Taz stood up, got blinded by mist, and airdropped. Just like that he was pinned by thousands of pounds of water beneath the surface; it was like being locked in an industrial washing machine. “I rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled,” he said of the terrifying ride. Jeff Clark, who was also at Ghost Tree on December 4 and had two 60-footers drop on his head, described the sensation of being trapped in the whitewash beneath the surface: “You just check out. You go to sleep. It’s like falling out of an airplane. What are you going to do about it?” When Taz made it to the surface, he choked and gasped for air. He’d had enough of Ghost Tree. He started to swim in toward the shore, headed straight for his car.

Davi went to the inside of the break and tried to paddle into the overcooked scraps. But it was unsatisfying. He attempted to catch one of the big rollers, but they were moving too quickly. He no longer had the athleticism to paddle into this kind of wave; the swells rolled under him without picking him up. He knew he had to put his principles aside and get a tow. It was the only way. He saw old friend Kelly Sorensen on a waverunner. Sorensen owned a surf shop in town and had sponsored Davi for years, supplying him with boards.

“I wanna get one of those waves,” Davi said.

“OK,” Sorensen replied. “Ride it, Pete.”

They waited, and when Sorensen spotted a swell, he throttled the waverunner. Davi pulled himself up on his board. The wave was big but not gigantic; he rode it, and at the end he tumbled back into the sea. His friends Ruffo and Flintstone passed on a waverunner. Flintstone was driving and Ruffo was sitting behind.

“My turn,” Davi said to Ruffo.

Ruffo jumped off, and Davi climbed on, holding his board. Flintstone drove him back to the lineup.

The meth in Davi’s bloodstream now mingled with adrenaline. He was about to harness the full power of a historic wave—on a board ill-suited for a swell this size and speed. He grabbed hold of the rope behind the waverunner. And then he saw it, rolling in with immeasurable force. A vast wave rose up out of the sea, moving fast and high.

Thirty feet. Forty feet.

Flintstone opened the waverunner’s throttle. Davi launched out of the sea like a water-skier, lifting his linebacker-size body up with all his strength. As he gained his footing, the wave started to break on the outside, generating an unholy roar. Davi released the tow. The board raced along the rising wave, pushing Davi faster and faster. He was moving over 20 mph now, cascading down the face of the wave, the wall of water towering over him. This was it: transcendence. The closer you get to total annihilation, the more real everything becomes. Boulders emerged, and Davi flitted around them with skill. The wave began to collapse on him. Coated in spume, he rode the whole wave, then let himself fall into the white water. The chop was so rough it tore his leash and carried his board away. The clamor still filled his ears, and his heart was pumping wildly. But he’d emerged in relative safety, protected by the boulder field. He was treading water amid some feather boa kelp, about 100 yards off the beach. Flintstone had picked up Ruffo, and the two rode over.

“Hey, Pete,” Ruffo said. “Want a ride in?”

“Nah, I’ve paddled this plenty of times,” Davi said, still breathing hard, his heart still pounding. He must have felt immortal. He waved his friends off and began to swim.

“We never second-guessed it,” Ruffo said. “It was the most natural thing in the world.”

No one ever saw Peter Davi alive again.


Thirty minutes later, Flintstone and Ruffo were headed back into Stillwater Cove. Ruffo noticed what looked like a snorkeler. They slowed to get a look and realized it wasn’t a diver. Ruffo jumped into the sea. He found Peter Davi floating, his face bone white and cold to the touch. He had abrasions on his head. No one had noticed Davi missing.

Onshore a 17-year-old EMT trainee performed CPR until the rescue personnel arrived. Davi was laid on a pier within feet of the ocean. A crowd gathered and watched as a paramedics inserted a femoral IV and pumped Davi’s chest, trying to revive him. All efforts to jump-start his heart failed. He was pronounced dead at 1:28 p.m.

As an ambulance carted him to a Monterey County hospital, the surfers were still out at the lineup, unaware one of their own had been killed. But the word spread. Cell phones rang, and local news reporters and television teams arrived to report on the story of a legendary surfer’s death. Davi’s rise and violent fall mimicked the last wave he’d surfed. “He went out the way he wanted to go out,” said
Sorensen, interviewed on-camera back at his surf shop in town, “in a big wave situation.”

“You can die in a motel with a crack whore, or in a hospital bed when you’re 80, or like this,” says Ruffo, of his friend’s last ride. “This is as it should be. The comforting part is that he’s a 45-year-old legend.”

Four days after Davi’s death, on Saturday, December 8, friends and family crowded into a Pacific Grove Catholic church for a memorial service. Afterward they headed over to the park at Lovers Point. The sun was shining, and the winds were light. One hundred surfers hopped on their boards and paddled out to form a circle just outside the break. They performed a traditional waterman’s send-off, chanting the dead man’s name.

“Davi. Davi. Davi.”

Then they paddled into the breakers, which carried them gently back to shore. 

The Monterey County coroner’s report found the primary cause of death was “asphyxia due to ocean drowning” coupled with “blunt force head and chest injuries.” When the toxicology reports were issued, the full story became a little clearer. The coroner reported “acute methamphetamine intoxication may have played a contributing role.” Davi had 0.75 milligrams of crystal meth in his system per liter of blood.

His friends don’t agree on what happened that day at Ghost Tree. Sorensen believes that in the aftermath of riding that big wave, Davi suffered a heart attack. Ruffo believes his leash snagged on rocks during an inshore surge as he paddled in, and the surge pummeled him into rocks, knocking him unconscious. Others think he was caught in ropy tangles of kelp. Don Curry is less ambivalent.
“This is a cautionary tale more than anything else,” he says. “Peter didn’t die surfing Ghost Tree. He died swimming in, and that’s the real tragedy for a surfer. You simply cannot be in a spot like Pescadero Point when you’re fucked up.”

While all the details will never be known, this much is: The next time the NOAA buoy readings signal gigantic rollers headed California’s way and the alarms go off on Internet bulletin boards, the world’s top surfers will gather again at Mavericks and Ghost Tree. They will fly across the globe in search of their next, and possibly their last, big wave.