The Wedge, and Hurricane Marie, 2014
On Sunday, August 20, the Category One tropical storm formally known as Hurricane Hilary churned her way across the border from Northern Baja, Mexico, and into San Diego County, the first storm of such magnitude to make landfall in California since 1939. September 25, 1939, to be exact, when a Category One tropical cyclone with the eminently descriptive name of El Cordonazo (a nod to the devil winds known to Baja residents as El Cordonazo de St. Francisco or “The Lash of St. Francis”) actually made landfall near Long Beach, causing millions of dollars in storm damage and killing an estimated 100 people in Southern California.
Oddly enough, I already knew this – and not surprisingly in the context of surfing history. A number of years before his death in 2011, I had the great pleasure of talking to pioneering surf photographer LeRoy Grannis. Already in his eighties, Leroy still displayed a full measure of the keen perception that no doubt contributed to his reputation as a master lensman, and it was a real privilege to sit at the knee and talk story with someone who began riding waves in the early 1920s. It was the length of that surfing life that I was most interested in, marveling at the breadth of experience one might achieve over an eight-decade time span.
“Think of how many more epic swells you’d get over an 80-year period,” I suggested. “As opposed to 20, or even 30 years of day-to-day surfing.”
“Not as many as you might think,” LeRoy told me. “For example, a surfer your age has never even seen a really big south swell. Because there hasn’t been one since 1939.”
LeRoy then regaled me with tales of the last truly big south swell to hit California, courtesy of El Cordonazo, whose particular storm path pushed ahead of its spinning eye huge swells that reached the West Coast days before St. Francis’ lashing winds.
“Imagine Malibu, ten-to fifteen feet, every wave breaking out past the end of the pier,” he recounted, matter-of-factly. “Long Beach Flood Control jetties out of control and winter spots like Rincon breaking ten feet in the summer. No, there hasn’t been a swell like that since then. Nothing you’ve seen, Sam, can compare to it. And that was over 60 years ago, so when you think about it, that means that a surfer might only get to experience only one or two really big swells in their lifetime.”
Fine, I asked for perspective. But I’ve thought a lot about LeRoy’s proclamation in the years since, and never more than during the last week, when virtually every Hurricane Hilary headline referred to 1939 in its subtitle, pointing to the fact that it had been 84 years since the last tropical storm had reached our western shores. Because of its signature track there’d be no 10-foot summer Rincon, so the surf forecasters told us, but it was nevertheless a significant event, impacting surfers and non-surfers alike.
But what about those extraordinary storm-related events that do impact surfers lives directly? Was LeRoy right? Might we only see a few in our short lifespans? The day before Hilary made its wild border crossing I ran into legendary Malibu surfer-lifeguard John Baker, who whether strictly for fun or in the tower has been checking the surf each morning since the early 1960s (and who, in his mid-70s, still rips on everything from a 6’6” Channel Islands to a 9’6” Robbie Dick) and asked if he could recall the most epic swells he’d ever seen.
“September, 1975,” he said, the memory obviously fresh in his mind. “South swell, and Malibu was 10 to 12 feet and perfect. Perfect, with Santa Ana offshores, and really strong, with non-stop sets, a lot of waves breaking past the end of the pier. I got one from Third Point, I don’t know, maybe double overhead-plus, and as I got closer and closer to the pier I could see these broken pilings washing back and forth off the end, and, hey, I thought about it. But at the last second I chickened out and pulled out over the back.”
Marie and Malibu went well together. Photo: Screenshot
“I remember that swell,” I told him. “SURFER magazine called it ‘The Monster from New Zealand.’ But was that it? After all these years.”
“Well, no, there was Hurricane Marie,” Baker said. “That was the biggest, best Malibu I’ve ever seen.”
“The Monster from New Zealand” and Hurricane Marie, two swells separated by almost 40 years; the two swells that stand out in a hard-core septuagenarian’s lifetime of surfing. I couldn’t help but think about my own time spent chasing waves, and the all-time swells I’d personally seen. In ’75 I surfed The Monster super swell, as well as Hurricane Marie in 2014. During the crazy winter of 1983 I rode giant Santa Barbara Sandspit – the biggest ever seen – then watched, spellbound, as videos taken on January 5, 2023, showed Sandspit breaking bigger than anyone who was there in ’83 could ever have been imagined. Again, two “”biggest days ever,” experienced four decades apart.
The “Eddie” contest at Waimea Bay had to wait 38 years for its “biggest day ever.” East Coast surfers waited a helluva lot longer than that for 1995’s Hurricane Felix, then Sandy in 2012 – waited since…well, since forever, really. The point being, that when you make an objective assessment of surfing history, truly epic swells really are few and far between.
So what should all this mean? I don’t know how you feel about it, but thinking back on that conversation with LeRoy Grannis, my conclusion is that it might be a good thing for surfers of all ages to begin looking at waves a bit differently. Or maybe judging them differently is a better way of putting it, doing one’s very best to resist comparing every session to those extremely rare epic swells that you may have had the good fortune to experience – or most probably have only heard about. Knowing that those aren’t the sorts of days that sustain you – they can’t, apparently appearing only once every 84 years. It’s got to be all those swells between, throughout the entirety of your surfing life, that provide the lasting satisfaction that makes waiting patiently for the next “biggest day ever” a whole lot easier.
