The Maui Effect (Man-Made Trilogy #1)

Barrels, Tubes & Shacks

Dane

As they rounded the point, everyone on the boat was holding their breath, waiting to see what Todos Santos had in store. The wave broke on the western tip of the north island, off a rocky outcrop outside of two lighthouses, and was hidden from view from the mainland. Dane trusted Manuel—he knew these waters better than anyone—to keep them outside the surf, but close enough to get a good look. Now they were in between sets, the water silver smooth with patches of foam floating here and there.

Kama was already zipping up his wetsuit. “Evidence.”

“The calm before the storm,” Holmes said, eyes on the horizon.

They were the first ones out, but it wouldn’t be long before others showed up. Initially ridden in the sixties, the break had managed to remain off the radar for another twenty years or so until Surfing Magazine ran an article that reverberated around the world. Suddenly, a world-class wave right off the coast of Baja California. Every big wave surfer wanted in.

Yeti, who had been sitting alone in the back, meditating on the ocean like he always did, came up to Dane holding his phone, his bushy eyebrows arched.

“Mate, the buoys have jumped up. Looks like the swell is going to be bigger than expected.”

Last they checked, it was already going to be huge.

“What’s the interval?”

“Harvest Buoy 24 feet, 17 seconds. Tanner Bank Buoy 26 feet, 17 seconds.”

Dane almost spit out his coffee. “You’re shitting me.”

“I don’t shit.”

They had now slowed and were motoring outside the red and white lighthouse and brown cliffs splattered with white bird poop. Slick current lines flowed out to sea, and sucking boils appeared near the rocks. Manuel cut the engine and they waited. A few minutes later, two jet skis showed up. Water safety, care of Holmes, since a good portion of surfers who came out here stayed at his casa .

‘Iwa came over and rubbed Dane’s shoulders, saying nothing. One of the things he like about her. No wasted words. On the way out, he’d been watching her watch the ocean, observe the islands and birds, sniffing the air and looking stunning even under five layers of clothing.

“A penny for your thoughts,” he said.

“It kind of feels like we’ve stepped back in time.”

“Mexico has that effect. It’s why I love it.”

“What was Yeti saying to you a minute ago?”

For a split second, he thought of skirting the truth, but with ‘Iwa it felt like he’d taken some kind of truth serum. In the past, when it came to women and surfing, he sometimes told white lies to make life easier. Nah, it’s not that big. Or when he’d paddle out alone. Going out with the boys. But now, nothing untrue could come out of his mouth.

“That the waves are going to be bigger than we thought.”

“It seems so peaceful now.”

On the other side of the boat, Yeti said, “Incoming.”

Dane leaned down and kissed her, inhaling the scent of coconut lotion coming off her skin. “What’s your Hawaiian word for wishing me luck again?”

She held on to him a little longer than usual, her thin arms surprisingly strong. “E ho‘oikaika nō . It’s not luck you want, but strength.”

The waves seemed machine generated. Big—but not too big—peaks that stood up on the rocky point and peeled down the line. Wave faces glimmered in the morning sun with pieces of kelp glowing gold. For a blissful half hour, it was just the four of them in the lineup, with Holmes shooting. The waves were supposed to build throughout the day, so this was just the beginning.

Dane kept an eye on Hope, who sat closer to the shoulder, taking the smaller waves. She could charge with the best of them, but after a double-wave hold-down in Fiji last summer, she’d become more cautious. In big surf, the double-wave hold-down was every surfer’s looming nightmare. A one-wave hold-down was bad enough in waves this big, lungs ready to burst, darkness and disorientation already critical. And then to get held down in that state as another wave passed over you, well, the experience would bring you to the brink. Dane hoped to never have the honor, but knew it was probably a matter of time.

The ocean will humble you.

When the next boat showed up, letting loose a posse of Hawai’i guys—Saville, Barels, Middleton, Christensen—Dane was stoked to share the lineup with such solid surfers, legit watermen. Guys who did it for the stoke, like him. Mother ocean kept the waves coming, providing enough for all. Then, as promised, Holmes went in and exchanged his camera for a long red gun. Hope also went in, setting up her giant telephoto lens on the front of the boat. ‘Iwa sat with Manuel on the bridge, probably picking his brain and memorizing the names of every plant and creature around. Gulls skimmed across the face of unridden waves.

Could life get any better than this?

Slowly more boats began arriving, with more surfers. Every wave that broke peeled fast and clean. Todos Santos was delivering in the best possible way. But a little after ten o’clock, the sets started breaking farther out, and Dane got a prickly feeling on the back of his neck. The ocean gave off a briny scent, as though new levels of bottom were being stirred up. Wind came on, not too much, but enough to hold up the waves even more and making them harder to paddle into.

In order to catch a wave, you had to be moving faster than the wave. And the bigger the wave, the faster the water moved. Waves formed when the water traveling underneath the surface hit a reef or a sandbar or something solid, and then slowed. But the water on the surface kept moving at a higher speed. Once the water underneath could no longer support the water above, the wave broke, crashing down on itself. Barrels or tubes or shacks—whatever you wanted to call them—were formed.

As a kid, Dane knew this intuitively, but it was Yeti that made them all study the physics of waves and surfing. Know your opponent. Now the waves were getting harder to paddle into. His arms burned as he scratched to get into the last one, a fast, hurling right that almost took him down. A boil appeared and nearly threw him off the wave. At the last minute, he managed to come up high and fly off his board, over the feathering lip. The water tried to suck him over the falls backward, but he kicked with all his might and pushed through.

Dane paddled back out to where Yeti sat, noticing a strengthening current along the way. “I don’t know how much more it can hold.”

This was as big as he had seen Killers while still being able to paddle into it.

“I guess we’ll find out,” Yeti said, not taking his eyes from the ocean.

“Have you seen Kama?”

“He’s on the boat. He lost a fin.”

A small bump rolled in, lifting Dane and Yeti. He turned to look at the smattering of surfers in the lineup. The crowd seemed to have thinned and those remaining were not talking amongst themselves. They were all quiet in the way that surfers were when the situation became critical.

Yeti lay down and started paddling. “I’ll see you back in the boat.”

“You’re leaving?”

Yeti didn’t answer.

“One more and I’ll be there,” Dane said, wanting that wave that would at least put him in the running for the XXL.

Seven minutes later, the wave he had been waiting for came right to him, an enormous, burly thing that flung him down the face at Mach 5. This one threw a thundering barrel behind him, but he was too far ahead to pull inside. The remaining surfers scrambled to get out of his way. He barely made it past the pitching boil, when the wave walled up even steeper. He had no choice but to keep riding, on and on and on, closer to the cliffs.

When he kicked out on the inside, he understood why everyone had been paddling wildly toward the horizon. The next wave was bigger than anything they’d seen yet and cleaning out everything in its path. An absolute closeout. Dane watched Saville and Barels get sucked over the falls backward and detonated, and the rest of the guys were bobbing around in the whitewater trying to collect their boards.

He started paddling out, but got mowed over by froth as he tried to duck dive. The water ripped his board out of his hands, but his leash held. Breathe, Parsons, you got this. Once he slid back on the board, though, he took a few strokes and was hit by another explosion of whitewater. Another unsuccessful duck dive. Then another. His ears ached and his lungs felt the squeeze. And the waves just kept coming. His board felt wobbly, and it took him a moment to understand it had buckled in the middle.

Fuck.

He turned to see how much room he had before he hit the shoreline and saw half of a yellow surfboard high up on the rocks.

There were only two options: keep trying to paddle out and risk getting taken by the rip and smashed to pieces where the yellow board had landed, or paddle toward a less formidable area beyond the lighthouses. He chose the latter. Or rather, the latter chose him. With the force of the waves and the sheer amount of moving water, he had little say in the matter. The rocks were getting closer. Boulders the size of televisions, then farther along, basketballs.

Still, the whitewater kept coming. All around him the ocean was just being ocean, doing its thing. The boom of rocks smashing together, water sucking. Sharp tang of seaweed and bird shit. Murky water, brown cliffs. Then his leash snapped and his board disappeared. This was close to worst-case scenario, but at least he hadn’t hit bottom. Or had he? He felt a little loopy. Up ahead, he saw a bunch of rocks sticking out of the water like spires. Those would tear him apart, no question.

With every ounce of remaining energy, he swam straight in, ready to cut his losses and wash up on the smaller rocks. What happened after that, who cared. There was no timing it, no control at all, really. All he knew was that he wanted out. Just before impact, he lay as flat as he could to lessen the brunt of an inevitable hard landing. His knees bumped rock, but he washed up without major consequence. Slippery moss on the sea-smoothed rocks made it impossible to get any kind of grip. Another wave came behind him and washed him farther up, then retreated.

Dane lay face down, arms and legs spread out like Spider-Man. Ragged breaths, heart jackhammering in his chest. Slowly, he half crawled, half dragged himself to a patch of dry rocks at the bottom of the embankment. There, he sat and took inventory. Sore left knee, bleeding right hand, just a small gash. Everything else seemed intact. Except there was a metallic taste in his mouth. He wiped his upper lip and his hand came away bloody. He rubbed his forehead, and a chunk of skin came off in his hand.

Then, either he was hallucinating, or he heard a dog bark.