“Waves are not measured in feet and inches; they are measured in increments of fear.” —Buzzy Trent

A little before 10 a.m. on the morning of December 4, Peter Davi drove his Ford F-150 along the 17 Mile Drive in Carmel-by-the-Sea, a quaint town bordering Monterey in Northern California. His friend Osh Bartlett, known as Frog, sat beside him. Through the window they smelled the pine and cut grass wafting from the farms and gentlemen’s ranches up in Carmel Valley. Davi watched with a flicker of disdain as a parade of Audis, Lexuses, and the occasional Ferrari sped past. As the other drivers stopped to buy skim lattes at Carmel Valley Coffee, Davi and Frog passed the Pebble Beach Golf Links, turned right onto Cypress Drive, and pulled into the parking lot at Still­water Cove—already filled with pickups hitched to empty waverunner trailers.

Outside it was cool and misty—mid-50s and rising. A 10-knot breeze blew out of the north, swirling the loose, dark curls on Davi’s head. Tourists come thousands of miles to eye this stretch of picturesque coast, with its rocky shoreline and lush cypress trees. But to Davi, a lifelong local, it was the sound that struck him that morning. In the parking lot at Stillwater Cove he could hear Ghost Tree like he’d never heard it before. It was the sound of 70-foot waves—surely record size—detonating onto the boulder field at Pescadero Point.

Davi was a massive, intimidating man. Considered the unofficial mayor of this legendary surfing community, he’d earned widespread respect over the years among elite surfers by launching himself into the largest, most terrifying waves in California and Hawaii. He knew every break in Big Sur. He had a ruddy, wind-swept face and dulled dark eyes. He stood 6'2" and weighed close to 250 pounds. When he pulled a 4/3-millimeter wet suit over his body, along with a hood and gloves, his paunch was visible. He grabbed his 8'5" surfboard—a “gun” suitable for paddle surfing but too long for this dangerous tow-in scene. At 45 he walked as if in constant pain, as though the cartilage in his knees had been worn away.

This morning Davi was feeling every hour of those 45 years. He’d had a long night snorting speed. The crystal meth sizzling in his bloodstream was fading away, sublimating into a hangover so toxic his saliva tasted like it could strip the paint off a fireplug. He still had enough meth coursing through him to feel the searing high. And he was about to swim into the biggest waves on record at Ghost Tree, arguably the most dangerous surf spot in the world. “What took you so long?” asked Anthony Ruffo, a pro surfer and one of Davi’s closest friends. He and Randy “Flintstone” Reyes had already launched two jet skis into Monterey harbor and rounded the peninsula to Pesca­dero Point.

Davi drank from a water bottle and worked the muscles in his jaw. He strapped a six-foot leash to his ankle and plunged into the teeming brine. As his wet suit filled with the icy water, Frog started up his jet ski. Lying on his board, Davi grabbed the tow rope and they idled out of the cove. When they passed Pescadero Rocks, Davi saw the swell. It was Ghost Tree like he’d never seen it, a mountain of water. The breaking surf now sounded like an airplane crashing, even from half a mile away.


The gigantic rollers were no surprise. “There were big buoy readings,” says Don Curry, 48, the legendary Carmel surfer who gave Ghost Tree its name, referring to weather data buoys that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration maintains far out at sea. “We knew we were going to get a big swell.” According to NOAA records, the buoys indi­cated 20-footers hundreds of miles out days earlier. A storm had parked in the middle of the Pacific for a week, packing 50 mph winds. The swells that resulted built as they neared the 9,600-foot deep underwater troughs called the Monterey Canyon off the California coast. As the storm blew and the rollers grew in speed and mass, the surfing world took notice. Historic waves were headed into shore, the kind that arrive only once every few years, if that.

The phenomenon is called the trifecta—a perfect storm of waves when surfers follow the same swell from a huge weather system as it surges east across the Pacific, beginning in Hawaii’s North Shore and Waimea Bay, then up to Northern California, and finally to Todos Santos Island off the coast of Baja. The week before the big event, alarms had gone off across Internet bulletin boards, e-mails were sent, and text messages crisscrossed the globe.

By December 3, many of the world’s top big wave surfers had descended on the Cali coast. Locals, like brothers Russell and Tyler Smith, were already here; others, like Don Curry, Greg Long, Mark Healey, and Mike Parsons, also showed up, as did a Santa Cruz contingent of Ghost Tree pioneers like Shane Desmond and Tyler Fox. Carlos Burle flew in from Brazil. Some wave hunters had hopped across from Hawaii; others had come all the way from Australia.

When Davi arrived at Ghost Tree, about 21 waverunners and 15 tow-in surfers were buzzing around trying to capture the madness and glory. Davi was instantly recognized; he was a trailblazer here, one of the first to surf these dangerous swells. Photographers lined the shore, snapping away at the action. Seaweed, sea cucumbers, and forests of feather boa kelp churned in the white water. Davi took his place on the shoulder of the lineup. The swells at Ghost Tree were so large and moved so fast, surfers were towed by jet skis into the waves on special short boards with foot straps. But Davi maintained a lifelong disdain of the tow-in—preferring the purist attitude that surfing was about nothing but the man, the board, and the sea. That’s why he showed up with his longboard rather than the shorter, pointed guns the tow-in surfers were riding.

Davi surveyed the scene. Twenty-footers were rolling in at 19 second intervals, and when the swells arrived in the shallows, the earth pushed them upward another 50 feet into the air. Around now the first foursomes at Pebble Beach were making the turn onto the 18th hole tee box, and they saw what Davi saw from the water: the gargantuan, vertical mug of Ghost Tree in all its thunderous glory.
 
“I was saying the day before that someone’s going to die on the fourth,” pro surfer Grant Washburn said. “That’s the kind of swell that kills people for sure. It’s that big, it’s that heavy, it’s coming at a scary angle. When you’re near those waves, you’re pretty much aware that they will kill you.”