For surfers who ride big waves, perhaps the most enticing, terrifying and humbling spot on Earth is a sunken island in open ocean 100 miles off the Southern California coast.
Cortes Bank was a California channel island 10,000 years ago, when the Ice Age lowered the sea level by 400 feet, journalist Chris Dixon says in his just-released book, “Ghost Wave: The Discovery of Cortes Bank and the Biggest Wave on Earth.”
Greg Long surfs a wave estimated at more than 50 feet at Cortes Bank, about 100 miles off the Southern California coast. One day in 2008 at Cortes Bank, Long may have ridden the two biggest waves ever surfed, according to fellow San Clemente surfer Mike Parsons.
Today it’s a hidden island, a sea mount where the ocean floor rises from a depth of 6,000 feet almost to the surface. In 1990, Dixon … More