Point break
A GLITTERING awards ceremony in front of 1500 people packed inside a California theatre usually means only one thing Hollywood.
Stretch limos, red carpet interviews and standing ovations, the awards season is as glamorous as it gets. But anyone turning up at the Grove Theatre in Anaheim last Sunday night expecting that this particular awards night would be a somewhat similar would have fallen off their Jimmy Choo stilettos in shock.
The Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Awards is the annual get-together of some of the world's best big-wave surfers and the dress code was just a tad more relaxed than the Oscars.
Not that the prizes on offer were low-key. Far from it. Highlight of the night was when Hawaiian big-wave rider Pete Cabrinha picked up a cheque for US$70,000 (€59,000). His feat? Landing the annual cash prize offered by the surf-clothing giant Billabong for the biggest wave ridden.
Only this time he had also set the world record.
On January 10 this year, Cabrinha had traveled from his home in Haiku on Maui to the island's North Shore and it was there that the 43-year-old tamed the monster break surfers call Jaws.
He was one of the original pioneers of the break, which is also known as Peahi, and had earned a reputation as a master of big wave tow surfing, a spin-off of the sport in which surfers are towed by a jet-ski and positioned in the right part of fast-moving ocean swells.
When the rider drops the rope he uses his momentum to catch waves that are generally uncatchable in conventional surfing.
Cabrinha dropped as the wave reached a massive 70 feet (21 metres).
"It was the first time I surfed Jaws this winter and it was on a brand-new board, so I asked my partner Rush [Randle] to tow me into a little warm-up wave," Cabrinha recalled.
"But when we took the jet ski outside of the break, this set came in and we basically claimed it as ours. Most people go right at Jaws, but on this day some of the lefts looked bigger and cleaner so that's the way I went. The board ended up working pretty well and when I kicked out, Rush looked at me and went, 'Holy crap, Pete, that was a bomb!' "
It didn't do Cabrinha's bank balance any harm either as he collected his prize at the weekend.
But there are many in the sport, though, who view the Billabong XXL challenge with contempt, seeing these big-money competitions as dangerous, and a stain on the reputation their sporting passion.
To them, and they include some of Cabrinha's surfing buddies, this is not what big-wave surfing is meant to be about.
Riding massive breaks, like many sports however, is all about cash these days and its supporters argue that is why big-wave surfing is making giant strides, pushing the boundaries of accomplishment with every passing year.
In 2002, Brazilian Carlos Burle set the previous record with a 68-foot ride at a northern Californian break called Mavericks.
As one commentator noted on hearing of Cabrinha's achievement, if you had gone back just 10 years and told a surfer that people would be riding 70-foot waves, he would have told you to lay off the grass.
On January 10, 2004, the day Cabrinha conquered Jaws, three other surfers rode the same break. Brazilian Danilo Couto and Hawaiians Archie Kalepa and Ian Walsh were also nominees for the Billabong XXL challenge, as was a wave ridden by California's Greg Long at the Cortes Bank, 100 miles into the Pacific, off San Diego, California.
Surfers have always seen big-wave surfing and the challenge of monster-like Jaws and Mavericks - as the pinnacle of their sport, and those who take them on are hailed as its heroes.
But conventional big-wave surfing knew its boundaries. Surfers paddled into waves at noted wave arenas like Hawaii's Waimea Bay, Todos Santos in Mexico, and Margaret River in Western Australia and rode the waves until they moved too fast or became too dangerous, usually once they reached about 30 feet.
That was, until the early 1990s when three Hawaiian surfers got hold of an inflatable boat and began towing each other behind it like water-skiers.
The added speed behind the boat worked like a catapult for the surfers who could now catch waves previously unattainable under their own paddle power.
Thus, Laird Hamilton, Buzzy Kerbox and Darrick Doerner inadvertently changed surfing forever. The Zodiac boats have gone now, replaced by high-powered jet skis, and surfers are riding bigger and bigger waves.
To marketing men like Bill Sharp, chief of operations of the Billabong Odyssey, the sky is the limit.
"Everest is never going to get higher," Sharp said recently. "But there is always a bigger storm, always a bigger wave."
His Billabong Odyssey is a three-year project to put a big-wave surfer on a 100-foot wave.
"The north-west face of the Hawaiian island chain is one example," Sharp said. "There's 1200 miles of coastline waiting to be explored properly. We're just familiar with the first islands. The Atlantic holds plenty of potential - the Canaries, the Azores, Africa, the atolls all over the South Pacific. Chile, too. I reckon that is the end of the rainbow."
The Billabong Odyssey has caught the attention of a wider audience which mainstream surfing has previously failed to tap in to. Which, of course, is very good for corporate types like Sharp.
But it has turned off many in the surfing community, including Hamilton, the pioneer of tow-surfing and universally thought of as the best big-wave surfer in the world. He has no interest in the commercial exploitation of his sport.
"There are three events going on right now," Hamilton told surfing magazine,Tracks, "one of which is the Billabong Odyssey, the tow-in event at Jaws, and I guess the XXL thing. I have no desire to do any one of those things. . . I'm more concerned with just riding the waves and getting involved in the equipment, and getting better at doing it.''
WITH so much money up for grabs, there are some surfers riding the likes of Jaws who are dangerously under-prepared. It is a point even Sharp admits concerns him.
"I think we are going back to the era where people can think if you're a bungee jumper or an extreme skier, that you can buy a jet ski and take on Jaws. That worries me more than anything."
The world's leading big-wave surfers have rigorous training schedules and a code whereby they must be able to swim five miles in choppy open sea and hold their breath underwater for two minutes. And that still wasn't enough to save a number of high profile big-wave surfers during the 1990s, men like Hawaiians Mark Foo and Todd Chesser and Californian Donnie Solomon, who drowned while surfing big waves.
Hamilton described big-wave riding as "like bounty hunting, where you go out and ride some giant wave and win a prize".
People are going to do things that aren't necessarily safe because they are making judgment calls around financial gains, or glory or fame, instead of out of the pureness of just doing it."
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