You stand there long enough and you start to understand that you’re watching a conversation between lunatics and the ocean. A negotiation conducted in foam and violence.
Mavericks. Half Moon Bay. The name sounds almost gentle. Like some old California settler had a beloved horse. But there’s nothing gentle about this place. This is where the North Pacific comes to fuck things up, where waves the size of apartment buildings announce themselves with a sound like distant artillery, and where men and women in wetsuits study the horizon with the focused intensity of fighter pilots.
The transitional space. The interface. The threshold. To me, it looks like the end of the world. There’s a small cluster of rocks, slick with algae and sea spray, where the surfers stage their entry into madness. Not a beach. Not a gentle slope where you can wade in up to your knees and think about it. Just jagged volcanic rock, kelp-slick and mean, surrounded by white water that wants to slam you into tomorrow.
The surfers move across these rocks like dancers, like cat burglars, in their thick rubber skins. They’re reading something I can’t see. Not just the waves, any fool can see the waves, but the spaces between the waves. The rhythm. The breath of it. Stand here long enough and you feel it too, in your chest, in your bones. The pull and push. The ocean inhaling, gathering itself, then exhaling in that catastrophic release of energy that sends water mountains marching toward the shore.
Timing is everything. Miss your window by fifteen seconds and you’re swimming. Or worse. Get it right and you’re sliding down the face of something that shouldn’t exist, that looks computer-generated, that has traveled three thousand miles to meet you right here, right now, for this singular moment of connection.
I’m trying to capture this with my camera. The decisive moment,
Cartier-Bresson and all that. But what’s the decisive moment here? When they leap? When they commit? When they launch themselves off those rocks into the channel, paddling hard into the impact zone while waves that could split a boat in half detonate around them?
Or is it before that? The moment when they’re just standing there, watching, calculating, feeling. When everything hangs in the balance and the only sound is the thunder of water meeting land and the cry of gulls who are smart enough to stay in the air.
The energy is palpable even from shore. Especially from shore. You feel it in your teeth. In your gut. Each big set sends vibrations through the rock beneath your feet. The air tastes like salt and adrenaline and something older, something that reminds you how small you are, how brief, how contingent. The ocean has been doing this long before we showed up, and it’ll keep doing it long after we’re gone.
I watch one guy, probably mid-thirties, wetsuit patched in three places, time his entry perfectly. He waits. Waits. A smaller set rolls through. He watches it detonate on the rocks with casual indifference. Waits some more. Then, in the lull, in that pregnant pause when the ocean draws back, he moves. Fast. Purposeful. Off the rocks, into the channel, paddling hard.
This is craft. This is commitment. This is people who’ve dedicated themselves to something difficult and dangerous and utterly without practical purpose, just because it calls to them. Because it has to be done. Because when you get it right, when you thread that needle, launch off those rocks at precisely the correct moment, make the wave, ride it into that cathedral of water, there’s nothing else like it.
You have to respect that. Honor the people who show up to the edge of things… and lean in. Who study the space where one element meets another and learn its language. Who accept the terms, which are non-negotiable, and do it anyway.
Go to. Strip off your clothes that are a nuisance in this mellow clime. Get in and wrestle with the sea; wing your heels with the skill and power that reside in you; bit the sea’s breakers, master them, and ride upon their backs as a king should
“A Royal Sport” is a chapter in Jack London’s 1911 book, The Cruise of the Snark
and was first published in 1907 in The Lady’s Home Companion.