Matt Bromley spends much of his time chasing waves that could kill him. It’s a weird way to pass the time to some, but for surfers like Bromley, there’s no other way to live. In the course of that search, he has, as you’d expect, been dealt more than his fair share of brutal wipeouts. Which is why he created a little series called Worst Wipeouts.
The first installment detailed a horrific beating he copped at an outer bombie at Nias. The second comes from Pipeline, which is one of the most dangerous waves in the world. Even the best surfers can’t escape injury, and this past year was a real doozy. Koa Rothman got 21 stitches to the face. Eimeo Czermak came frighteningly close to dying. Austin Gibbons had his lungs filled with water after a two-wave hold down. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“The thing that makes it so dangerous, it’s lava rock,” Bromley says. “It’s very very uneven so you’ll get like a slab of lava rock and then you’ll get a hole or you’ll get a cave or an overhang. There are different parts of the reef; some parts are very shallow and other parts are much deeper and it makes the wave warp and change and do crazy things. That’s one of the reasons why guys like John John and and Jamie O’Brien and these dudes are like some of the best barrel riders in the world: because of how difficult Pipe and Backdoor is.”
In Bromley’s account of his Pipeline wipeout, he tells how he ended up in one of the many caves in the reef below the world’s most famous wave. The day he was surfing wasn’t all-time, by any means. Bromley, by his own telling, prefers to surf Pipe when it’s not perfect, due to the crowds. But Pipeline is still Pipeline.
“This particular day was very marginal,” he remembers. “There was a bit of wind and backwash on it. I think it was a rising swell, so there was an extra period in the swell, which makes the wave lurch a lot more and be a lot more unpredictable.”
A wave came to Bromley that looked, at first, as though it was going to be a really good one. Bromley spun, paddled hard, and dropped in. The drop at Pipe is a steep one and requires some very fine board control, of which Bromley has in spades. But sometimes, things just don’t work out.
“I remember it being really steep and I had it,” he says. “Then suddenly I hit a backwash and the whole wave wobbled. I lost my fins, went over the handlebars, and up and over the falls. As I went up and over the falls, I must have been in a very shallow spot, because I landed straight on the reef… I was tumbling along the reef, then I went over a ledge and into a hole. As I went into the hole I got pushed under an overhang and I was closing my eyes, pinned against the back wall. I could sense that the there was a roof over me and I had this moment of intense panic because I was pinned against the back where the water was surging into the hole pushing me back against the back wall. It was pitch black and aerated with bubbles and I knew I was in a cave. In my mind, panic hit.”
I’ll let Bromley finish the tale for you, but it sounds as though it was an absolute nightmare. But he didn’t let it stop him.
