On February 24th, Nazaré really did its thing. That “thing” is producing waves on an almost unimaginable scale, and as is generally the case when that happens, a few of the usual suspects were there to try and wrangle them.
Nazaré is a wild place with waves that are fueled, like all waves, by storm systems. What makes the waves off that sleepy little Portuguese fishing village, however, is a deep underwater canyon that funnels all that raw power into a pretty small zone.
“Think for a few seconds about what happens when you throw a stone into a serene pond,” explained Sally Warner, an Assistant Professor of Climate Science at Brandeis University. “It creates a ring of waves – depressions and elevations of the water’s surface – that spread out from the center. Waves in the ocean act similarly. On rare occasions, earthquakes and landslides can generate waves, but usually, waves are created by wind. Generally, the biggest and most powerful wind-generated waves are produced by strong storms that blow for a sustained period over a large area.”
Take, for example, the wave Maya Gabeira rode at Nazaré on February 11, 2020. It was a world record, and it was likely generated by a storm that swirled somewhere between Greenland and Newfoundland a few days earlier. “The waves within a storm are usually messy and chaotic,” Warner continued, “but they grow more organized as they propagate away from the storm and faster waves outrun slower waves.”
But since waves aren’t just on the top of the ocean, the seafloor is what makes them surfable.
“When waves move into shallower water close to shore, they start to ‘feel’ the ocean’s bottom,” said Warner. “When the bottom pulls and drags on the waves, they slow down, get closer together, and grow taller. As the waves move toward shore, the water gets ever more shallow and the waves keep growing until, eventually, they become unstable and the wave ‘breaks’ as the crest spills over toward shore.”
In Nazaré, the canyon rears up steeply as it nears the coast, and since all that storm power is funneled right up to it, those waves get enormous. And of all the surfers who tackle them, Lucas Chumbo stands out.
He’s not just a Nazaré surfer. In order to really surf the place at size, a surfer needs to be equally as good at all the other stuff that comes along with it. Piloting the all-important sled and having the rescue skills necessary to save a life, should you need to, are just a few of the skills Chumbo has, but it’s likely the ride itself is the real cherry on top.
