Reporting from The Pacific Northwest — The hunt is on. Garrett McNamara hurtles 60 mph down an icy river in the Great Northwest, throttling a 255-horsepower Sea Doo jet ski loaded with surfboards. His 11-year-old son Titus clings to his back, and a reporter clings to Titus’ back.
McNamara punches it up to 65 to cross the mud flats of a coastal inlet. The engine screams like it’s shredding sheet metal. Eyes tear up in the cold. The water is just inches deep. Tiny shells glint in the slipstream. McNamara does not worry about hitting a rock or submerged log. He is not a man given to thoughts of mortality.
McNamara, 41, has surfed some of the biggest, heaviest, ugliest waves on earth — notably the debris-strewn tsunamis generated by crashing glaciers in Alaska. He has broken his back and three ribs, popped both his knees, scraped most of the skin off his thigh, suffered countless sprains and deep-tissue cuts, and shattered his foot several times.
On this January morning, he is here to surf the local “slab” — not so much a normal ocean wave as a sudden, violent tear in the fabric of the ocean…. More info