Killer Waves : Despite Deaths of Others, Surfers Continue Quest for Mastery of the Ocean’s Power Regardless of Risk Involved

The waves seemed to rise out of nowhere, and after crashing down upon the sparkling blue sea, they peeled beautifully toward the island’s rocky shore.

Some of them measured 12 feet, with 20-foot faces.

The four surfers, who had traveled in the predawn darkness by boat to a small, barren island outside this Mexican port city, found the break totally deserted.

And they were . . . totally bummed.

“C’mon baby, give us something,” begged Robert Brown, a photographer and skipper of the boat.

Give us something?

Here were very rideable waves, some of them very large and very powerful--and nobody else was in sight much less in the lineup. What more could any surfer ask for?

Turns out these guys are not your typical surfers. They expected waves twice this size, twice as hollow, twice as thrilling but also twice as deadly.

They were, after all, at Todos Santos Island.

Reachable by chartered or trailered boat after only a short drive across the border, Todos Santos is the Southland’s answer to the famous Waimea Bay on Oahu’s North Shore.

“It’s so similar to Waimea it’s a joke,” said Brown, a staff photographer for Surfing magazine.

The same winter swells that smash into the North Shore usually reach Todos Santos about 48 hours later. They are channeled through a deep-water canyon that funnels up to a rocky reef about a quarter-mile off the island.

On the bigger swells the waves can measure 20 feet or more from the backs, with 35- to 40-foot faces. Like Waimea, they break to the right, are usually hollow and powerful, and crash thunderously over a shallow reef.

And like Waimea, these waves are attractive only to a select group of surfers.

Surfers such as Mike Parsons, Evan Slater and Joe McNulty, all from Orange County, and Todd Chesser of Hawaii--the four who accompanied Brown on his most recent trip to the island.

Surfers who are driven by a desire to push their skills to the limit. Surfers driven by speed rushes generated by monstrous waves, which they chase around the world whenever their funds allow.

“It’s not like jumping off a building or jumping from a plane with a parachute,” said Parsons, 30, the most experienced of the four and the undisputed king of Todos Santos. “It’s not just the adrenaline rush; to me it’s facing Mother Nature at her best. Every ride is different, every situation is different.”

Parsons is the epitome of the big-wave surfer.

He started surfing at 6, began competing at 13 and turned pro at 18. At 17, he traveled to Hawaii for the first time, “but even before then I enjoyed the thrill of bigger waves,” he said. “Always, as a kid, I was the one who wanted to skate the biggest hill, jump off the highest cliff.”

Today he mostly sticks to big waves, waves that in the past year have taken the lives of two of his contemporaries.

Parsons was in the lineup at Maverick’s--a recently discovered and now notorious big-wave break below San Francisco near Halfmoon Bay--last year when his good friend, Mark Foo, drowned after a dramatic wipeout.

The swells were pushing 20 feet. Foo, a veteran pro surfer respected by his peers, took off, was pitched from the lip of the wave and the massive wall of water buried him.

Parsons and another big-wave expert, Brock Little, took off on the next wave.

“We took off on a bigger wave, and both of us wiped out,” Parsons recalled. “We both got washed into the rocks. I got my leash caught in rocks and thought I was going to drown. When I was under water, I felt another person bump into me, which I now know was Foo.

“They say he drowned, but he may have been stuck [in the rocks] or he may have hit his head on his board. I think, personally, he was knocked out because of how he bumped into me under water. I know it wasn’t Little because the person who bumped into me wasn’t scratching for surface, it was just . . . like a body that wasn’t moving.”

At the time, though, Parsons didn’t know that Foo had run into trouble. He paddled back out and figured Foo had made it to the beach.

It wasn’t until nearly two hours later, when he and Slater were coming in on a boat they had hired, that Parsons discovered otherwise.

He and Slater saw part of Foo’s board floating in the water, and then they noticed that Foo was still attached to the board’s leash.

Slater jumped in and pulled Foo’s body to the boat.

“Me and the photographer [on the boat] pulled him in and raced into the harbor,” Parsons said. “But it was too late. I was really good friends with him; it was the heaviest thing I had ever been through in my life, by miles.

“I was so stoked to be alive after my wipeout, and then to find him dead. . . . It went from ultimate day to the worst day in my life.”

Only three weeks ago, a year to the day after Foo’s death, a longtime friend of Slater’s, Donnie Solomon, drowned after wiping out at Waimea.

Solomon, an up-and-coming surfer from Ventura, reportedly got sucked over the falls on the first wave of a large set and was pounded by successive waves so that he was unable to catch his breath. He was later pronounced drowned.

Slater, 24, en route to Todos Santos on the recent trip, said Solomon’s death hadn’t soured him on big-wave surfing, but he added: “I no longer feel immortal.”

Parsons voiced a similar sentiment.

“You get so cocky and take such bad wipeouts, but you always seem to come up; you think you can do anything,” he said. “Now if two guys like this, both of them very good surfers, can get killed. . . . This really brings it home.”

Parsons, however, wasn’t that overcome with fear or grief. He was at Waimea a week later and nearly suffered a similar fate.

He was invited, along with 32 other surfers, to participate in a prestigious big-wave tournament named after the late Eddie Aikau, a surfer and lifeguard who apparently drowned in 1978 after trying to paddle for help after the vessel he was on capsized in the notoriously rough Molokai Channel.

The tournament is held only when the waves reach 25 feet.

Parsons, who is sponsored by two surf-related companies, flew to Hawaii on a Thursday night and drove to Waimea the next morning and saw the swell rapidly building.

The tournament started at 11. The waves were 25 feet and growing. Parsons was in the second heat at about noon.

“On the first wave I took off and ate it,” he said. “I fell at the bottom and got sucked over the falls--it’s the worst thing you can do.

“I was lucky there was only one wave behind it, because I was right in the impact zone. That’s right where Donnie drowned. Had there been four more waves, who knows . . . “

Waimea got so big the entire bay began closing out and the tournament had to be called off.

Parsons, still apparently not fazed enough to take a reality break, decided to fly back to California and catch the swell when it hit Maverick’s, then travel to Todos Santos Island, thereby doing what no surfer had yet done: surf the same huge swell at all three places.

Sean Collins, a Huntington Beach-based surf forecaster who gathers weather data from several sources, and swell information from buoys, had timed the North Shore swell perfectly.

Acting on Collins’ tip, Parsons took the red-eye from Hawaii and arrived at San Francisco early that Saturday morning. But Collins had not counted on a change in weather conditions: a strong westerly wind was developing, which would create unsurfable conditions.

Collins informed Brown, who informed Parsons in San Francisco that Maverick’s was out and that conditions seemed to be improving locally. A Santa Ana wind was developing and if it strengthened, conditions at Todos Santos would be ideal by midday Sunday.

Parsons got on a plane and flew home.

Brown and the others, including Chesser, who had taken a red-eye from Hawaii to Los Angeles, left Orange County at 3 a.m. Sunday, embarked from a small harbor north of Ensenada and made it to the island at about 6:30.

The swell seemed to be arriving, though not in force. And something Collins had not counted on--another swell from the South Pacific--seemed to be interfering with the westerly swell, creating shifting, sloppy waves that the surfers wanted no part of.

They waited patiently, hoping for conditions to clean up, and for the Santa Ana to fully develop and blow the clouds away--it was still overcast and cold.

Parsons, crouched at the bow, cold and bored, finally decided to paddle out anyway. So did McNulty.

Slater, sporting a gaping gash on his leg, suffered when his board hit him after a wipeout two weeks earlier at Maverick’s, decided he wasn’t going to paddle out unless it got bigger and cleaner. Chesser made the same decision.

It soon became apparent, however, that conditions were not going to change any time soon. McNulty, after catching several waves and losing control and spinning down the face on a couple, paddled back to the boat.

Parsons stayed out a bit longer, waiting for a swell that would never quite materialize as he had hoped.

But he, too, eventually gave up and paddled back to the boat, where instead of voicing his frustration he chose to be philosophical.

“Even though it didn’t work out, I wouldn’t have wanted to miss if it did,” he said. “Last year I surfed Todos Santos huge two days in a row, then Maverick’s. And then I got on a plane for Hawaii, then flew back and got more big waves here. It was a week I’ll never forget.”