Amazing Surfing Stories: Tales of Incredible Waves & Remarkable Riders

by Alex Wade

Overview

This eclectic mix of surfing stories has something for everyone, from classic tales of monster waves and epic battles to stories of when life among the breakers goes wrong. There are accounts of death and disaster, as well as bravery and triumph. The bizarre and the extreme rub shoulders with perfect breaks and beautiful beaches. Be thrilled by legendary surfers, as well as learning about local heroes who never made the headlines. Each compelling tale has been chosen to stoke the fire of armchair surfers and hardcore wave-riders alike, and many are illustrated with colour photographs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781118340202
Publisher:	Fernhurst Books Limited
Publication date:	09/28/2012
Series:	Amazing Stories , #4
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	228
Sales rank:	329,052
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Alex Wade is a writer, freelance journalist, media lawyer and lecturer. As well as running the Surf Nation blog, Alex has edited and/or contributed columns and features for many national newspapers and magazines including The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent titles, the FT, The Telegraph, Huck, Wavelength, The Surfer's Path, Flush, Coast and Cornwall Today. In 2009, Alex was short-listed as Sports Feature Writer of the Year in the Sports Journalists' Association's awards and he has sat on various occasions as a judge for Coast's annual awards. He was the first UK writer to cover surfing in serious depth for a national newspaper. Alex has travelled the globe extensively in search of the biggest waves and best breaks. He has written about surf breaks from Hawaii and Costa Rica to France and Portugal. Despite a restless life he thinks he has found paradise in West Penwith, Cornwall, UK, where he surfs all year round.

Read an Excerpt

CHILD’S PLAY? DEFINITELY NOT

Garrett McNamara and Keali’I Mamala are not the first surfers to ride Alaskan waves. But they are the first, and possibly the last, to ride Alaskan waves which were generated by a calving glacier.

Midway through the trailer for George Casey’s 1998 film

Alaska: Spirit of the Wild, the camera pans over the deep crevasses of a glacier in a sequence filmed from a helicopter or a small plane. The landscape is frigid, stark and monumental, beautiful and yet inimical to man. Next is a head-on shot, probably from land, of the face of the glacier. A vast slab of ice detaches itself from the face and plummets into the water below. A huge and murky, mud-brown wave erupts, staggering in its velocity, only for the footage to move almost as quickly as the rhapsodic score and sweep from mountains to whales and other Alaskan wildlife. The trailer closes with an image of a grizzly bear cub playfully eating a fish.

Anyone who loves the great outdoors would feel stirred by the trailer, let alone the 40-minute Charlton Heston-narrated film. But if you happened to be a surfer, and you witnessed the waves created by the ice as it fell from the face of the glacier, what would you think? Would you think ‘Wouldn’t it be great to ride one of those waves?’ Or would you conclude that any such enterprise would be the height of madness?

For Ryan Casey, who worked on Spirit of the Wild as the stills photographer, the sight of the glacier-generated waves wouldn’t go away. A fanatical surfer, Casey believed that the waves were rideable.

While working on the film in 1995 he had seen them peeling for

200 yards, and at serious size: the biggest offered faces of between 20 and 30 ft. The fact that the slabs of ice were falling onto an ice shelf which was a mere 18 inches in depth meant that these waves also had an awful lot of power, even forming barrels sometimes.

The scene of the phenomenon seen by Casey and those who worked on Spirit of the Wild was Child’s Glacier, some 50 miles from the small city of Cordova in south-central Alaska. Between May and September, as the glacier inches forward, it ‘calves’ – chunks of ice collapse into the water of Copper River below, as the river undermines its face. Each year, the calving process draws the more intrepid kind of tourist. Intrepid because this is an elemental place, much visited by bears, especially when outsize calving occurs; the waves caused by the falling ice detonate like a round of artillery fire and can throw up salmon on the shore of the opposite river bank, some 300 yards away. Bears – and eagles – know the sound, and they will not spurn such an easy meal.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Part One Going to Extremes

Child’s Play? Definitely Not 3

Hold Down 7

Surviving the Atom Blaster 12

Oh My God (Take 1) 18

Size Matters 23

Part Two Tragic Tales

In Memory of Andy Irons 31

Veitch: RIP 36

QED 40

The Peterson Problem 44

Part Three When the Big Stuff Bites

A Bite out of Burle 51

People in Car Crashes Don’t Stop Driving 55

Bare Hands and Bombs 59

The White Zone 66

Part Four Gonzo Interlude

Being Dave Rastovich 75

A Thrust Too Far 87

Do You Know Russell Winter? 92

Four Surfers and a Painting 98

Part Five Contests and Communities

Higher than a High Five 105

Black Clouds and Bellyboards 109

Bad Boy Bobby and the New York Quiksilver Pro 114

The Big M 120

Lord Thurso, Cool in Caithness 123

A Debt at Dungeons 126

After Rio Breaks 133

Part Six Worldwide Waves

Seven Ghosts 139

Hokkaido – The Rights of Passage 145

1,300 Miles for a Wave 150

Ed’s Left, aka the Spot with No Name 153

Loco on Lobos 157

The Lady in the Emerald Green Bathing Dress 162

Purring thanks to ‘Da Cat’ 168

Part Seven Obsession

Peg Leg Rik 175

Soldiers Get Stoked 179

The Daily Wavester 182

The Amazing Mr Slater 186

Part Eight Inspiration

Stoked 193

Colonel ‘Mad Jack’ Churchill 195

OMG (Take 2) 199

Dr Sarah and the Meaning of Surfing 204

Acknowledgements 208

Editorial Reviews

"So accessible and diverting."

The Times Literary Supplement

"Expect an exhilarating ride alongside surfing legends.” (Coast) “With tales of monster waves, deadly sharks and perfect breaks, this book alone gets every surfer stoked – even if there isn't a wave in the sea.” (Cornwall Today) “Entertainingly written and painstakingly researched: there's something for everyone.” (Carve Surfing) “Accessible and diverting. There are a great many stories here, all short and true. The language is at once literary and idiomatic...Wade comes across as so steeped in respect for the ocean that the overriding impression is of authenticity. The book succeeds through a confluence of subject matter and structure. Some of these stories will transport us, others may pass us by, and the feeling is eerily akin to that of surfing itself.” (Times Literary Supplement 2013)

From the Publisher

"So accessible and diverting."

Times Literary Supplement