DANGER
Thomas Traversa is the most experienced big wave windsurfer of my generation. I don’t know another human who can read the ocean better than Thomas. Despite that, there was a moment as he swam off the rocks when a wave rose up and I held my breath. Thomas escaped but only by centimetres. The others who planned to launch – Cedric, Aleix, and Aleksy Gayda – were much less experienced in big waves and tricky launches. With no boats or jet skis, there would be no ocean rescue if anything went wrong. Every man for himself. It’s not that I thought they could not handle the situation; I knew that they did not fully understand the risk of what we were doing.
Jaws is easy, which makes it dangerous. Most places, when the waves are big, the ocean becomes survival-at-sea – the currents become freight trains, the channels disappear, the waves close out into a single explosive line of erupting white water. Once the waves at Ho’okipa go above 6 metres, the best windsurfers in the world struggle to make it out past the breaking waves. In contrast, even when the waves are bigger than a building, on either side of the wave at Jaws is a channel as calm as a swimming pool. Everything is easy, unless something goes wrong. The waves were not massive when Polakow was held under the water at Jaws for over a minute – while he was wearing a flotation vest.
After I launched and had caught a few waves myself, I saw Aleksy crash a crash that could have killed him. As I sailed back out in the channel, he rode towards the shore on a wave small for that day but huge anywhere else (over 6 metres). He was too deep, too far behind the peak of the wave. That day was windy and the wave was not too large, and Aleksy could have used the power of the wind to speed in front of and around the breaking wave into the safety of the channel. To my surprise, he instead went upwind and further into the no-man’s land. As he slowly turned more and more into the wind, my surprise turned to leaden dread – a wipeout was unavoidable. The wave rolled past me and began to break, and Aleksy went out of my view, still heading upwind, heading to nowhere but a wipeout. Worried, I kept watching. Eventually, Aleksy and his pink sail popped out of the whitewater wake of the wave – separated by a distance of 50 metres or more. The next waves pushed Aleksy’s rig onto the rocks at the base of the cliff. I knew Aleksy was still in the water, somewhere to the left of where the wave breaks from the perspective of a surfer in the water looking back at the land. I wanted to help Aleksy, but he was too far inside and too far upwind to reach with a windsurfer. I could have sailed upwind until where the wind died and then swam to where I thought Aleksy to be, but I would have been impotent to offer any real assistance. I would have just been there to keep him company, an act of solidarity, rather than a rescue. Half of the Tabou crew were stood on the Jaws rocks, but they too would be unable to help Aleksy – any attempt at rescue would be futile. With no jet skis or boats, he was on his own.
There was nothing I could do – nothing anyone could do – to help Aleksy. Maybe he was already dead or broken or scared to death trying to find a way to put land under his feet. So I continued my session.