Mark Healey has surfed a lot of good waves on a lot of good days. Far more than most people ever will, so when he calls a certain swell “by far the standout of the whole season”, you can bet it was a really good swell. It wasn’t just Healey saying it, either. “Pretty much as good as waves get,” according to Grant “Twiggy” Baker. Maybe not so good for the Average Joe who isn’t necessarily able to surf waves the size of buildings, but for someone like say, Mark Healey, John John Florence, Koa Rothman, Ezekiel Lau, Kohl Christensen, Twiggy Baker, Mikey Wright, or Anthony Walsh, it was definitely the standout. We’re talking, of course, about Super Swell Saturday, the day that Hawaii went next-level.
“The buoys were hitting super strong, the wind was kind of southeast, which is pretty much ideal. I just knew it was going to be on. That day, you could tell in the morning that it was going to be a really special day. The buoys just kept rising and rising… knowing that was going to hit us in another nine hours, you just knew you had this entire day-long window to get giant surf.”
Healey packed his gear and headed to an outer reef that he knows very well. When he got out to the wave, it was just about as perfect as perfect gets. Most of the best big wave guys were out there at some point during the day, and since the big wave community is relatively small, it was likely one of those days that will remain stuck in each of their memories for a long time to come.
“It was one of those days to try and catch a wave that I’ve always been dreaming of,” Healey continued. “You only get so many chances at catching a truly giant wave in your life, and I just knew it was going to happen that day.”
At first, Healey was trying to catch every wave he could. The excitement was getting to him, and he wasn’t picking them right. “They were clamping on me and stuff like that,” he explained. “Finally, a bomb came and I ended up catching that. I think it’s the fastest I’ve ever gone on a surfboard. I was trying to turn my surfboard, and my surfboard was like, ‘Nope, I want to go the beach.'”
He ended up falling on that particular wave. He leaned a little too far forward and skipped on his stomach a few times before getting sucked up and over. “It was a crazy view that I had,” he remembered, “stuck in that lip upside down and looking out. I just remember thinking, ‘Okay, I got my foam floatation on, I got a little bit of air in my Patagonia vest, so if I hit the water so hard that I get knocked out, I’ll have enough floatation for someone to come pick me up.'”
Thankfully, he didn’t get knocked out or injured in that wipeout. Perhaps just the opposite, in fact. For months before, his neck, back and hips had been bothering him. That violent wipeout, Mark suspects, fixed what was ailing him. That wipeout drove him to want the biggest of wave his life even more than he already wanted it, but that’s when things started to go wrong. Like, really wrong. But we’ll let Mark take it from here. Watch above as he breaks down the full day, which includes the fact that after everything went pear-shaped, Healey went back out to catch some more waves.
Learn to push yourself, keep calm, and manage fear in heavy surf with Mark Healey’s Guide to Heavy Water.
