BREAKING THE SILENCE
The Big-Wave Map Gets Redrawn

Greg Long

The Sunday Sessions
Two days later, the weather had moved in, with dawn’s light barely penetrating the fog and intermittent drizzle of Sunday, July 30. On the back of Red Bull celebrations and revelry after Friday’s all-day stellar conditions, few could imagine the final swell pulse would surpass the prior days’ surfing. The resulting exodus of international and Durban surfers cleared the lineup for a Sunday session comprised solely of local Dungeons devotees and three well-connected Californians.

By virtue of their elongated African tenures and good-natured, inclusive personalities, the trio of Gary Linden, Grant Washburn and Greg Long are regarded as brethren amongst the local big-wave community. When the call came through that Dungeons was bombing yet again, Linden and Washburn were nursing vicious tequila hangovers, while Long awoke lost and stranded on the wrong side of Cape Town, scuttling to pick up dispersed equipment en route back to Hout Bay Harbor. There they motored out with the local tow-surfers—Andy Marr and Simon Lowe, Ross Lindsay and Mickey Duffus, Mike Schlebach and Jake Kolnick, Reynard Fourie and Jevon Le Roux, Davey Smith and Twiggy Baker.

By late morning, several tow teams had already been scouring the Dungeons and Tafelberg lineups, trailing for outside bombs and inside barrels. Tafelberg, an outer bomborra, one mile farther out than the Dungeons lineup, has the potential to hold even bigger swells than Dungeons due to its deep channel alongside, but without enough southerly swell direction was merely large and sloping.

Around noon, a quartet of paddlers hit the water: Nico Johnson, Grant Washburn, Gary Linden and Duncan Scott. Johnson, one of the pioneering Cape tow surfers, who has the lungs of a whale, was held so deep he lost faith in his ability to resurface again. “It was a very dark, very cold place down there, and I was lucky to come up at all,” he confided in the boat afterward. Bigger, inescapable cleanups sets started ploughing through the lineup, resulting in some severe beatings for the paddlers, including Linden, who was sucked backward over the falls on a 20-footer.

Grant Washburn somehow scratched into a colossal beast, negotiating it beautifully before enduring the rest of the set on the head. Thereafter, the paddlers acknowledged the changing dynamics of the swell, letting the tow-teams take over.

Even the tow-surfers were not immune to inevitable punishments, with both Twiggy Baker and Simon Lowe enduring double-wave hold-downs even with impact vests on, and Ross Lindsay was sent to the hospital after receiving a set of fins to his face.

All afternoon, solid 20-to-30-foot peaks were detonating across the zone under gray skies and offshore north-westerlies. Around 4:15 p.m., a three-wave set bulldozed across the Dungeons lineup, which would indelibly change both the South African and international big-wave maps forever. Last in the priority rotation, Jet Ski driver Twiggy saw the waiting teams ignoring the first of these darker swell bands and fired the starter, whipping Greg Long deep into the wave at the last moment. Coming from high up on the reef, and with no warbling foreground humps to diffuse it,