Stoked! by Chris Bertish

Author:Chris Bertish [Bertish, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Big-wave surfer Chris Bertish was the first South African to brave the monster waves of Mavericks, winning the Mavericks Big Wave Invitational surfing event in the biggest and heaviest waves ever recorded in the history of the sport. That same year, he finished third on the Big Wave World Tour, despite only surfing three of the five events. With his infectious enthusiasm, Chris tells how he pulled off death-defying antics, time and again, overcame overwhelming obstacles and manoeuvred around the many random twists of fate to achieve his goals and fulfil his dreams.
ISBN: 978-1-77022-765-1
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2015-07-03T22:00:00+00:00

6

Doldrums

Don’t fence me in

It was never my intention to “make my mark” on big-wave surfing. The Big Four trip was a personal mission to surf the biggest waves I could find and get this obsession out of my system. Now that I’d done that (by swapping Teahupoo for Jaws), I assumed I could just move on with my life. But things rarely turn out exactly the way we plan.

I’d become the first South African to surf Mavericks. I’d paddled into and surfed the biggest wave in the world that year at Todos Santos, and won an award that I didn’t even know existed. I’d become the first documented person in the world to paddle into serious waves at Jaws. After all the publicity and media coverage – on the internet, a double-page spread in Surfer, a feature in Surfing and the cover of Zigzag – I thought I’d get offered good local or international sponsorship. But it never happened. So I told myself it was time to return home, settle down, get a job and start a regular life. I figured I would get the house with the white picket fence and the Jack Russell, get married and have kids. But I was wrong.

Big waves weren’t out of my system. As much as I tried to move on, now that I’d really had a taste of the biggest and best of them, my desire to chase them and ride them had only strengthened. I tried to ignore the pull. For three whole years I tried to put it out of my mind, but I was just really unhappy. Every time I saw a big swell appearing on the charts somewhere in the world, I’d get anxious, irritated and depressed that I wasn’t there to surf it. It must be how a drug addict feels when they aren’t able to get their fix. It’s like this torturous, irritating, sickening feeling that won’t go away, and it just gets worse and worse as the swell approaches. And then the reports start coming in from your friends saying that the waves were epic. And that makes it even worse, hearing what you missed out on. It’s horrendous.

I had taken a job as Billabong South Africa’s national sales and promotional manager, based in Jeffreys Bay. For the next two years I just put my head down and worked really hard. So hard, in fact, that I hardly got in the water at all. Eventually I realised that having a great job title, a good salary and a seven-hour drive to Cape Town every alternate weekend to see family and friends wasn’t really making me happy. And there was something else – I wasn’t getting to do the one thing in life that really made me happy: surf really big waves.

I’d lost my sense of humour. When you’re working so hard, you get so absorbed and caught up in it all that you don’t have time to come up and take a breath. I always

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