Inside Out

The Chase is On for The Hundred-Foot Wave

The Billabong Odyssey has the world's top surfers gunning for the really big one

By Michael Bamberger

"Someday, somebody will ride a 100-footer," says Parsons. "If I did it, I'd be back the next day, looking for something bigger."  Aaron Chang/AP Photo/Swell

They have never seen it. Still, the surfers are in search of it: a monster wave that dwarfs anything ever ridden, a wave that measures 100 feet high, a massive apartment building of a wave, so black and terrifying and unknowable that guys puke at the idea of it. It occupies their dreams, their nightmares, their plans. Where the wave will appear, they do not know. Maybe a hundred miles off the San Diego coast. Maybe off some other continent. There might be 30 men in the world capable of surfing such a brute. A 100-foot wave could topple with no warning, with the surfer somewhere inside it.

The search for this wave has been organized by Billabong. The surfwear maker will pay $250,000 to the first surfer who can find a wave measuring at least 100 feet, ride it, document it and survive.

The contest is called The Billabong Odyssey. From time to time, the company sponsors trips -- "missions,"

It calls them -- to big-surf spots. Everything is in place to make this one happen: computer forecasts, boats, helicopters, skilled surfers. Still the chances of somebody actually surfing a wave that measures at least 100 feet anytime soon are about as good as Dick Cheney's chances of completing this year's Boston Marathon. The biggest wave ever ridden is believed to have been a 66-footer, by Mike Parsons in 2001, at a then newly discovered surf spot called Cortes Bank, a reef break 105 miles off San Diego. According to surfline.com, a surf forecasting company, 66 feet at Cortes Bank represents about two thirds the size of the reef's biggest waves. But the surfer has to be there when the 100-footers are and stop vomiting long enough to surf.

Parsons is 37 and has no plans to quit chasing waves. Most of the surfers in the Odyssey are in their 30s; many with kids, none with much body fat; all with something to prove, mostly to themselves. There's Ken (Skindog) Collins, Josh Loya, Darryl (Flea) Virostko, all of Santa Cruz, Calif.; Parsons, the pro's pro, a waterman. They believe bigger is better. They don't worry about form. They surf on short, heavy boards with their feet strapped into place. They wear life jackets. They train by carrying boulders along the ocean floor. The number of surfers in the contest is growing, but slowly. (Only those certified by Billabong are invited on the missions, but anybody can enter the competition.) The Billabong people are looking for surfers with experience on big, potentially lethal waves; a paramedic's attitude about preparation; and an astronaut's view on exploration.

Cortes Bank is a new frontier. "I know there's unfinished business out there," says Parsons. "Someday, somebody will ride a 100-footer. If I did it, I'd be back the next day, looking for something bigger."

The founder of the contest, Bill Sharp, the former editor of Surfing magazine, is assisting on a movie about the search, also called The Billabong Odyssey. If the movie succeeds, it will reveal the vastness of a monster wave, the thundering noise it makes, how airless it is for the surfer trapped within it. What makes the surfers take on a wave like that is trickier to explain. "I get sick, I get nervous, I get worried the day before," Parsons said recently, describing his state on a Billabong mission. "Once I'm in the water, I'm calm. That's where I know what I'm doing." The movie can only be the opposite of the surf classic The Endless Summer. That 1966 film followed a couple of kids, happy and broke, as they hauled nine-foot noseriders around the globe, searching for the perfect wave: mellow, warm, beautifully shaped, long. It is a charming movie. The Billabong Odyssey, the movie and the contest, reflect a brave new surfing world in which technology, nature and outsized desire converge in a wave that is nothing but ferocious.

The competition began in October 2001, and Billabong is committed to it through at least July 2004. Sharp is himself an accomplished surfer, but this contest goes beyond his limits. It goes beyond all known limits. For years Maverick's, a big-wave, cold-water surf spot south of San Francisco, was a secret. Jaws, off the Maui coast, was a secret. Now those places are known, and so are their limits. Short of some freak natural event, it's unlikely those two spots will produce surf bigger than 70 feet. Cortes is one potential Everest. There could be others, maybe off Chile or Western Australia or somewhere in the South Pacific.

Parsons says the point of the contest is not merely to find a 100-foot wave and see if somebody can surf it. Maybe that will happen, maybe it won't. The point, he says, is also to explore the world's oceans in ways they've never been explored before. Along the way the minds and bodies of the world's best big-wave surfers will be pushed along too, to places they've never been. It's athletes getting better, is what it is.

Issue date: March 17, 2003

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