The murder of Captain Cook at O-Why-ee. O-Em-Gee.
Worse things happen at sea. Anyone who spends enough time around the ocean knows this to be among the truest adages ever spoken. Brett Archibald certainly does. He is the unlucky South African who spent a little over a day treading water and being pecked by seagulls in the Indian Ocean after falling off his boat. Of course, he survived, so it could have been worse; although those might not be the first words I would say to him. By surviving his ordeal, he joins an illustrious list of surfers who have experienced some very bleak moments in the open ocean and lived to tell the tale. The following is a list of five of most harrowing in no particular order and judged only by me. Of course, it doesn’t include your stories, so please share them in the comments. Feel free to exaggerate where necessary.
1. Cook Runs Aground
Captain Cook didn’t surf. But it was through his expeditions that Europeans got the first written account of surfing, many of the headlands that create Eastern Australia’s famed point breaks were named by him – (see “Point Danger” ie, the Superbank) and due to the fact that he was killed by native Hawaiians, you might say he was murdered by surfers. Although Cook is often credited with “finding” the Great Barrier Reef on June 11th, 1770, the truth is that he ran aground on it. In doing so, he punched a hole so large through the bottom of his flagship, the Endeavour, that he was in danger of sinking. Put yourself in his slightly soggy shoes: you are now stuck in the labyrinth of an uncharted reef system in a sinking ship that meandered off the end of the known world some weeks ago. Luckily for all involved, Cook was, at least until his third voyage, known for his imperturbability. In order to keep his neck above water he and his crew jettisoned much of their non-essential items and used an old sailors’ trick called “fothering” in which a spare sail is covered with tar and yarn then spread across the hole from the outside in order to plug it. Cook is considered by some to have been one of the preeminent English navigators of his day and never did he prove it better than in the way hey then steered his ship Northward through the Great Barrier Reef to a small harbor where the Endeavour was beached and repaired.
2. Angels and Sharks
Jose Angel is one of the Paul Bunyans of our sport. Described by Greg Noll as “the gutsiest surfer there ever was,” he was one of the most respected watermen in Hawaii in 1970s. He was known as much for his daredevil antics as he was for his surfing. The stories about Angel can fill up an entire article – indeed, Bruce Jenkins wrote an entire article about him in 1992 that is a classic of surf journalism – but there is one in particular that concerns us here. At some point in the mid seventies (dates vary), Angel was diving for black coral off the coast of Maui. After coming up from one of his legendarily deep dives he finds that a strong current has swept him out to sea and his spotting boat is nowhere to be found. At the moment when most people begin to panic, Angel gets his bearings and decides that the only remedy for this situation is to swim to Molokai, the next island in the chain. The swim was thirteen miles topped off with another four mile walk through the jungle to a payphone. Regarding sharks, Jenkins quoted Jeff Johnson saying: “A little 13-mile swim didn’t bother him a bit. He told me the sharks started coming up and circling him. So he went down and yelled at them.”
3. Freeth Freezes
Freeth was the physical opposite of Angel, but perhaps his equal in the water, if not in outsized personality. For all of Freeth’s fame as a surfer and life saver, we know comparatively little about the man due to his somewhat retiring nature. One thing we can say is that he apparently had a robust disregard for his own well-being. At no time was this better demonstrated than on December 16th, 1908, when a squall sunk the ships of some local fishermen in Santa Monica Bay. Freeth spent the next two and a half hours swimming out to the stricken vessels and ferrying men back to shore. When you consider that the water of the Bay would have been a balmy 59 degrees Fahrenheit, the ordeal is put into numbing perspective.
4. “Awe, Mate, In Australia…”
If you drink enough with enough Australians, you will find that most of them have a few traumatic stories up their sleeves, and by comparison, their traumatic stories make your traumatic stories sound like gentle drives in the countryside. Aussies are the undisputed masters of getting into grim situations and living to tell the tale in an entertaining and self-deprecating manner. And so we have the anecdote of one-time World Tour great Dean Morrison’s ill-fated Queensland fishing trip. Morrison, along with fellow irreverent Queenslanders Paul Fisher, Darren Scott, and Dean and Shaun Harrington, better known as “the Hazza twins” took his boat to Hamilton Island off the coast of Northeast Queensland with the intention of fishing in the shipping lanes that crisscross the reefy warren of the Whitsunday Islands. Apparently, none of the crew were especially experienced fishermen or boatmen. They were, however, all very good drinkers. During a session on the sauce they managed to decelerate too quickly and swamp their boat, sinking it in under a minute. What followed hovers, in true antipodean fashion, somewhere between harrowing and hilarious. They swim to an island, get separated by currents, find each other again, spend the night spooning on the floor of a pit toilet, encounter venomous snakes, swim to another island, get separated again by currents, dodge crocodiles and tiger sharks, and finally encounter an unsuspecting couple who alert the coast guard. Oh, and Morrison did all of this with a newly operated-on hip. See more on that story here.
5. Obligatory Chris Ward Story
Whereas most people can claim a bit of bad luck in their brushes with watery death, Chris Ward seems to invite these sorts of escapades. Three years ago, he and his girlfriend, Ashley Rogers, motored out to a slab in central California. On the way back Ward’s boat overheated and, well versed as as is when the going gets tough, he turned around and headed back out to sea in order to make sure he didn’t get pushed onto the rocks if his engine died. Die it did, and the Coast Guard was called. Now, in true “Ward Story” fashion, is when things get really crazy. Aboard the 47-foot Coast Guard boat, the captain decides to start “surfing” waves into the Bay. Surprisingly, this turns out to be a less-than-safe idea, and the boat flips sending Ward and Rogers into the drink. Somehow they manage to not drown or get crushed by the rolling boat and the lifeguards buzz out on a ski and pick them up. Between court hearings, getting smacked around in Hawaii and hurricane chasing in Baja, this was probably not even the craziest thing that happened to Ward that year. Read more about that one here.
