Matt Bromley is no stranger to heavy wipeouts. He’s made surfing huge waves his mission, and he’s not failing. But with huge waves come serious beatdowns, and Bromley is in the process of detailing some of his worst. The most recent installment of the series comes from Maverick’s, a place that hands out some of the fiercest wipeouts on Earth.
So far, Bromley has talked about a particularly bad fall at Pipeline that led to him finding himself trapped in an underwater cave. Next on the docket was a brutal one at a Nias outer bombie that very likely could have ended far worse. The Mav’s one, though, might top them both.
Bromley paddled into a big one at California’s most famous big wave spot. He was a little too deep, and went over the handlebars on the drop. Maverick’s is known as an extraordinarily heavy wave, which he knows all too well.
“The slab at Maverick’s is one of the most violent places on the planet with a huge amount of water,” he wrote, “focusing into a very small area, magnifying the power and intensifying the wipeout.”
Although Matt was wearing an inflatable vest, it didn’t help much when it was put up against the power of Mother Nature.
“I pulled my vest — I think I pulled it two or three times — so I was fully inflated,” Bromley remembered. “I was grounded on the rock… it was like I was at the bottom of this underwater waterfall. It was just surging down on me. Like the heaviness of the whole ocean just pushing down on my shoulders and weighing me down to the bottom.”
Luckily, he lived to tell the tale. Those who choose to spend their lives chasing big waves know the risks they’re taking and have, for the most part, trained for them. But it’s likely that with all that experience comes a hefty amount of humility. Bromley won’t stop chasing the type of waves he loves, but it’s likely that the way he goes about riding them has evolved over the years.
