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Laird Hamilton drops into a monster barrel at Teahupo'o on the main island of Tahiti. Check out the lip: There's more than one Olympic-sized swimming pool in there! Note the jet ski bubble trail within the wave and the tow rope skipping across the crest. Surfing the set from hell Tow a legend waterman into a turquoise Tahitian
crusher and the surfing world stands in awe ... September 6, 2000 When legend waterman Laird Hamilton survived a truly monster barrel at Teahupo’o late last month, the adrenalin rush that followed turned him to jelly. The event was recorded on film, and now everyone is talking about But without the advice of Surf Alert wave forecaster Mike Perry, Laird might not have been in Tahiti to ride the wave of his life. According to Perry, Sydney-based film-producer Jack McCoy phoned him at his Queensland office the day before the shoot to ask the surf forecaster a simple question: Was it worth hanging around paradise waiting for the perfect wave? "McCoy called me up with no warning and popped the question," recalls Perry. "I hadn’t had time to monitor trends. This area should have been specifically observed. I didn’t have much help." McCoy said: "Should I leave town tomorrow or stay for an extra couple days?" It turned out that the surf had already been pretty good. There had been an eight to ten foot swell, and good footage was shot, but some of the local guys were saying that some really big waves were on their way. According to Perry, the swell just over the horizon was the product of a low traveling east from New Zealand after clipping the top of Cook Strait, between the north and south islands. At its centre the pressure measured 986 hPa. "But it was not an especially significant system," observed Perry. "It was only a small diametre storm, there was no great fetch." For really big waves, the likes Laird Hamilton eats for breakfast, forecasters look for a period between troughs of between 17 and 22 seconds. Waves at the latter end of the scale are typical of big gnarly Hawaiian monsters. Perry could only find waves measuring 14 seconds from this particular New Zealand low. "McCoy sounded like he was in a hurry to leave the island so I bowed to his concerns and told him to pack up and go home. McCoy later told me that he stayed only because I said the waves didn’t look good. So I guess I can sort of claim to be responsible for this outcome …" The set from hell In hindsight, Perry notes that the New Zealand low showed a brief period of intensity in the 24 hours prior to the waves landing at Tahiti. He calls it Dynamic Fetch. "Dynamic fetch is when an already bad-assed storm increases in strength - maybe for only six to ten hours - and the result is a quantum leap in wave size. That’s one way I can explain what happened. It might also be as simple as multiple wave trains combining to produce something huge." Throughout the next morning, waves at Teahupo’o started to build and by the following day the surf was again at eight to ten foot. Conditions were absolutely perfect for surfing - the azure sea was a sheet of glass. Chow-Poo chum Teahupo’o - or Chow-Poo as the tourists call it - needs some explanation here. Perry describes it as a shallow, dome-shaped reef - maybe half a metre below the sea surface - pounded smooth by surf.. The reef faces south west and works best on a deep southern swell. Because it is domed shaped, waves wrap around it and surfers game enough to take the drop are faced with a ludicrous situation. Imagine this: Stretch your arm out away from your body and bend it at the elbow. Picture your entire bent arm as an azure-blue, vertical cliff of warm, clear, Tahitian water. That is the view Laird Hamilton was faced with after he survived the free-fall and after he made it out of the tube in a cloud of spray more powerful than a firehose. The only way he, or any surfer riding Teahupo’o survives, is to trim the board real nice and point the nose at the fist (do you still have your arm bent in position?). At that point the sea hasn’t yet erupted into an undulating serpent and if your good enough, you will cross the wave front and end up in the safety of a deep water channel. Perry says what happens to the wave is called ‘extreme refraction’ and when the refracted portion curves around far enough to meet the driving portion of the wave, a watery explosion is the result. Get stuck in there, and Teahupo’o will do to a surfer what a meat tenderiser does to a clove of garlic. The recent death of a Tahitian surfer at Teahupo’o in conditions one quarter the size of the wave Laird Hamilton rode underscores the dangers of this reef. "It shouldn’t be surfed," says Perry. "Even the pros are scared of this place. California’s Rob Machado, ranked number seven in the world, says not a single pro-surfer enjoys it out there." The main event Except for Laird Hamilton. This Hawaiian extremist spends his free time chasing monster sets at a Maui reef called ‘Jaws’. He understands death by drowning and munching and has managed to avoid both. Hamilton is regarded as a pioneer of tow-in surfing and he helped develop the board for the job: 16 inches wide, 15 kg in weight with foot straps - all of which help to stay in control in extreme, choppy conditions. The jet ski which towed Hamilton into Teahupo’o was equally robust, tricked up to be able to carry this large man at 80kph onto the shoulders of large waves. Perry says Hamilton and crew were in the boat, mid channel, taking a breather when someone spotted a monster set on the horizon. Everyone moved fast and they managed to pull him in. He made the drop, he explored the tube and navigated his way out of the jaws of death and pulled into the deep water channel. "He was an absolute jibbering idiot," recalls Perry. "He was highly adrenalinised and was having a hard time staying on this planet." The wave measured 20 feet ‘Hawaiian’ - that’s 20 feet from crest to trough. The rest of us, notes Perry, would say the wave was over 30 feet. Another rogue wave appeared on the horizon and Hamilton did it all again, but this time, after the event, he paddled away from the camera boat, sat up on his board and held his head in his hands for something like ten minutes. Even a man of iron has to shit himself some of the time. Over the next 12 hours the swell fell off completely. The game was over. The camera crew picked the eyes out of an extreme event, packed up and went home. "It was absolutely the most amazing surf I have seen in 40 years," said Perry. Did you know?
© Jamie Brown/weather-wise.com 2000 Check out more great surf reading at weather-wise.com Great sites: Mike Perry's Surf Alert: Great links, solid advice, and awesome pictures. This is also the home of Mike's daily surf fax, detailing breaks right around the world up to eight days in advance. www.stormsurf.com: These guys have a lot of info on everything from wave prediction to weather tutorials. Their home wave is the legend winter break of Mavericks, south of San Francisco. Check out the video! View Laird's amazing ride through the eyes of several cameramen in this video showing several angles. See how Maui's 'Jaws' works in a big swell. |