Living the dream in the belly of a wave

Sideline Cut:Even as Edmund Hillary, the first man to ascend Everest, bowed out this week, contemporary adventurers continue to shoulder against nature's mightiest phenomena.

For the past few days, pictures of the 80-foot breakers surfed by four big-wave veterans off the coast of California last weekend have been circulating the globe, crossing over from surf publications to mainstream newspapers. You don't have to care for or know anything about surfing to appreciate the fabulous visual power of a silhouette of a man in a black body suit crouched beneath a terrifying, looming wall of water that looks set to crush him.

The oldest seafaring stories like to pit the ingenuity of man against the unfathomable power of the sea, and in these photographs the water looks as though it has come alive in anger and is chasing down its prey.

Mike Parsons was skilful and canny enough to surf clear of the wave before it collapsed upon him in the photograph that will surely become celebrated, and it is just as well because it is impossible to imagine any human being, regardless of his relationship with the ocean, surviving such an onslaught of water driving downward at such unmerciful velocity.

Parsons is regarded as one of the pre-eminent exponents of "big wave" surfing, an extreme pursuit that has reached Ireland in recent times. Whether surfing is a sport or a more spiritual communication with nature is a matter of ongoing debate.

There was no conventional prize at stake when Parsons and his three colleagues set off into the face of a storm to make their way some 100 miles out from the San Diego harbour to surf the notorious break on the Cortes Banks.

What they were seeking was, of course, the same sense of accomplishment that drove Hillary to keep climbing the mountain face over half a century ago. They wanted to surf higher waves than the surfing forefathers like Duke Kahanamoku would have ever thought possible and, of course, they wanted the rare adrenaline rush that would go with that experience of hurtling down a vertical 80-foot wall of water at around 50 miles per hour.

The prize on offer was succeeding in riding the biggest waves any of them had ever seen and - in grand seafaring tradition - living to tell the tale. Because the photographs are there to prove it, they have had no need to exaggerate the size of the beast they encountered. What they did took exceptional skill and courage and organisation and also a necessary element of vanity.

The laws of physics suggest no man should be able to survive the consequences of getting caught underneath the kind of pressure generated by such waves as they broke. The surfers had absolute faith in their own ability to stay on their boards and on each other: they towed one another on jet skies in order to reach the necessary speed to catch the waves as they peaked.

When surfing originated in Hawaii, the writer Jack London was among those absolutely entranced by the sight of fellow men seemingly gliding nonchalantly through the turbulent water.

Since then, and particularly with the infusion of the hippy influence in the early 1960s, surfing has existed in the popular imagination as a fun and self-consciously hip pursuit that took place within sight of the beach-front.

In recent decades, the clichéd portrayal of reefers, absurd clothing and dude-speak has made surfing an easily parodied lifestyle. But the period of the surfboard as fashion accessory has passed, and yet more and more youngsters, in this country and elsewhere, are turning to it in preference to the more traditional ball sports.

What happened out in the Cortes banks may as well have taken place on a different planet from the summery breaks that thrill surfers 15 or 20 metres off the coast of California - or, for that matter, Bundoran.

These four were all alone, 100 miles out in the Pacific, surfing waves that were basically created by an underwater mountain whose 4,000-foot peak comes within four feet of the ocean surface. They were surfing in a narrow time frame between the abatement of one storm and the arrival of another that was wheeling in from the mighty Pacific.

For the vast majority of people, it would have been a pursuit of absolute lunacy and certain death.

And yet the number of recorded fatalities in big-wave surfing has been relatively small. The most famous casualty was Mark Foo, the Hawaiian who was filmed as he tumbled off a relatively innocuous 18-foot wave in 1994. Foo, a small, fiercely brave surfer with an unabashed talent for self-promotion, was one of a number of celebrated big-wave surfers who had converged to surf "Mavericks", a wave break off San Francisco that was discovered in the early 1960s by Alex Matzeino, who promptly named the point after his dog.

The reef was famously described in Surfer - the magazine bible - as "gloomy, isolated and inherently evil". Local fisherman once pulled three great white sharks from the waters near Mavericks in one afternoon.

Even in the 1990s, just a handful of surfers had attempted it. Foo helped to popularise and mythologise big-wave surfing and so dozens of cameras were trained on him as he dropped vertically down a vast wave that broke viciously, split his board in three places and churned him around in much the same way as a rag doll might be spun in a domestic washing machine.

Mike Parsons was out on Mavericks that day and got pulverised in the wave directly after Foo: he too fought desperately for breath as a combination of churning water and ocean-floor debris kept him pinned beneath the surface. He brushed against someone's arm as he made a desperate attempt to reach the surface. Only when he made it back to shore did he realise he had glanced against Foo.

Foo had often spoken about his conviction that he would die just as he did, caught in the midst of a mammoth wave. He has become the James Dean of the big-wave phenomenon - the eternal poster boy. Since then, bigger waves have been discovered and pioneers like Laird Hamilton continue to push the boundaries of possibility through a combination of new technology, careful planning and reasoned bravado.

Big wave breaks have appeared locally, off Tullaghan in Donegal and off the Cliffs of Moher, and Irish surfers like John McCarthy and Richard Fitzgerald have joined the exclusive batch of surfers capable of mastering the scale and power of these freak waves, of channelling all that natural aggression into the extreme edge of exhilaration and eye-catching performance.

The blessed thing, so far, has been that most very good surfers seem to have understood that attempting to ride these monster waves would simply be stupid and probably fatal. But when you see those photographs of Mike Parsons, who is 42 years old now, out on the Cortes Banks in the midst of what looks like an unimaginably physical and sensory rush, it seems only a matter of time before bravado and a false sense of infallibility get the better of the younger generation.

And now that the 80-foot barrier has been tamed, the big-wave hunters will keep on searching for higher, wilder game.