Imagine you’re sitting on a surfboard in the ocean a good quarter mile from shore, at a surf break called Mavericks, on a day of giant waves. Your board is narrow and long, probably around nine feet, and your wetsuit, thick and cumbersome, only partially manages to ward off Northern California’s midwinter chill. The breeze blowing off the land carries the scent of salt and sea lions. You bob amid a scrum of like-minded adventurers. Everyone’s looking west.
At some point, the horizon changes color, a subtle shift of shadow that takes an experienced eye to detect. It’s the gut-wrench indicator that something wicked and beautiful approaches. The first surfers to see it flop to their bellies and begin paddling seaward. You follow their lead, and soon the entire pack is scrambling for deeper water, all hoping hard that they haven’t let themselves drift too close to shore.
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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You crest a small forerunner and come face-to-face with the first wave of the set, 20 feet of deepwater swell that has begun to interact with the underwater topography, escalating into a dark, thick demon with a lurching face over 50 feet high—one of the biggest rideable waves in the world.
This is the moment of truth. This is the beast you have come to ride. The question now: Are you too far outside to catch it, are you too far inside to get over it (the worst-case scenario), or have you somehow successfully positioned yourself in that narrow Goldilocks zone where you have time to spin the board around, turn your back to the behemoth, stroke hard, jump to your feet, and ride into the pages of surfing lore?
Up until the early 1990s, any California surfer with a jones for huge waves had essentially one option: fly to Hawaii and join the circus on Oahu’s North Shore, where the spot of choice for many was a muscular blue break named Waimea Bay.
Then, about 30 years ago, word leaked out that a place called Mavericks, just 20 miles south of San Francisco, served up rideable waves as big as or bigger than Waimea’s, and the surf world’s cameras quickly panned 2,400 miles northeast—to the frigid, murky waters off Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay.
Today, Mavericks is one of the most popular big-wave spots on the planet. When it comes alive on a serious winter swell, surfers fly in from all corners: Brazil, South Africa, Portugal, Australia, and beyond. This cold-water circus can be even crazier than Waimea’s, with close to 70 people in the lineup on a well-forecasted swell. It’s not uncommon for many of those surfers to spend several hours in the water—jockeying for position, dodging sets, pretending to stroke for waves they don’t really want—without once getting to their feet.
Sadly, only a small subset of them have any knowledge of the forces that make the place such an oceanographic wonder.
All dependable big-wave breaks—and there are only a handful worldwide—are bathymetric marvels, but the underwater contours that create Mavericks’s rideable peaks are downright artistic. Topographic maps of the surf zone there look like a Hokusai woodblock…like 3-D renderings of a Van Gogh swirl.
Among the many curving fissures beneath the waves are a pair of prominent parallel trenches, nearly identical in shape, that begin near the rocky shoreline at a depth of about 60 feet. They trend west, then elegantly arc north in unison, getting deeper and narrower until they descend to a depth of about 100 feet a mile offshore.
Sandwiched between these troughs is the shallow reef on which the waves at Mavericks break. The reef gets all the press, but it’s the trenches that make the magic.
Here’s how it works: When winter storms churn east across the North Pacific, the seas they excite often take aim at Northern California. If a storm is far enough away and stays active long enough, the choppy waves have time to smooth out and team up, slowly organizing into a train of large, luscious swells with lots of space between them. The energy of such waves runs to great depths. As they approach shore, the shallows slow them down and can make them taller.
But in a place like Mavericks, with its two artful trenches carved close to shore, to the north and south of the break, the incoming wave energy maintains its open-ocean speed in the ravines, moving ahead of the decelerating midsection. These faster outside edges bend around the shallows and begin to converge, as if to give the reef a hug. The convergence can double, triple, even quadruple the size of the original swell.
And Mavericks’s twin underwater troughs have another benefit. They’re so deep that waves pass over them without breaking, even on giant days, so if you have a nimble boat and an able skipper, you can calmly sip a beer just a few hundred feet from one of the greatest sporting spectacles in North America.
That’s by far the best way to watch the place live: in a small boat, positioned in the channel just south of the break. Trying to spectate from the beach, even with strong binoculars and an elevated vantage point, is largely an exercise in frustration, because the wave breaks too far offshore to appreciate. But out there in the water, floating safely above that ancient tectonic trench, you not only get to see the wave and stand in awe of it; you also get to smell it, hear it, and taste it on your tongue.•
Steve Hawk is a writer and editor who lives near Half Moon Bay. He previously served as editor of Stanford Business magazine, as executive editor of Sierra (the magazine of the Sierra Club), as editor of Surfer, and as a consultant and writer on the HBO series John from Cincinnati.
