Matt Bromley at the top of what was to be a very bad wipeout. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
As a professional big wave surfer, Matt Bromley has spent far more time dealing with horrible wipeouts than the average surfer. “I feel like as a professional big wave surfer,” Bromley said, “I’ve been exposed to some really, really scary situations.”
Bromley has a little series running on his YouTube channel called, fittingly, My Worst Wipeouts. This is the fourth installment, with previous episodes covering wipeouts a Nias outer bombie and a particularly terrifying Pipeline hold down. In this one, he details a fall on a wave that metes out some of the worst wipeouts in the world: Jaws.
“Waking up in my tent and paddling out to 50ft Jaws,” he wrote, “I recall one of the most violent and deepest hold downs of my career.”
This one happened in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdowns. He arrived on Maui the night before the session in the video, and he slept in a tent above Jaws. As many of you will know, when you’re sleeping within earshot of a huge wave, both the sound and the excitement make sleeping difficult. Bromley got almost no sleep.
“First thing in the morning,” he recalled, “I paddled out to some giant, giant waves. Windy, aggressive, violent Jaws.”
Right off the bat, he stroked into two amazing waves. With the tiredness washed off and his confidence rising, things were looking up.
“I really thought my trip was already made with those two waves,” he said. “I remember thinking to myself ‘I want to go sit way out the back and I want to wait for a wave that’s going to change my life.'”
It truly was a massive day — according to Bromley, there were opportunities to get 40-foot barrels. Then a wave approached that was almost unbelievable.
“The wall of water fills up the whole bay,” he said. “It feels like it’s going all the way across the bay to the mountain. It’s filled with this thick, big wall of water that comes into the bay. As it does, it starts to bend. It starts to wrap on the reef, and it feels like all that energy starts to converge right into the point of take off where you are. It’s the most intense feeling.”
Bromley made a quick decision to go, so he swung and paddled into the stiff offshore wind.
“It was an amazing feeling,” he said. “The feeling of committing to something that feels on the edge of my ability. Those are the moments that I really look for.”
As fate would have it, though, this particular wave was not the perfect one he was dreaming of. The bottom dropped out too fast, and Bromley knew then he was in for a bad time. In a split second, everything went wrong. The wind coming up the face got under his board and although he struggled mightily to correct, his foot slipped on muddy wax. That sent him into a sort of cutback away from the face of the wave and under the falling lip.
“I just knew I was in for one of the most intense scenarios of my life,” he said.
Luckily for Matt, he’s trained for those scenarios. But all the training in the world can’t ever fully prepare you for the real thing, and it’s a wipeout Bromley will never forget.
