Big wave surfing has really come into its own in the last decade or so. While it used to be a little more of a fly-by-the-seat of your pants, hold your breath, and cross your fingers kind of thing, now it’s a little more safety oriented and performance based. Personal water crafts piloted by surfers with heads full of rescue training cruise around the lineup, ready to fly in and yank someone from the watery clutches of a potentially fatal wipeout.
Impact suits stuffed with pads and balloons are wrapped around the surfer. Pretty much everything about it is safer than it used to be, but it’s still pretty damn dangerous. With the introduction of the PWC, however, a whole new set of dangers arose.
Take, for example, the day you see in the video above. Shot by the Mavericks Surf Awards team during a pretty epic run of swell, it shows how quickly things can go wrong.
“Maverick’s played host to big wave tow surfers from around the globe when a monster swell slammed Half Moon Bay on December 28, 2023,” the description reads. “Jet Ski chaos ensued, as one of the safety teams tried to escape a massive wave by punching through the lip to no avail.”
Luckily, nothing too bad happened to anyone involved. The Jet Ski was likely a little worse for wear, but for those who routinely surf Mav’s when it’s giant, mishaps like this one are par for the course.
