| There is a
corollary to the assertion that the sea is at any given moment capable
of being something other than what it is: bodies of water, like human beings,
are not created equal, in terms of what they may be. The Sea of Cortez,
for example, is largely incapable of producing good surf, due to its limited
breadth. This narrowness results in what surfers and oceanographers refer
to as a short fetch; “fetch” is the reach of unbroken water across which
wind can blow in order to raise a groundswell.
By contrast,
the Pacific Ocean has a fetch of many thousands of miles. Looking south
from my last west coat campsite, for example, there is nothing of any significance
to impede the production of a groundswell until we come upon the pack ice
of Antarctica, some 8,000 miles distant. So even when the sea is flat,
you may still find yourself gazing horizonward with an alertness in your
surfing soul, for - however many miles out there, however many days’ journey
away - there likely is a slew of waves in transit in your direction at
that very moment.
In July 1996,
world champ bodyboard-surfer Mike Stewart experienced in a very personal
way the implications of the Pacific’s vast reach. Stewart was on a surf
trip in Tahiti when he learned that a huge groundswell was battering the
islands to the south - some of the smaller, low-lying atolls had disappeared
underwater. The next day the head-high vanguard of the northbound swell
arrived in Tahiti. Within 24 hours, the island’s south facing reefs were
under full, thunderous assault. Through satellite imagery and modern communications
technology (and with the expertise of wave guru Sean Collins), Stewart
realised that the size, location, wind vortices and projected track of
the southern ocean tempest that had spawned the big swell were exactly
right for him to try to accomplish something that had never been done before,
never even been tried. It was the chance of a lifetime.
Stewart
spent two days in Tahiti searching for a break that wasn’t mutated out-of-control.
He finally surfed the peaking swell in near-survival conditions, then
packed up and flew to Hawaii. Arriving simultaneously with the likewise
north-travelling groundswell, he surfed the legendary speed break on Maui
called Maalaea, which he was told hadn’t gone off that big and fast since
the ‘70s. Wild-eyed with hair still damp, he mad-dashed to the airport
to catch a flight to the mainland.
And so it went.
Steward followed the swell’s northward progress, next surfing the classic
Newport Beach, California, break known as The Wedge. Although the storm
that had parented the great swell was blowing itself out thousands of miles
to the south, the vigour of its wave-progeny had diminished but little
during the journey north: The Wedge was maxing in the 25-30 foot range.
Speeding up
the coast by automobile, Stewart surfed central California at two secret
spots reachable only by boat. Here, after five days of crazed travel and
extreme conditions in the water, he began to feel a synchronicity with
the groundswell’s rhythms, and to sense its idiosyncrasies; to develop
what he terms “an anthropomorphic” relationship with the waves he
was riding. The swell “had taken on a personality”, he later wrote.
“Like a friend… (or) a primitive life form.”
Three days
later, as Stewart stood on a remote point on the Gulf of Alaska, watching
head-high waves march up from the blue expanse to the south, a feeling
of almost psychedelic unreality swept over him. He felt he understood,
in a visceral and soulful and inexpressible way, the machinations of the
sea, and, by subtle inference, the universe at large. Although he had not
been present at the tumult of the groundswell’s birth, he had experienced
it throughout its existence in space - and in a sense, time as well. Through
his travels he had conjured a sort of time machine, which enabled him to
remain in “the present” of a phenomenon that over a period of some ten
days had spanned nearly half our planet’s circumference. Moreover, the
waves he rode had, in a very real way, affected virtually the whole of
the Pacific basin, as the ripples from a pebble dropped in a bucket spread
across the surface of the water within.
Stewart’s was
a conceptual and logistical achievement of no small merit. And being a
wave rider of great talent, his quest resonated on a creative level as
well. In his wave-pursuit across the vastest of oceans, Mike Stewart had
enabled himself to personally, holistically, experience the process of
the continual transfer of energy through the matter on a grand scale. And
he knew that the elemental progenitor of that energy was the sun itself.
In its giving up of the heat to the sea and the land and the air, our local
star is the creator of all the earth’s winds. It is the wind that creates
waves.
Finally, as
the physicists now tell us - and as Eastern philosophers have long implied
- the “stuff” of matter is waves, if on the tiniest and most ephemeral
of levels. The universe vibrates in many ways, and on many planes, producing
many different realities: from vibrations of nothingness (of space itself)
spring galaxies and stars and planets and human beings; similarly, from
the sea’s vibrations arise the groundswells that traverse the limited physical
realm of our world. And perhaps consciousness itself - the universe turned
inward to reflect on its own vibrations - manifests itself as yet another
plane of vibration. Another sort of wave.
In Search
of Captain Zero is available wherever books are sold.
The following
is a list of articles Allan has written for the magazine:
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