The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean

[The waves] move across a faint horizon, the rush of love and the surge of grief, the respite of peace and then fear again, the heart that beats and then lies still, the rise and fall and rise and fall of all of it, the incoming and the outgoing, the infinite procession of life. And the ocean wraps the earth, a reminder. The mysteries come forward in waves.

The devices meant to float at sea and capture the waves' power have been destroyed in short order by . . . the waves. "they've all been smashed up in storms," Challenor said, shaking his head.

When waves or fire or an unplanned encounter with rocks disabled a ship

Louch logged countless hours in the North Atlantic in his day; he had traversed the Southern Ocean off Antarctica

Jaws is all about the hold-down,” he said. “Teahupoo is all about the bounce.

We pulled into the so-called safe zone, next to a pair of tow teams that had sidelined themselves, and as King reached past me to untether his camera case and assemble his housing, I started at Jaws. At about 40 feet, this wasn't the biggest day on record, but somehow that diminished nothing. The wave was breathtaking. As it rose, its face opened up to the cliffs and its lip curled over a full-bellied barrel. Except for the luminous glints of turquoise at its peak, the wave was sapphire blue, gin clear, and flecked with white. If heaven were a color it would be tinted like this. You could fall into this water and happily never come out and you could see it forever and never get tired of looking. Jaws did not permit its spectators to daydream about being someplace else, to feel bored or irritated or jaded. Watching it was an instant antidote to petty problems. There could be no confusion about who called the shots out here, at this gorgeous, haunted, heavy, lush, primordial place, with all its unnameable blues and its ability to nourish you and kill you at the same time. There was unspeakable power at Jaws, but it was the beauty that got me.

Every big-wave rider I’d spoken to had stressed the impossibility of getting a good night’s rest before a large swell. Hamilton referred to this tossing and turning as “doing the mahi-mahi flop. Full pan-fried mahi. Up every hour, looking at the alarm clock.

more than 60 percent of the global population lives within thirty miles of a coastline.