime \u003c\/i\u003emagazine wrote. Honolulu’s then–ocean safety chief, Captain Edmund Pestana, agreed: “It ’s a deadly scenario for every- one involved.” The trade journal \u003ci\u003eTransWorld SURF Business \u003c\/i\u003ewas blunt: “You’re asking these surfers to take huge risks for our titillation.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eNext, even if a surfer wanted to take his chances, finding the wave was a problem. Although they were no longer considered imaginary, hundred-foot  waves were not exactly kicking around within Jet Ski range. Further complicating things, for tow surfing’s purposes not just any hundred-foot wave would do. The enormous seas the \u003ci\u003eDiscovery \u003c\/i\u003eencoun- tered; the huge freaks that pop up to batter oil rigs—these are unsuitable, despite their great height. Waves that exist in the center of a storm are avalanches of water, waves mashed on top of other waves, all of them rushing forward in a chaotic jumble.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eSurfers need giant waves with a more exclusive pedigree. In their ideal scenario, a hundred-foot wave would be born in a blast of storm energy, travel across the ocean for a long distance while being strengthened by winds, then peel off from","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305264140517,"sku":"NP9780767928854","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780767928854.jpg?v=1767742147","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-wave-isbn-9780767928854","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}