Dangerous Fun by Ugo Corte;

Author:Ugo Corte; [Corte, Ugo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO000000 SPORTS & RECREATION / General, SPO066000 SPORTS & RECREATION / Cultural & Social Aspects, SPO069000 SPORTS & RECREATION / Water Sports / Surfing, SOC026000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2022-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

Getting caught inside and preparing to be mowed over.

Phil warns me that the worst-case scenario is probably being hit by your board, blacking out, and having your leash snap. Finding you in time to try to revive you—or finding you at all, even if only to bring some peace to your loved ones, then becomes a nearly impossible task. The depth and expanse of the ocean swallows you. As Tom Farber writes: “Drowning, death from submersion in water. Swallowing the sea, being swallowed by the sea.”11 The majority of drowned bodies are never found, which makes closure difficult while adding mystique. Eddie Aikau is only one name among a long list of surfers who died this way, not counting the many others whose bodies were never found. Phil adds that a good thing about wearing a flotation vest is that your family can have your body back, and can have an open-casket funeral. “It’s huge for having closure,” a lifeguard confirms. Phil says he has seen all sorts of freak accidents, the bottom line being that as soon as you enter the ocean anything can happen. Your leash can get tangled on a submerged rock, causing you to drown, and some argue that this probably contributed to the death of the Hawaiian big wave surfer Mark Foo while visiting Mavericks in California. Foo’s last wave, as documented by a sequence of photographs, was not particularly large. Certainly nothing out of the ordinary for him in terms of size. But it was a wave somewhere other than Waimea, and in colder water too. Foo was tired from a red-eye flight, true, and the cold water probably magnified the impact of that factor. There were of course many other surfers and photographers there; but there wasn’t any explicit rescue plan in place, and no strong community norm of surfers working together to enhance and ensure safety.

Before the formation of the Big Wave Risk Assessment Group (BWRAG) in 2011, and other similar groups, “people would get desperate, or wouldn’t pay enough attention, while now everyone knows what to do. They have life-saving eyes,” a founder of the group says. A handful of surfers established BWRAG because of the drowning at Mavericks of their friend Sion Milosky. The group holds a yearly four-day workshop before the start of the winter season, including presentations by paramedics, lifeguards, and other specialists teaching apnea, jet-ski training, breath-holding, and forecasting. One topic that is discussed is the exit plan at each surfing spot: what will you do when things go wrong? “Everyone needs to be on the same page,” the same guy tells me.

Big wave surfing has progressed and changed much in the last decade, and understanding the evolution of safety procedures and technologies is certainly key to understanding risk-taking in this social world.

I haven’t experienced a truly bad wipeout surfing Waimea, but I almost drowned while surfing Jockos on a double-overhead day when I got caught inside by a larger set. Some waves can hold you down more than you would expect, while others may “release” you quicker than you were anticipating.

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