Surf & Destroy: Big Wave Surfing On The Billabong Odyssey

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Outside Magazine April 2004

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Surf & Destroy
Can a monster swell be tracked down and hunted like some great beast? That's the mad mission of the $3 million Billabong Odyssey, surfing's rapid-response quest to find and ride the biggest wave in history?

By Steve Hawk


	Don't look back: Billabong Odyssey surfer Ian Walsh in Maui, riding a 60-foot-plus wave at Jaws, January 10, 2004 (Tony Harrington)

RODENT IS TWITCHING. A new swell has finally arrived—the pulsing residue of a storm that spun off the Antarctic ice a few days ago and is now dumping snow in the southern Andes. We're a thousand miles above the bad weather, in Arica, Chile's northernmost coastal town, where the rain never comes. At a deepwater surf spot called El Buey ("the Ox"), the sets are triple-overhead, smooth and beckoning. The waves aren't quite the towering monsters that our ten-man "strike team" had hoped to find, but they're still big enough to make most surfers pucker.

Jiggling his knee impatiently, Rodent (a.k.a. Adam Replogle) is down at the waterline waiting for his tow-in surfing partner, a wiry guy named Ken "Skindog" Collins, who squirms into a wetsuit as he hustles from his seaside bungalow. Replogle has hooked an 800-pound Yamaha XLT1200 WaveRunner to the back of a truck and simply dragged it across the sand to the water. Forget the trailer: Swell's here, wind's calm, let's go.

By 9:37 a.m., Replogle and Collins have secured the rescue sled, basically an oversize boogie board, to the back of the jet ski. For this session, Replogle will do the towing, so he guns the 155-horsepower machine and the two surfers rocket out to El Buey's main reef, a half-mile offshore. At 9:44, Replogle is tugging Collins into his first wave, a clean and speedy 15-foot face. The shoulder races northward with alluring precision, and Collins takes full advantage of his whiplash entry, drawing long, powerful arcs off the bottom, then toying with the lip as he sweeps across the top. The barrel reels for 200 yards; as soon as Collins kicks out, Replogle is there in the WaveRunner, ready to pick him up and go again.

I'd surfed El Buey by myself two days earlier, when the swell was smaller but still big enough to make me pucker. Without the motorized assist, it took 45 minutes to triangulate into my first wave. I paddled 90 minutes and rode a grand total of four times.

Today, standing on the shore and enviously logging Skindog's rides—four waves in nine minutes—I think, What a dick.

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