100 Foot Wave (2021) s01e01 Episode Script
Sea Monsters
The idea of surfing
on a hundred foot wave
came purely from trying
to get the rush.
There was no wave too big.
It was just looking for bigger and bigger and bigger.
The 100 foot wave has become this phantom legend.
Does the hundred foot wave exist? I think, it does.
Is it surfable? I don't know.
It's a very fine line.
Surfing big waves is very exhilarating, but quite scary too.
You have to have that mental attitude to be willing to die.
And die again and again.
And that's wave after wave, day after day.
You start to fear for your life.
It's pretty crazy seeing those images of surfers on big waves.
And you wonder how do we survive that.
Whenever you fall on a big wave, you don't have any control of what's about to happen.
You are blasted this way, blasted that way, flying up all over the place.
When you're holding on to your last breath, there's panic and there's fear.
The goal is to face fears, to go straight at the fear, to release it, to free it.
In doing this and facing this fear, I'm going to discover a part of myself that I didn't know was there.
Check out these monster 100 foot waves off Portugal.
The biggest wave ever surfed as high as 100 feet.
To put that into perspective, that is taller than an eight story building.
Surfers are always looking for the next great thing.
It often breaks those brave or crazy board riders.
Severe wipeouts and waves of mind boggling height.
What happens here happens nowhere else in the world.
The biggest wave ever surfed.
100 foot wave.
100 FOOT WAVE Chapter 1 Sea Monsters My name's Garrett McNamara.
I'm an ocean explorer.
I just feel real comfortable in the ocean.
Probably more comfortable than I do on the land.
Garrett McNamara, known for discovering and pioneering and surfing the biggest wave in the world.
Garrett is an American professional big wave surfer.
Hawaii's big wave rider Garrett McNamara has ridden what could be the world's biggest wave.
This daredevil Hawaiian is still pushing the envelope, chasing one final prize, to surf the perfect wave.
Hey, baby! - The waves are coming, huh? - Yeah.
Tradewinds offshore? Yeah, it's going to be giant, like 15 miles an hour.
Perfect.
All right, bye.
I've always wanted to ride a wave over a hundred feet.
And there's not another place in the world like Nazaré in Portugal.
That's the only place that I see the potential of a hundred foot wave.
One, two, three.
I am getting ready physically, mentally, spiritually to go back to Nazaré.
This year, I am very, very confident that we're going to ride the biggest wave ever ridden out there.
I've been surfing my whole life and it has pretty much been a dream the whole way.
When we were younger, I would spend my last penny to go hunt for a wave.
I would literally not have any money left at the location and I would have to sell surfboards to get a plane ticket out of there.
I would do everything and anything you could do to get to that next big wave.
But at 35, I gave up on my passion and I opened a store because I thought it was the responsible thing to do.
I thought it was what we're supposed to do.
I had three children with my first wife and I didn't think there was a future in surfing.
Since I had surfed my whole life up to that point, I felt like, okay, I already got to surf till 35.
So working for the rest of my life isn't too bad.
I should be very happy to just work now.
My brother's t-shirt.
It's him on the shirt.
After about two or three years, I was pretty miserable going to work every day.
I was driving to the store and I was passing perfect waves and I was getting depressed.
I thought to myself, man, I really want to give the surfing one more chance.
I wrote a business plan to keep surfing, basically a roadmap, keep surfing was the goal.
Training, focusing, manifesting was what I felt was the way to achieve that.
We're in the parking lot of the store that I very fortunately got to close.
It was doing well, it was a successful business, but it wasn't fun.
When friends came in talking about how good the waves were, I'd just be like, don't even tell me.
I don't remember it being red.
Garrett, I don't really remember hearing from him for a while, but when tow surfing emerged, right around the turn of the century, that's where Garrett reinvented himself.
In the beginning, there was paddle surfing and it started out in smaller waves where if you could just make it outside was a challenge.
There was no jet skis, there was no flotation, so we went as far as we could go with our arms.
At some point, with all the North Shore breaks, they're all just so crowded.
It's just so hard to get the good wave.
It's like being in a ski resort and there's just hundreds of people on every run.
And then there's mountains in the back.
Laird Hamilton, Derek Dorner and I, we went, "maybe if we take my Zodiac out there," "we can start tapping into these back mountains".
The very first day that we implemented the technique in large conditions, it was Thomas Edison and the light bulb.
Everything lit up and we were like, yeah, we're onto something.
I was on the beach watching that first day.
And I was instantly like I'm just watching them ride wave after wave.
I felt like I was a cartoon character with the jaw dropped on the ground and I'm just watching.
We knew that it was something special.
We knew that it was going to change the way we rode giant waves, but I don't think we had any idea to what extent.
When we started towing these waves, it was like an untapped resource, but it was kind of a risky thing, especially with the Zodiac.
The challenge with the Zodiac is there's a propeller and that thing will chop you up.
So Zodiac can't really go in and rescue you.
So the only way to catch it, once it gets over like 50 feet tall, is with a jet ski.
We took both the WaveRunner and the jet ski over to Maui.
Then we found out that it can handle as big as mother nature can send.
Using a jet ski allowed access to these outer reefs.
And it turned out those waves breaking out there were much, much bigger than anyone really realized, that there were suddenly 50 foot waves and 60 foot waves.
And they were everywhere.
Now, there was no waves that were too big to ride.
You could surf anywhere.
Garrett really kind of burst back on the scene in about 2001, 2002.
There was a series of swells at Jaws.
And one of them was for the Tow-In World Cup.
There was a contest at Jaws and I got invited somehow.
I thought winning the event was the way to keep surfing.
I remember the very first day that he came to Jaws, it was probably one of the better days that I've seen at Jaws.
The waves were really, really good.
And it was a giant day.
I'd never been to Jaws and it was terrifying.
I was so afraid.
First wave, I panicked, I chickened out.
And I was like, kind of embarrassed and ashamed.
And then he put me on another wave, right in the right spot, and I just ran.
Got to a channel, kicked down.
And then the next one, yeah.
And the next one started to turn, started to have fun.
And right at the horn, we got the third wave.
We ended up winning.
It was a 70 000 dollars purse.
The highest purse ever won with the biggest waves ever competed in.
And then I wanted to get barreled.
I saw so many guys riding so many waves, not in the barrel.
And so the next year, went and got barreled.
Holy shit! I was in the water shooting a big 35 millimeter camera rig.
It was like a 50-foot day.
And I turned on the water and I just zoomed in enough, and I just saw this wave barreling.
It just spit.
And then this little guy came out and it was Garrett with his hands over his head.
That was the deepest anyone had ever gotten inside a barrel out at Peahi and come out.
It was something that we hadn't been doing quite like that.
We had been moving a lot more slowly.
We were just trying to survive it.
I have a saying, ride to ride another day.
And I think Garrett's saying is, ride to ride today and maybe not tomorrow.
When Garrett caught that giant barrel, I was sitting in a tree with my younger brother and my best friend.
And we could not believe our eyes.
Part of me thinks he came from another dimension.
I got sucked up into the barrel and then, like a cannon, just whoosh.
Opened my eyes, looked up, my hands up.
Thank you, God.
That ride was like, the biggest barrel ever gotten to date.
It's still probably the best barrel ever ridden at Jaws.
That stands the test of time almost 20 years later as one of the biggest, best barrels that any human being has ever ridden.
That wave revitalized my surfing career.
I closed the store and then it just went bananas.
He won some awards with that wave.
It was massive.
The winner is Garrett McNamara.
That was the turning point for him to say: "You know what?" "I'm going to focus on catching the biggest wave in the world.
" I'm a little lost for words.
It happens once in a while.
He got so focused on chasing the biggest, gnarliest waves.
Anytime there was a swell anywhere, you knew Garrett was going to be there.
And he was frothy.
I mean, he went mad.
He just went everywhere.
Garrett's really found his niche by being somewhere acceptable by the surf industry, but largely being a maverick out doing his own thing.
He's never, ever been comfortable just being part of the surfing herd.
And because of it, he's really stood out and had one of the most spectacular careers that's come out of big wave surfing.
Holy fuck, it's Garrett McNamara! There's traditional surfing, and there's extreme surfing.
I prefer to do extreme surfing, put your life on the line every time you go out.
Everybody always just thought I was crazy, out of my mind, but they don't realize that I was focused.
I had a plan every big swell, I was going after something.
I'm in search of the biggest waves to ride.
And that'll take me all over the world.
I'll ride a hundred foot wave.
Actually, I have no interest in a hundred foot wave.
I want a 120 footer.
That way they'll be no ifs, ands or buts about it.
Big wave surfing has been one of the strangest evolutions just over the last 20 years.
There was a time when the only place that had big waves was Waimea Bay in Hawaii.
And every few years just out of the mist would emerge another place.
Mavericks suddenly emerged.
And Jaws really showed that there were 60 foot waves, 70 foot waves, 80 foot waves.
Cortes Bank put the whole idea of the hundred foot wave out there.
And the most recent one to shatter everyone's notions of big waves was Nazaré.
And for sure, Garrett was the first to go there.
When I met Garrett, he had all these brilliant ideas and all these goals and all these things he wanted to accomplish.
And one of them was riding the hundred foot wave.
I really wanted to help him get organized.
And so I traveled everywhere with him, every swell.
I was always there.
We were inseparable.
At that time, nobody knew about Nazaré.
It was not a surfing town.
I've been involved in surfing for a long time.
I was at Surfing Magazine in the eighties.
I did a lot of traveling in the nineties and a lot of surf exploration around the world.
I had never heard of Nazaré prior to Garrett.
In fact, I'd never even heard of big waves in Portugal.
First time I heard about Nazaré, I got an email from Dino.
He was working for the city hall of Nazaré.
I was walking and I stopped near the cliff to see the view.
And I took a picture of a perfect, incredible wave.
I didn't realize how special that wave and that picture was until I arrive home.
I immediately think that I need to do something.
I found Garrett's website and I sent him an email with this picture saying that we had a giant wave.
That's over a hundred feet.
He asked me, can you come see if my wave was big and good? And he sent me a picture and it was amazing.
We emailed back and forth for about five years.
Never really got anywhere.
And then Nicole saw the email chain.
That looks big.
And she said, what is this? And I said, some guy in Nazaré wants me to come check out his wave.
I think he had just been watching these waves his whole life and he wanted to see somebody surf them.
When I was a kid, I was always passionate about the giant waves.
And that was a passion that I cannot explain you.
Every time that we had a giant swell, I walk to the lighthouse, spend there four hours or five hours just enjoying.
And I always want to share that.
So I found the email and I was like: "Do you want to go?" And he said, yes.
And then in a month we were there.
It was just Garrett and I, and we had zero expectations.
We were in love and it didn't matter what was here, we were going to have a good time.
So literally the first place we went when we arrived was the lighthouse.
This is incredible.
Beautiful.
So we get out, we could barely open the car door, cause the wind was just pounding us.
So this is the first day.
This is crazy.
You feel the power from here.
You can feel the shaking.
That thing's probably 50, 60 feet tall.
You're gonna die right there, guaranteed die.
This is incredible.
This is big and dangerous.
Crazy.
It's going to be a fun trip.
At that time in my life, I would almost surf anything that broke and nothing was too big and nothing was too dangerous.
I was real hungry and real focused and determined to find this hundred foot wave.
And I thought with Nazaré, it was possible.
I got lucky.
The one thing that defines Nazaré, the unique aspect under the water is the canyon.
It's three miles deep, three times the size of the Grand Canyon.
When the swell comes down on the canyon, it moves faster and gets compressed.
And that's what draws the waves and magnifies them.
They cross up at the right time and it just creates this wedge.
40 to 60 foot wave is all of a sudden 80 plus.
These waves come out of a 10 000 foot deep trench and just lurch up out of the ocean.
I mean, they're basically sea monsters.
The scariest thing overall is the unpredictability.
It's a hundred foot beach break and it's over sand.
What that means is waves break everywhere.
There's almost no predictability to it.
Whereas Jaws is a solid reef bottom and the wave will break in the same spot just about every time.
Nazaré is very different than almost any other spot in the world.
Jaws, Waimea Bay, Mavericks, they all have a big channel, which is a spot off to the side where the water's super deep, where waves will never break.
And you're able to sit there on your surfboard or in a boat or jet ski and just watch what's going on.
And if you do ride a wave, you can get off to safety rather quickly.
Nazaré is different because there is no channel for you to go to where it's safe.
Oftentimes you're going through the rinse cycle where you have to keep going through wall after wall of whitewater.
It looks totally unrideable.
There's no safe zones.
I don't know how I was thinking that we could ride it.
But luckily we stayed.
So we have big storms forming in the Northern part of the Atlantic.
But this is a more typical winter condition for us.
We went with Garrett to the Hydrographic Institute, where he learnt the process through which big waves in Nazaré are formed.
We went out on the sea with a probe.
And thus he found out which were the best spots.
19, 20.
We're in the canyon? We need the cameraman right here.
He knew exactly, by looking at the land, if the depth was 100, 200, or 20 meters.
And thus he found out which were the best spots to catch the big waves.
That's the wave.
That's where it'll break.
See the swells? Garrett came, he saw really the magic of Nazaré and he literally put his life on hold and he studied these waves.
He learned these waves.
He put the time in because he believed in this place.
I guess I was just really hungry for adventure at that time of my life.
You got to see the wave out there.
It's huge.
I don't know.
I think probably 100 feet waves are out there right now.
Did anyone come here before Garrett? Yes.
Of course, a lot of surfers were here and it was crazy, but nobody thought that it was possible to ride those waves.
So the first time I witnessed Nazaré, it was in 2005.
When we walked up, and it looked like a hundred feet, perfect pipeline.
I'd never seen anything so perfect.
And it looked like you could make the wave, but then you would get washed up onto the beach.
Ross Clarke-Jones was pretty much my mentor when it came to huge waves, his approach.
And for some reason he decided not to go out.
I think mainly because it looked possible to ride, but not possible to rescue.
I regret not going out to get that one wave in Nazaré the first time.
But the skis weren't right, they were like puddle jumpers.
No one was either keen or capable of trying to rescue someone back then.
The first year we went to Portugal, we decided to build a brand with the town of Nazaré.
It was called the North Canyon Project.
When we build the project in 2010, Nazaré was really known and famous because of its summer.
Because it's a really beautiful place with a lot of traditions.
The beach is amazing in the summer, but during the winter days, it was a really quiet place.
And that's why we built the project, to show the waves to the world, and to give reasons for the people to visit Nazaré also in the winter.
Just like Jaws is on the map as one of the biggest waves in the world, Nazaré, the goal was to put it on the map also.
Just like a knife to cut the waves.
There was no money, no sponsors, no nothing.
What we did have was the full support of the city hall.
It's a big pleasure.
The first year was real bare bones.
The main guy was Paulo Caldeira.
He is pretty much the only reason we made it to Nazaré because he organized it all.
Then we had Pedro Pisco.
He was our right hand.
He was in charge of getting us where we needed to go and what we needed to do and how we needed to do it.
Jorge Leal got brought in by the city hall to just document whatever we were doing.
He was mainly a still photographer, but he knew how to hold a video camera.
Celeste supported the North Canyon Project and she gave us so much good food.
Thank you.
Then there was Pitbull.
When Garrett arrived to Nazaré, everything was new and different for us.
And he start putting people in places and he decided that I should be a safety driver.
I never went on a jet ski, almost all my life.
So I was learning.
Garrett taught all of these guys how to handle a ski and how to take care of a ski, how to maintain a ski, how to put the sled on, how to put the straps on.
That was all from the first project.
We were such a tight team.
We did everything together, planned everything together.
The early days, it was really easy.
It was just us.
So there was no distractions.
There weren't very many people or businesses that supported the project in the first early years because they didn't believe what was out there.
Hey, Garrett.
This is Lino.
But Lino believed in what we were doing and saw what was possible.
Big wave surfing is particular because it's not the kind of surfing where you can grab a board under your arm and go do it.
It needs a team.
It needs logistics, jet skis, proper boards, proper suits.
There are no big wave surfers working alone.
Lino did work for the city hall basically.
When the project came in, the city hall didn't have money to fund anything.
So Lino actually supported everything.
In the beginning, the community in Nazaré was like: "Who are these people? What are they going to do there?" The people from Nazaré have suffered a lot in the past because of the waves.
Lots of people have died.
There have been accidents.
Nazaré was a small village, a fisherman village.
In the past, there was no harbor and the boats had to enter on the sand.
The big waves, they put fear on the fishermen.
Many times, fishermen died during that process.
My great, great grandfather died on the sea and that's the history of most of the families of Nazaré.
All my family are fishermen.
And if you are going to the sea, you work 10 hours.
When you come back, it's the big waves.
And sometimes the boats fall down.
And sometimes people die.
My uncle died in a ship.
It's danger.
It's not easy to look at the same sea that brought so much pain to these people as a place for crazy people to play with jet skis and boards.
The scariest day was Garrett didn't know the place very well yet.
He was by himself without a jet ski.
And he was like: "I'm gonna standup paddle from the village all the way around.
" "And I'll catch a small wave on the other side and I'll come in.
" And he decided to do this in his board shorts in November.
The day that Garrett decided he wanted to surf, the waves were not that big, but the inside was so much current.
And I tried to stop him, but he did: "No, I'm going.
" "People, trust me.
I'll do it.
" So he paddles around.
He catches a wave and he wipes out.
I was panicking.
I was thinking that he wouldn't make it.
I was swimming in and it kept sucking me back out.
I was getting very winded.
He had a really hard time getting to the beach.
And he was exhausted.
If he didn't make it to the beach, we didn't have a jet ski, there was nobody to save him.
He would've just been swept to sea.
I think that day was decisive for him to learn what Nazaré is all about.
This wave is powerful.
This is nothing to mess around with.
You got to have a really good driver.
You gotta know exactly what you're doing.
It's so gnarly.
That showed Garrett the respect that you have to have when you go out there.
My only concern is the safety of everybody.
I was really concerned about what I did, sending the picture to Garrett, inviting Garrett to come.
And I have all the weight in my shoulders of the responsibility if something bad happened to someone.
You might fall because the rocks are - Slippery? - Yeah, slippery.
Be careful because the rocks might Go down, go down.
We were a little afraid of what could happen.
We didn't know Garrett that well.
And we thought that if this go wrong, somebody's going to die.
We knew that all the big wave spots around the world already had guys dying.
The power of the wild California waves has been a magnet for surfers from all over the world.
Tonight, one of the very best, Mark Foo, has died.
32 year old Kirk Passmore of Haleiwa was last seen wiping out on a huge wave.
Amid the wild waves, a tragedy.
A surfer found floating face down and unconscious in Stillwater Cove.
We knew that guys died here and there.
And we thought Nazaré was more dangerous.
If somebody dies, somebody is going to come to us and say: "What the hell? What did you guys do?" On the first day that Garrett went out, it really was giant and we were on the top of the lighthouse, just shaking.
We were like, really scared because we were responsible for that.
We were on the cliff and we were seeing the waves and we're trying to guess the size.
And then we saw the jet skis arriving and because the jet skis were there, you had something to compare, you know, finally.
And we all were looking at each other, like, what is this? The waves were looking huge.
When we saw Garrett on the water, we finally understood the size of those waves.
Okay, go! When Garrett caught a wave, it was magical.
We were like, the guy survived! For us it was like a dream come true because we really didn't know if that could be possible or not, somebody could surf that or not.
We understood that we had found the gold.
And we went to the harbor and he was so relaxed.
Like, this is doable.
This is nice.
Garrett fell in love with Nazaré.
The corner must be fun right now.
See those little waves? So we stayed that first year, learning as much as possible.
Look how beautiful it is.
During that time, my brother came to Nazaré to surf with Garrett.
2010.
Yes.
Yeah.
In 2010, that was my first time to Nazaré.
I actually was in Guadalajara, Spain and I was playing a season of volleyball there.
Garrett said, yeah, come by for the weekend.
So I went for three days over to Nazaré.
We had surfed together and he said, "you surf well enough".
"I can teach you how to drive the jet ski.
" "I can tow you into some of the biggest waves of your life" "and you can just learn.
" And I was just blown away.
I didn't know what was going on.
I tied it too much.
You with the He-Man grip, the gorilla grip.
Let me see your hand.
Give me your hand.
You got more meat.
Yours are like salchichas.
My first impression of the waves was why are we here? Like, what am I looking at? Can I be out in those waves and have fun and not just be getting washed around? And it was mostly just faith in Garrett at that point.
I'm the only guy you listen to out here and the only guy who pretty much talks unless you have a question.
Nobody tells anybody what to do, except me.
- I'm serious.
I'm not joking.
- I know.
You don't listen to me on this only when you're absolutely 100% sure that what I'm telling you to do is gonna kill you.
Other than that, you listen to me in the water.
He hadn't steered me wrong.
And he still hasn't really.
He was just egging me to go out and this is what we're going to do.
So I'll put you on the wave.
We do this, super easy.
We go, catch some waves.
I'm like, all right, let's do it.
Just take your time and relax.
Yeah! Hey, stay here.
You're going to go like that.
Go! Cut back, cut back! - How was that? - That was perfect.
So yeah, he brought me out into the waves and I just got a couple of waves.
He drives so perfect.
He put me right on the spot.
15 feet, 20 feet at the biggest, the face.
Yeah, that was my first tow-in experience getting a little bit bigger waves.
So we just got done towing and CJ went out for his first time.
How was it out there, CJ? I am officially hooked.
I gotta work on my upper body strength.
Couldn't hold on any longer.
Just the stamina.
You just gotta do it a few times.
I was getting that choppy smacking feeling on the drop, going pretty fast.
The hardest place in the world to train.
If you could do it here, you can do it anywhere.
Technically I'm the first girl to ever tow surf in Nazaré.
My dad's a surfer.
So I grew up surfing small waves, but I love standup paddling and I love standup paddle surfing.
The day Garrett took me out, it was not a pretty day.
It was freezing cold.
It was stormy.
And he says to me, don't worry.
We'll just tow around a little.
And then this wave just came out of nowhere.
He's pulling me up.
I'm not even fully up, and he's saying: "Go, go!" "Let go!" So I held on too long and it flung me down the wave.
But I was like a stone, I just skipped on the face of this wave.
And then you can see, I go over the falls and you can see my little arm sticking out of the wave when it's crashing down.
I was kind of disoriented cause I was so cold.
And then at that point I was kind of towards shore and he's like: "Stand up!" But it's just sucking you back out to sea, it doesn't spit you out.
And then finally I got far enough up that this little wave pushed me up and you can see me like a starfish, just like floating.
I couldn't breathe for like three days.
I really have PTSD.
Like just going out on small waves, freaks me out.
I love to breathe.
I just don't want to be held under water.
I love breathing so much.
People really take it for granted.
Where's Chris? Where was Chris going? He's gonna go dive with Billy.
For a husband and wife who work together, we've learned how to really effectively communicate with each other.
So this is really cool.
Garrett is an idea man and I'm more of the practical woman.
So sometimes the idea and the practicality and the logic interfere, but we have an amazing life and we've been really blessed.
This one spot around the corner is one of the most beautiful places.
There's a pod of dolphins that we hang out with a lot.
Swimming with the dolphins here in Hawaii, it's just euphoric.
You're just connecting with nature, in the ocean and the saltwater.
Just super special, especially with the family.
Garrett's very intense, but at the same time, he's a very loving, caring, sensitive person.
And he loves his family.
I really don't know any other big wave surfer who travels with his family the way we do, but it's challenging for him, for sure.
Garrett's not at peace with himself.
I feel a deep sense of responsibility.
I should just focus more on my family and being present, but I still feel like I need to do more for some reason.
I know my purpose.
It's riding big waves.
In November 2010, the largest swell of the season appeared on weather maps.
That's a good swell.
So this big swell was coming and we're like, okay, who's Garrett gonna work with? We needed somebody with experience to drive the jet ski.
I definitely wasn't towing him in, especially after my episode.
And we heard about this Irish tow team.
Big wave riding is an opportunity that even the most experienced surfer might turn down.
But for two Plymouth surfers, it's more a case of the bigger, the better.
Normally you'd have to sort of travel to the other side of the world to surf waves that sort of size.
Hawaii, Australia, places like that.
But it's sort of surprising that they're actually right in your backyard.
We were sort of surfing big waves, or trying to surf big waves, but there wasn't really any professional big wave surfers in Ireland at the time.
So we didn't have anyone to show us or tell us anything about how to set a jet ski up.
We were just watching YouTube videos and trying to work out how you tow surf.
At that time, these big waves, they only existed in people's minds in Hawaii and California.
They didn't exist in Ireland.
Before I met Cotton, I was struggling to find somebody who had the same vision as me, that wanted to ride bigger waves.
And I was sponsored by a company who made surfboards and Cotton was the guy that fixed the surfboards.
And he also was working on a building site as a plumber's apprentice.
He told me he'd ridden a couple of big waves and he wanted to see what this was like.
So I invited him over.
So within about the first week of Cotton coming to Ireland, I took him out to Mullaghmore Head cause it was a gigantic swell coming.
We're gonna go tow surfing.
Should be fun.
I'd never driven a jet ski and I wasn't the quickest learner.
And I was having a terrible time.
He was struggling to get me on the waves.
So I then got on to the jet ski to put him on a couple of waves.
Then like that bang, bang, bang, he got like three waves.
So then he's like, right, I want to get you one.
He gets on the ski.
And there was a big wave coming through, like it was a proper 40 foot thick, big, angry thing.
I can remember like in slow motion just thinking this is going terribly wrong.
Fuck, fuck! Get the phone.
Jesus! The wave swung wide an extra like hundred meters and I couldn't outrun it.
I was like, I've got to get off this here, like jump.
He positioned the ski where I should have been.
And basically he went for a surf with the ski and I didn't.
When I look back at that footage, like, what are you doing? But I didn't know what I was doing.
I panicked.
It took me about 20 minutes to get back to shore.
And then I spotted the ski and him on top of it way off the coast.
And the jet ski wouldn't start.
Somebody who happened to be onlooking from a nearby house called the coast guard.
Helicopter is now overhead.
They moved him from the jet ski and took him out of there.
But the ski was gone, it disappeared.
That was the end of it.
It was a pinnacle point.
because for me, it was like, give up now, just like suck it all off and just actually ask for your job back and go back or you got to really make it happen.
It was actually thanks to Al.
He was like, we're going to do this.
We'll get a new ski.
We'll come back harder.
So we surfed big waves in Ireland for two years or three years.
And then that's when Garrett reached out to me and Al.
October 2010, we had surfed this new location off the coast and it was really big and really perfect.
And it got a lot of media attention.
And at that time Garrett was in Portugal and I think he'd seen this.
Look at that! Holy shit! And at the time I believe he was struggling to find people who wanted to surf Nazaré.
When Garrett went to Nazare the first time I was actually doing the standup paddle world tour.
And I can remember him asking me to join him to go.
I think he couldn't find anybody else to go at the time.
He was out telling me and all the guys here are like, "I'm not going there.
" Yeah.
Okay.
Sure.
There's a giant wave in Portugal.
I don't like cold water and halfway around the world.
It's like, no.
I tried to recruit a bunch of people.
A lot of people.
Nobody came.
I don't think I'd met Garrett before this point, but when he phoned me, I immediately said yes.
How do you feel your level of driving is? We get by with what we know.
I don't know what you would say we're capable of.
I think if you were here, maybe you could teach us quite a few things.
I was kind of out of my depth.
I wasn't really that confident on the ski.
And I think Garrett realized that.
He was on a search for people that were obviously good, but also willing to learn.
Andrew Cotton and Al Mennie came.
We became fast friends.
Meeting Garrett was kind of surreal.
We went from having the worst luck or driving skills ever to like being asked to drive around Nazaré on a jet ski with one of your surfing heroes.
That next morning, Garrett drove the car up the hill to the lighthouse.
And at that time the lighthouse was a kind of out of town area.
No one really went there.
There's a dusty road down to this old fort down on a very prominent headland off the west coast of Portugal.
And there's a real feeling about the west coast of Portugal.
It's an end of the world feeling.
You feel like you're on the edge of the world.
It's raw.
On that morning, I remember standing down there and the explosions of the waves hitting the rock in front of the headland were earth-shattering.
The waves were hitting this rock and pouring up over the top.
It felt like it was almost reaching for us.
It was like reaching up.
As it got to the edge of the path, it just dropped down and you're like, "oh".
Garrett actually asked the question, he said: "You are doing this for your own reasons.
Aren't you?" Which made me realize that he understood that this place is very dangerous.
He understands the ocean in terms of big waves as well as if not better than any other big wave surfer on the planet.
So for him to tell us that this is serious, this is dangerous, that really made me go: "How dangerous is this?" I think part of the reason that big wave surfing resonates with so many people is because everyone's been to the beach and played around in two foot waves and been tossed around by this little wave that will hold you down against your will.
And if a three foot wave is going to do that, what's a 60 foot wave going to do to me? Falling on a sixty plus foot wave is like being in a car accident for a solid minute.
It's just the most violent rag dolling experience.
If you try to fight it, you feel like your arms and legs are just going to get ripped clean off.
It is so much power.
You're underwater getting beat and you don't know which way's up.
It gets dark down there and you're just getting spun and you just let your last breath out.
There's always this feeling: "God, is this ever going to let up?" It's really terrifying.
The reality is that riding big waves is dangerous and you can die from it.
And people do.
It's not a joke.
Nice! I got the rush fully, like more than I do in the waves.
- Let's just go home then.
- Yes, it's done.
We're done.
Coming from Ireland, I was a self-sufficient big wave surfer.
Everything I did was by myself.
I organized everything myself.
But turning up in the harbor in Nazaré, all these local Portuguese men, they were setting up jet skis for us.
They were like towing them around.
What is this? I started to realize this was a huge passionate endeavor by the local crew.
Most people can't get the funding to run a local contest, local small wave surf contest, but they had managed to get this crew of people and the backing of their government to fund and help support Nazaré as a big wave surf destination without even knowing if it was possible to ride at size.
There was definitely an air of concern from the local guys and you could see it in them and you could feel it in them.
And rightly so.
Nazaré is a very dangerous place.
The first time that we surfed together in Nazaré, there's a lot of pressure.
You doubt yourself.
Your anxiety, your fear, you're stressing that the waves are going to be big.
Are you going to be good enough? The system we were trying to develop for doing this safely was that we were going to use one surfer being towed by one driver and another jet ski to track the first team as a safety precaution.
That hadn't happened before in the world of surfing.
This is my first time.
I'm on the ski.
Garrett's driving and we go down to the rock.
We were rounded about three seconds and Garrett's going: "Get on the rope!" And I'm going: "What?" And there's like fifty foot peak just going everywhere.
This was like a war zone, peaks and waves coming in from every angle It felt like you were being hunted.
That's honestly what it felt like.
And he's shouting: "Get on the rope!" And I'm like: "Would you shut up? Let me have a look at it.
" Nazaré isn't like any other big wave spot.
It's a different animal.
It comes in taller and taller and wobbles and it moves and it shifts and it breaks a bit and a bit more and then it goes waaah! What'd you think of the waves? It looks heavy.
That's the first time I've seen it.
So it's nerves and fear.
We've surfed and towed beaches, but nothing like that.
When we first got there, a couple of really big waves came and it seemed really big and it just seemed to get bigger and bigger and more water moving.
When we first drove out this morning, Garrett was like a kid at Christmas and I'm sitting there going: "Look at how crazy it looks!" I heard you were the king of the morning, you got the biggest one.
I think a big one.
Did I? It seemed quite big.
As I started looking down the wave, all I heard was Garrett shouting: "To the bottom.
Go to the bottom.
" He's driving the ski.
It's definitely been a memorable session.
There's no doubt about that.
I'll never forget it.
It was big.
And a lot of water moving.
And the drops were Never got to the bottom.
Never got to the bottom.
Right? Did you get to the bottom? I don't know.
And then all of a sudden you start riding.
You keep going down.
It's like, scary.
Scary, right? From speaking to the locals afterwards, there was a real turning point that day.
When Garrett fell on a wave, both Andrew and I immediately ski straight in after him.
We went straight in through all the chaos where all the huge whitewater is rushing through, where we had never been before and we got him and then we raced all the way to shore and we fought our way back out.
And I think that was the first time that ever really happened.
Nobody had really had to go in and do that sort of a rescue before, but it made us realize that this was possible.
You were a champion in there.
I was on the back of his ski and I felt really safe.
Well, that's good, at least you know that as a result.
The first day I surfed with Cotty, I really had an amazing connection with him and really felt comfortable.
At that point, I was a plumber from Devon.
Not many professional surfers would have trusted a plumber from Devon to go tow him in Nazaré.
He gave me the time, he didn't care where I was from, my background.
So I think that just speaks volumes to me.
It was just the right time for me.
I was just at a point where I hated plumbing and I was just so into my big waves.
It was just a dream to be doing it at all.
Surfing with Garrett in Nazaré opened my mind to how you approach a big wave, not just how you physically approach it, but how you mentally approach it, what you can survive and what that takes to surf the biggest waves in the world.
I was just like a sponge.
It was just amazing.
So what's next for you? I've got to get home.
I'm a plumber.
Gotta get home.
- I've got two jobs.
- So you're used to barrels? Used to lots of water leaking everywhere.
Today's our last day.
And we're going to go paddle around and just really get to know the canyon and its surroundings.
And just enjoy it and get ready to come back.
I got invited here to Nazaré by Dino and the city hall and it far exceeded my expectations.
The waves are giant, powerful and challenging, and I consider it a second home now.
I've surfed waves all over the world, chasing swells everywhere.
There's all these guys searching for this hundred foot wave, and everybody wants to ride the hundred foot wave.
I know it's here and I know it's for real and I know it will happen.
So mark my words, we'll be riding one out here someday.
There was no wave too big.
It was just looking for bigger and bigger and bigger.
The 100 foot wave has become this phantom legend.
Does the hundred foot wave exist? I think, it does.
Is it surfable? I don't know.
It's a very fine line.
Surfing big waves is very exhilarating, but quite scary too.
You have to have that mental attitude to be willing to die.
And die again and again.
And that's wave after wave, day after day.
You start to fear for your life.
It's pretty crazy seeing those images of surfers on big waves.
And you wonder how do we survive that.
Whenever you fall on a big wave, you don't have any control of what's about to happen.
You are blasted this way, blasted that way, flying up all over the place.
When you're holding on to your last breath, there's panic and there's fear.
The goal is to face fears, to go straight at the fear, to release it, to free it.
In doing this and facing this fear, I'm going to discover a part of myself that I didn't know was there.
Check out these monster 100 foot waves off Portugal.
The biggest wave ever surfed as high as 100 feet.
To put that into perspective, that is taller than an eight story building.
Surfers are always looking for the next great thing.
It often breaks those brave or crazy board riders.
Severe wipeouts and waves of mind boggling height.
What happens here happens nowhere else in the world.
The biggest wave ever surfed.
100 foot wave.
100 FOOT WAVE Chapter 1 Sea Monsters My name's Garrett McNamara.
I'm an ocean explorer.
I just feel real comfortable in the ocean.
Probably more comfortable than I do on the land.
Garrett McNamara, known for discovering and pioneering and surfing the biggest wave in the world.
Garrett is an American professional big wave surfer.
Hawaii's big wave rider Garrett McNamara has ridden what could be the world's biggest wave.
This daredevil Hawaiian is still pushing the envelope, chasing one final prize, to surf the perfect wave.
Hey, baby! - The waves are coming, huh? - Yeah.
Tradewinds offshore? Yeah, it's going to be giant, like 15 miles an hour.
Perfect.
All right, bye.
I've always wanted to ride a wave over a hundred feet.
And there's not another place in the world like Nazaré in Portugal.
That's the only place that I see the potential of a hundred foot wave.
One, two, three.
I am getting ready physically, mentally, spiritually to go back to Nazaré.
This year, I am very, very confident that we're going to ride the biggest wave ever ridden out there.
I've been surfing my whole life and it has pretty much been a dream the whole way.
When we were younger, I would spend my last penny to go hunt for a wave.
I would literally not have any money left at the location and I would have to sell surfboards to get a plane ticket out of there.
I would do everything and anything you could do to get to that next big wave.
But at 35, I gave up on my passion and I opened a store because I thought it was the responsible thing to do.
I thought it was what we're supposed to do.
I had three children with my first wife and I didn't think there was a future in surfing.
Since I had surfed my whole life up to that point, I felt like, okay, I already got to surf till 35.
So working for the rest of my life isn't too bad.
I should be very happy to just work now.
My brother's t-shirt.
It's him on the shirt.
After about two or three years, I was pretty miserable going to work every day.
I was driving to the store and I was passing perfect waves and I was getting depressed.
I thought to myself, man, I really want to give the surfing one more chance.
I wrote a business plan to keep surfing, basically a roadmap, keep surfing was the goal.
Training, focusing, manifesting was what I felt was the way to achieve that.
We're in the parking lot of the store that I very fortunately got to close.
It was doing well, it was a successful business, but it wasn't fun.
When friends came in talking about how good the waves were, I'd just be like, don't even tell me.
I don't remember it being red.
Garrett, I don't really remember hearing from him for a while, but when tow surfing emerged, right around the turn of the century, that's where Garrett reinvented himself.
In the beginning, there was paddle surfing and it started out in smaller waves where if you could just make it outside was a challenge.
There was no jet skis, there was no flotation, so we went as far as we could go with our arms.
At some point, with all the North Shore breaks, they're all just so crowded.
It's just so hard to get the good wave.
It's like being in a ski resort and there's just hundreds of people on every run.
And then there's mountains in the back.
Laird Hamilton, Derek Dorner and I, we went, "maybe if we take my Zodiac out there," "we can start tapping into these back mountains".
The very first day that we implemented the technique in large conditions, it was Thomas Edison and the light bulb.
Everything lit up and we were like, yeah, we're onto something.
I was on the beach watching that first day.
And I was instantly like I'm just watching them ride wave after wave.
I felt like I was a cartoon character with the jaw dropped on the ground and I'm just watching.
We knew that it was something special.
We knew that it was going to change the way we rode giant waves, but I don't think we had any idea to what extent.
When we started towing these waves, it was like an untapped resource, but it was kind of a risky thing, especially with the Zodiac.
The challenge with the Zodiac is there's a propeller and that thing will chop you up.
So Zodiac can't really go in and rescue you.
So the only way to catch it, once it gets over like 50 feet tall, is with a jet ski.
We took both the WaveRunner and the jet ski over to Maui.
Then we found out that it can handle as big as mother nature can send.
Using a jet ski allowed access to these outer reefs.
And it turned out those waves breaking out there were much, much bigger than anyone really realized, that there were suddenly 50 foot waves and 60 foot waves.
And they were everywhere.
Now, there was no waves that were too big to ride.
You could surf anywhere.
Garrett really kind of burst back on the scene in about 2001, 2002.
There was a series of swells at Jaws.
And one of them was for the Tow-In World Cup.
There was a contest at Jaws and I got invited somehow.
I thought winning the event was the way to keep surfing.
I remember the very first day that he came to Jaws, it was probably one of the better days that I've seen at Jaws.
The waves were really, really good.
And it was a giant day.
I'd never been to Jaws and it was terrifying.
I was so afraid.
First wave, I panicked, I chickened out.
And I was like, kind of embarrassed and ashamed.
And then he put me on another wave, right in the right spot, and I just ran.
Got to a channel, kicked down.
And then the next one, yeah.
And the next one started to turn, started to have fun.
And right at the horn, we got the third wave.
We ended up winning.
It was a 70 000 dollars purse.
The highest purse ever won with the biggest waves ever competed in.
And then I wanted to get barreled.
I saw so many guys riding so many waves, not in the barrel.
And so the next year, went and got barreled.
Holy shit! I was in the water shooting a big 35 millimeter camera rig.
It was like a 50-foot day.
And I turned on the water and I just zoomed in enough, and I just saw this wave barreling.
It just spit.
And then this little guy came out and it was Garrett with his hands over his head.
That was the deepest anyone had ever gotten inside a barrel out at Peahi and come out.
It was something that we hadn't been doing quite like that.
We had been moving a lot more slowly.
We were just trying to survive it.
I have a saying, ride to ride another day.
And I think Garrett's saying is, ride to ride today and maybe not tomorrow.
When Garrett caught that giant barrel, I was sitting in a tree with my younger brother and my best friend.
And we could not believe our eyes.
Part of me thinks he came from another dimension.
I got sucked up into the barrel and then, like a cannon, just whoosh.
Opened my eyes, looked up, my hands up.
Thank you, God.
That ride was like, the biggest barrel ever gotten to date.
It's still probably the best barrel ever ridden at Jaws.
That stands the test of time almost 20 years later as one of the biggest, best barrels that any human being has ever ridden.
That wave revitalized my surfing career.
I closed the store and then it just went bananas.
He won some awards with that wave.
It was massive.
The winner is Garrett McNamara.
That was the turning point for him to say: "You know what?" "I'm going to focus on catching the biggest wave in the world.
" I'm a little lost for words.
It happens once in a while.
He got so focused on chasing the biggest, gnarliest waves.
Anytime there was a swell anywhere, you knew Garrett was going to be there.
And he was frothy.
I mean, he went mad.
He just went everywhere.
Garrett's really found his niche by being somewhere acceptable by the surf industry, but largely being a maverick out doing his own thing.
He's never, ever been comfortable just being part of the surfing herd.
And because of it, he's really stood out and had one of the most spectacular careers that's come out of big wave surfing.
Holy fuck, it's Garrett McNamara! There's traditional surfing, and there's extreme surfing.
I prefer to do extreme surfing, put your life on the line every time you go out.
Everybody always just thought I was crazy, out of my mind, but they don't realize that I was focused.
I had a plan every big swell, I was going after something.
I'm in search of the biggest waves to ride.
And that'll take me all over the world.
I'll ride a hundred foot wave.
Actually, I have no interest in a hundred foot wave.
I want a 120 footer.
That way they'll be no ifs, ands or buts about it.
Big wave surfing has been one of the strangest evolutions just over the last 20 years.
There was a time when the only place that had big waves was Waimea Bay in Hawaii.
And every few years just out of the mist would emerge another place.
Mavericks suddenly emerged.
And Jaws really showed that there were 60 foot waves, 70 foot waves, 80 foot waves.
Cortes Bank put the whole idea of the hundred foot wave out there.
And the most recent one to shatter everyone's notions of big waves was Nazaré.
And for sure, Garrett was the first to go there.
When I met Garrett, he had all these brilliant ideas and all these goals and all these things he wanted to accomplish.
And one of them was riding the hundred foot wave.
I really wanted to help him get organized.
And so I traveled everywhere with him, every swell.
I was always there.
We were inseparable.
At that time, nobody knew about Nazaré.
It was not a surfing town.
I've been involved in surfing for a long time.
I was at Surfing Magazine in the eighties.
I did a lot of traveling in the nineties and a lot of surf exploration around the world.
I had never heard of Nazaré prior to Garrett.
In fact, I'd never even heard of big waves in Portugal.
First time I heard about Nazaré, I got an email from Dino.
He was working for the city hall of Nazaré.
I was walking and I stopped near the cliff to see the view.
And I took a picture of a perfect, incredible wave.
I didn't realize how special that wave and that picture was until I arrive home.
I immediately think that I need to do something.
I found Garrett's website and I sent him an email with this picture saying that we had a giant wave.
That's over a hundred feet.
He asked me, can you come see if my wave was big and good? And he sent me a picture and it was amazing.
We emailed back and forth for about five years.
Never really got anywhere.
And then Nicole saw the email chain.
That looks big.
And she said, what is this? And I said, some guy in Nazaré wants me to come check out his wave.
I think he had just been watching these waves his whole life and he wanted to see somebody surf them.
When I was a kid, I was always passionate about the giant waves.
And that was a passion that I cannot explain you.
Every time that we had a giant swell, I walk to the lighthouse, spend there four hours or five hours just enjoying.
And I always want to share that.
So I found the email and I was like: "Do you want to go?" And he said, yes.
And then in a month we were there.
It was just Garrett and I, and we had zero expectations.
We were in love and it didn't matter what was here, we were going to have a good time.
So literally the first place we went when we arrived was the lighthouse.
This is incredible.
Beautiful.
So we get out, we could barely open the car door, cause the wind was just pounding us.
So this is the first day.
This is crazy.
You feel the power from here.
You can feel the shaking.
That thing's probably 50, 60 feet tall.
You're gonna die right there, guaranteed die.
This is incredible.
This is big and dangerous.
Crazy.
It's going to be a fun trip.
At that time in my life, I would almost surf anything that broke and nothing was too big and nothing was too dangerous.
I was real hungry and real focused and determined to find this hundred foot wave.
And I thought with Nazaré, it was possible.
I got lucky.
The one thing that defines Nazaré, the unique aspect under the water is the canyon.
It's three miles deep, three times the size of the Grand Canyon.
When the swell comes down on the canyon, it moves faster and gets compressed.
And that's what draws the waves and magnifies them.
They cross up at the right time and it just creates this wedge.
40 to 60 foot wave is all of a sudden 80 plus.
These waves come out of a 10 000 foot deep trench and just lurch up out of the ocean.
I mean, they're basically sea monsters.
The scariest thing overall is the unpredictability.
It's a hundred foot beach break and it's over sand.
What that means is waves break everywhere.
There's almost no predictability to it.
Whereas Jaws is a solid reef bottom and the wave will break in the same spot just about every time.
Nazaré is very different than almost any other spot in the world.
Jaws, Waimea Bay, Mavericks, they all have a big channel, which is a spot off to the side where the water's super deep, where waves will never break.
And you're able to sit there on your surfboard or in a boat or jet ski and just watch what's going on.
And if you do ride a wave, you can get off to safety rather quickly.
Nazaré is different because there is no channel for you to go to where it's safe.
Oftentimes you're going through the rinse cycle where you have to keep going through wall after wall of whitewater.
It looks totally unrideable.
There's no safe zones.
I don't know how I was thinking that we could ride it.
But luckily we stayed.
So we have big storms forming in the Northern part of the Atlantic.
But this is a more typical winter condition for us.
We went with Garrett to the Hydrographic Institute, where he learnt the process through which big waves in Nazaré are formed.
We went out on the sea with a probe.
And thus he found out which were the best spots.
19, 20.
We're in the canyon? We need the cameraman right here.
He knew exactly, by looking at the land, if the depth was 100, 200, or 20 meters.
And thus he found out which were the best spots to catch the big waves.
That's the wave.
That's where it'll break.
See the swells? Garrett came, he saw really the magic of Nazaré and he literally put his life on hold and he studied these waves.
He learned these waves.
He put the time in because he believed in this place.
I guess I was just really hungry for adventure at that time of my life.
You got to see the wave out there.
It's huge.
I don't know.
I think probably 100 feet waves are out there right now.
Did anyone come here before Garrett? Yes.
Of course, a lot of surfers were here and it was crazy, but nobody thought that it was possible to ride those waves.
So the first time I witnessed Nazaré, it was in 2005.
When we walked up, and it looked like a hundred feet, perfect pipeline.
I'd never seen anything so perfect.
And it looked like you could make the wave, but then you would get washed up onto the beach.
Ross Clarke-Jones was pretty much my mentor when it came to huge waves, his approach.
And for some reason he decided not to go out.
I think mainly because it looked possible to ride, but not possible to rescue.
I regret not going out to get that one wave in Nazaré the first time.
But the skis weren't right, they were like puddle jumpers.
No one was either keen or capable of trying to rescue someone back then.
The first year we went to Portugal, we decided to build a brand with the town of Nazaré.
It was called the North Canyon Project.
When we build the project in 2010, Nazaré was really known and famous because of its summer.
Because it's a really beautiful place with a lot of traditions.
The beach is amazing in the summer, but during the winter days, it was a really quiet place.
And that's why we built the project, to show the waves to the world, and to give reasons for the people to visit Nazaré also in the winter.
Just like Jaws is on the map as one of the biggest waves in the world, Nazaré, the goal was to put it on the map also.
Just like a knife to cut the waves.
There was no money, no sponsors, no nothing.
What we did have was the full support of the city hall.
It's a big pleasure.
The first year was real bare bones.
The main guy was Paulo Caldeira.
He is pretty much the only reason we made it to Nazaré because he organized it all.
Then we had Pedro Pisco.
He was our right hand.
He was in charge of getting us where we needed to go and what we needed to do and how we needed to do it.
Jorge Leal got brought in by the city hall to just document whatever we were doing.
He was mainly a still photographer, but he knew how to hold a video camera.
Celeste supported the North Canyon Project and she gave us so much good food.
Thank you.
Then there was Pitbull.
When Garrett arrived to Nazaré, everything was new and different for us.
And he start putting people in places and he decided that I should be a safety driver.
I never went on a jet ski, almost all my life.
So I was learning.
Garrett taught all of these guys how to handle a ski and how to take care of a ski, how to maintain a ski, how to put the sled on, how to put the straps on.
That was all from the first project.
We were such a tight team.
We did everything together, planned everything together.
The early days, it was really easy.
It was just us.
So there was no distractions.
There weren't very many people or businesses that supported the project in the first early years because they didn't believe what was out there.
Hey, Garrett.
This is Lino.
But Lino believed in what we were doing and saw what was possible.
Big wave surfing is particular because it's not the kind of surfing where you can grab a board under your arm and go do it.
It needs a team.
It needs logistics, jet skis, proper boards, proper suits.
There are no big wave surfers working alone.
Lino did work for the city hall basically.
When the project came in, the city hall didn't have money to fund anything.
So Lino actually supported everything.
In the beginning, the community in Nazaré was like: "Who are these people? What are they going to do there?" The people from Nazaré have suffered a lot in the past because of the waves.
Lots of people have died.
There have been accidents.
Nazaré was a small village, a fisherman village.
In the past, there was no harbor and the boats had to enter on the sand.
The big waves, they put fear on the fishermen.
Many times, fishermen died during that process.
My great, great grandfather died on the sea and that's the history of most of the families of Nazaré.
All my family are fishermen.
And if you are going to the sea, you work 10 hours.
When you come back, it's the big waves.
And sometimes the boats fall down.
And sometimes people die.
My uncle died in a ship.
It's danger.
It's not easy to look at the same sea that brought so much pain to these people as a place for crazy people to play with jet skis and boards.
The scariest day was Garrett didn't know the place very well yet.
He was by himself without a jet ski.
And he was like: "I'm gonna standup paddle from the village all the way around.
" "And I'll catch a small wave on the other side and I'll come in.
" And he decided to do this in his board shorts in November.
The day that Garrett decided he wanted to surf, the waves were not that big, but the inside was so much current.
And I tried to stop him, but he did: "No, I'm going.
" "People, trust me.
I'll do it.
" So he paddles around.
He catches a wave and he wipes out.
I was panicking.
I was thinking that he wouldn't make it.
I was swimming in and it kept sucking me back out.
I was getting very winded.
He had a really hard time getting to the beach.
And he was exhausted.
If he didn't make it to the beach, we didn't have a jet ski, there was nobody to save him.
He would've just been swept to sea.
I think that day was decisive for him to learn what Nazaré is all about.
This wave is powerful.
This is nothing to mess around with.
You got to have a really good driver.
You gotta know exactly what you're doing.
It's so gnarly.
That showed Garrett the respect that you have to have when you go out there.
My only concern is the safety of everybody.
I was really concerned about what I did, sending the picture to Garrett, inviting Garrett to come.
And I have all the weight in my shoulders of the responsibility if something bad happened to someone.
You might fall because the rocks are - Slippery? - Yeah, slippery.
Be careful because the rocks might Go down, go down.
We were a little afraid of what could happen.
We didn't know Garrett that well.
And we thought that if this go wrong, somebody's going to die.
We knew that all the big wave spots around the world already had guys dying.
The power of the wild California waves has been a magnet for surfers from all over the world.
Tonight, one of the very best, Mark Foo, has died.
32 year old Kirk Passmore of Haleiwa was last seen wiping out on a huge wave.
Amid the wild waves, a tragedy.
A surfer found floating face down and unconscious in Stillwater Cove.
We knew that guys died here and there.
And we thought Nazaré was more dangerous.
If somebody dies, somebody is going to come to us and say: "What the hell? What did you guys do?" On the first day that Garrett went out, it really was giant and we were on the top of the lighthouse, just shaking.
We were like, really scared because we were responsible for that.
We were on the cliff and we were seeing the waves and we're trying to guess the size.
And then we saw the jet skis arriving and because the jet skis were there, you had something to compare, you know, finally.
And we all were looking at each other, like, what is this? The waves were looking huge.
When we saw Garrett on the water, we finally understood the size of those waves.
Okay, go! When Garrett caught a wave, it was magical.
We were like, the guy survived! For us it was like a dream come true because we really didn't know if that could be possible or not, somebody could surf that or not.
We understood that we had found the gold.
And we went to the harbor and he was so relaxed.
Like, this is doable.
This is nice.
Garrett fell in love with Nazaré.
The corner must be fun right now.
See those little waves? So we stayed that first year, learning as much as possible.
Look how beautiful it is.
During that time, my brother came to Nazaré to surf with Garrett.
2010.
Yes.
Yeah.
In 2010, that was my first time to Nazaré.
I actually was in Guadalajara, Spain and I was playing a season of volleyball there.
Garrett said, yeah, come by for the weekend.
So I went for three days over to Nazaré.
We had surfed together and he said, "you surf well enough".
"I can teach you how to drive the jet ski.
" "I can tow you into some of the biggest waves of your life" "and you can just learn.
" And I was just blown away.
I didn't know what was going on.
I tied it too much.
You with the He-Man grip, the gorilla grip.
Let me see your hand.
Give me your hand.
You got more meat.
Yours are like salchichas.
My first impression of the waves was why are we here? Like, what am I looking at? Can I be out in those waves and have fun and not just be getting washed around? And it was mostly just faith in Garrett at that point.
I'm the only guy you listen to out here and the only guy who pretty much talks unless you have a question.
Nobody tells anybody what to do, except me.
- I'm serious.
I'm not joking.
- I know.
You don't listen to me on this only when you're absolutely 100% sure that what I'm telling you to do is gonna kill you.
Other than that, you listen to me in the water.
He hadn't steered me wrong.
And he still hasn't really.
He was just egging me to go out and this is what we're going to do.
So I'll put you on the wave.
We do this, super easy.
We go, catch some waves.
I'm like, all right, let's do it.
Just take your time and relax.
Yeah! Hey, stay here.
You're going to go like that.
Go! Cut back, cut back! - How was that? - That was perfect.
So yeah, he brought me out into the waves and I just got a couple of waves.
He drives so perfect.
He put me right on the spot.
15 feet, 20 feet at the biggest, the face.
Yeah, that was my first tow-in experience getting a little bit bigger waves.
So we just got done towing and CJ went out for his first time.
How was it out there, CJ? I am officially hooked.
I gotta work on my upper body strength.
Couldn't hold on any longer.
Just the stamina.
You just gotta do it a few times.
I was getting that choppy smacking feeling on the drop, going pretty fast.
The hardest place in the world to train.
If you could do it here, you can do it anywhere.
Technically I'm the first girl to ever tow surf in Nazaré.
My dad's a surfer.
So I grew up surfing small waves, but I love standup paddling and I love standup paddle surfing.
The day Garrett took me out, it was not a pretty day.
It was freezing cold.
It was stormy.
And he says to me, don't worry.
We'll just tow around a little.
And then this wave just came out of nowhere.
He's pulling me up.
I'm not even fully up, and he's saying: "Go, go!" "Let go!" So I held on too long and it flung me down the wave.
But I was like a stone, I just skipped on the face of this wave.
And then you can see, I go over the falls and you can see my little arm sticking out of the wave when it's crashing down.
I was kind of disoriented cause I was so cold.
And then at that point I was kind of towards shore and he's like: "Stand up!" But it's just sucking you back out to sea, it doesn't spit you out.
And then finally I got far enough up that this little wave pushed me up and you can see me like a starfish, just like floating.
I couldn't breathe for like three days.
I really have PTSD.
Like just going out on small waves, freaks me out.
I love to breathe.
I just don't want to be held under water.
I love breathing so much.
People really take it for granted.
Where's Chris? Where was Chris going? He's gonna go dive with Billy.
For a husband and wife who work together, we've learned how to really effectively communicate with each other.
So this is really cool.
Garrett is an idea man and I'm more of the practical woman.
So sometimes the idea and the practicality and the logic interfere, but we have an amazing life and we've been really blessed.
This one spot around the corner is one of the most beautiful places.
There's a pod of dolphins that we hang out with a lot.
Swimming with the dolphins here in Hawaii, it's just euphoric.
You're just connecting with nature, in the ocean and the saltwater.
Just super special, especially with the family.
Garrett's very intense, but at the same time, he's a very loving, caring, sensitive person.
And he loves his family.
I really don't know any other big wave surfer who travels with his family the way we do, but it's challenging for him, for sure.
Garrett's not at peace with himself.
I feel a deep sense of responsibility.
I should just focus more on my family and being present, but I still feel like I need to do more for some reason.
I know my purpose.
It's riding big waves.
In November 2010, the largest swell of the season appeared on weather maps.
That's a good swell.
So this big swell was coming and we're like, okay, who's Garrett gonna work with? We needed somebody with experience to drive the jet ski.
I definitely wasn't towing him in, especially after my episode.
And we heard about this Irish tow team.
Big wave riding is an opportunity that even the most experienced surfer might turn down.
But for two Plymouth surfers, it's more a case of the bigger, the better.
Normally you'd have to sort of travel to the other side of the world to surf waves that sort of size.
Hawaii, Australia, places like that.
But it's sort of surprising that they're actually right in your backyard.
We were sort of surfing big waves, or trying to surf big waves, but there wasn't really any professional big wave surfers in Ireland at the time.
So we didn't have anyone to show us or tell us anything about how to set a jet ski up.
We were just watching YouTube videos and trying to work out how you tow surf.
At that time, these big waves, they only existed in people's minds in Hawaii and California.
They didn't exist in Ireland.
Before I met Cotton, I was struggling to find somebody who had the same vision as me, that wanted to ride bigger waves.
And I was sponsored by a company who made surfboards and Cotton was the guy that fixed the surfboards.
And he also was working on a building site as a plumber's apprentice.
He told me he'd ridden a couple of big waves and he wanted to see what this was like.
So I invited him over.
So within about the first week of Cotton coming to Ireland, I took him out to Mullaghmore Head cause it was a gigantic swell coming.
We're gonna go tow surfing.
Should be fun.
I'd never driven a jet ski and I wasn't the quickest learner.
And I was having a terrible time.
He was struggling to get me on the waves.
So I then got on to the jet ski to put him on a couple of waves.
Then like that bang, bang, bang, he got like three waves.
So then he's like, right, I want to get you one.
He gets on the ski.
And there was a big wave coming through, like it was a proper 40 foot thick, big, angry thing.
I can remember like in slow motion just thinking this is going terribly wrong.
Fuck, fuck! Get the phone.
Jesus! The wave swung wide an extra like hundred meters and I couldn't outrun it.
I was like, I've got to get off this here, like jump.
He positioned the ski where I should have been.
And basically he went for a surf with the ski and I didn't.
When I look back at that footage, like, what are you doing? But I didn't know what I was doing.
I panicked.
It took me about 20 minutes to get back to shore.
And then I spotted the ski and him on top of it way off the coast.
And the jet ski wouldn't start.
Somebody who happened to be onlooking from a nearby house called the coast guard.
Helicopter is now overhead.
They moved him from the jet ski and took him out of there.
But the ski was gone, it disappeared.
That was the end of it.
It was a pinnacle point.
because for me, it was like, give up now, just like suck it all off and just actually ask for your job back and go back or you got to really make it happen.
It was actually thanks to Al.
He was like, we're going to do this.
We'll get a new ski.
We'll come back harder.
So we surfed big waves in Ireland for two years or three years.
And then that's when Garrett reached out to me and Al.
October 2010, we had surfed this new location off the coast and it was really big and really perfect.
And it got a lot of media attention.
And at that time Garrett was in Portugal and I think he'd seen this.
Look at that! Holy shit! And at the time I believe he was struggling to find people who wanted to surf Nazaré.
When Garrett went to Nazare the first time I was actually doing the standup paddle world tour.
And I can remember him asking me to join him to go.
I think he couldn't find anybody else to go at the time.
He was out telling me and all the guys here are like, "I'm not going there.
" Yeah.
Okay.
Sure.
There's a giant wave in Portugal.
I don't like cold water and halfway around the world.
It's like, no.
I tried to recruit a bunch of people.
A lot of people.
Nobody came.
I don't think I'd met Garrett before this point, but when he phoned me, I immediately said yes.
How do you feel your level of driving is? We get by with what we know.
I don't know what you would say we're capable of.
I think if you were here, maybe you could teach us quite a few things.
I was kind of out of my depth.
I wasn't really that confident on the ski.
And I think Garrett realized that.
He was on a search for people that were obviously good, but also willing to learn.
Andrew Cotton and Al Mennie came.
We became fast friends.
Meeting Garrett was kind of surreal.
We went from having the worst luck or driving skills ever to like being asked to drive around Nazaré on a jet ski with one of your surfing heroes.
That next morning, Garrett drove the car up the hill to the lighthouse.
And at that time the lighthouse was a kind of out of town area.
No one really went there.
There's a dusty road down to this old fort down on a very prominent headland off the west coast of Portugal.
And there's a real feeling about the west coast of Portugal.
It's an end of the world feeling.
You feel like you're on the edge of the world.
It's raw.
On that morning, I remember standing down there and the explosions of the waves hitting the rock in front of the headland were earth-shattering.
The waves were hitting this rock and pouring up over the top.
It felt like it was almost reaching for us.
It was like reaching up.
As it got to the edge of the path, it just dropped down and you're like, "oh".
Garrett actually asked the question, he said: "You are doing this for your own reasons.
Aren't you?" Which made me realize that he understood that this place is very dangerous.
He understands the ocean in terms of big waves as well as if not better than any other big wave surfer on the planet.
So for him to tell us that this is serious, this is dangerous, that really made me go: "How dangerous is this?" I think part of the reason that big wave surfing resonates with so many people is because everyone's been to the beach and played around in two foot waves and been tossed around by this little wave that will hold you down against your will.
And if a three foot wave is going to do that, what's a 60 foot wave going to do to me? Falling on a sixty plus foot wave is like being in a car accident for a solid minute.
It's just the most violent rag dolling experience.
If you try to fight it, you feel like your arms and legs are just going to get ripped clean off.
It is so much power.
You're underwater getting beat and you don't know which way's up.
It gets dark down there and you're just getting spun and you just let your last breath out.
There's always this feeling: "God, is this ever going to let up?" It's really terrifying.
The reality is that riding big waves is dangerous and you can die from it.
And people do.
It's not a joke.
Nice! I got the rush fully, like more than I do in the waves.
- Let's just go home then.
- Yes, it's done.
We're done.
Coming from Ireland, I was a self-sufficient big wave surfer.
Everything I did was by myself.
I organized everything myself.
But turning up in the harbor in Nazaré, all these local Portuguese men, they were setting up jet skis for us.
They were like towing them around.
What is this? I started to realize this was a huge passionate endeavor by the local crew.
Most people can't get the funding to run a local contest, local small wave surf contest, but they had managed to get this crew of people and the backing of their government to fund and help support Nazaré as a big wave surf destination without even knowing if it was possible to ride at size.
There was definitely an air of concern from the local guys and you could see it in them and you could feel it in them.
And rightly so.
Nazaré is a very dangerous place.
The first time that we surfed together in Nazaré, there's a lot of pressure.
You doubt yourself.
Your anxiety, your fear, you're stressing that the waves are going to be big.
Are you going to be good enough? The system we were trying to develop for doing this safely was that we were going to use one surfer being towed by one driver and another jet ski to track the first team as a safety precaution.
That hadn't happened before in the world of surfing.
This is my first time.
I'm on the ski.
Garrett's driving and we go down to the rock.
We were rounded about three seconds and Garrett's going: "Get on the rope!" And I'm going: "What?" And there's like fifty foot peak just going everywhere.
This was like a war zone, peaks and waves coming in from every angle It felt like you were being hunted.
That's honestly what it felt like.
And he's shouting: "Get on the rope!" And I'm like: "Would you shut up? Let me have a look at it.
" Nazaré isn't like any other big wave spot.
It's a different animal.
It comes in taller and taller and wobbles and it moves and it shifts and it breaks a bit and a bit more and then it goes waaah! What'd you think of the waves? It looks heavy.
That's the first time I've seen it.
So it's nerves and fear.
We've surfed and towed beaches, but nothing like that.
When we first got there, a couple of really big waves came and it seemed really big and it just seemed to get bigger and bigger and more water moving.
When we first drove out this morning, Garrett was like a kid at Christmas and I'm sitting there going: "Look at how crazy it looks!" I heard you were the king of the morning, you got the biggest one.
I think a big one.
Did I? It seemed quite big.
As I started looking down the wave, all I heard was Garrett shouting: "To the bottom.
Go to the bottom.
" He's driving the ski.
It's definitely been a memorable session.
There's no doubt about that.
I'll never forget it.
It was big.
And a lot of water moving.
And the drops were Never got to the bottom.
Never got to the bottom.
Right? Did you get to the bottom? I don't know.
And then all of a sudden you start riding.
You keep going down.
It's like, scary.
Scary, right? From speaking to the locals afterwards, there was a real turning point that day.
When Garrett fell on a wave, both Andrew and I immediately ski straight in after him.
We went straight in through all the chaos where all the huge whitewater is rushing through, where we had never been before and we got him and then we raced all the way to shore and we fought our way back out.
And I think that was the first time that ever really happened.
Nobody had really had to go in and do that sort of a rescue before, but it made us realize that this was possible.
You were a champion in there.
I was on the back of his ski and I felt really safe.
Well, that's good, at least you know that as a result.
The first day I surfed with Cotty, I really had an amazing connection with him and really felt comfortable.
At that point, I was a plumber from Devon.
Not many professional surfers would have trusted a plumber from Devon to go tow him in Nazaré.
He gave me the time, he didn't care where I was from, my background.
So I think that just speaks volumes to me.
It was just the right time for me.
I was just at a point where I hated plumbing and I was just so into my big waves.
It was just a dream to be doing it at all.
Surfing with Garrett in Nazaré opened my mind to how you approach a big wave, not just how you physically approach it, but how you mentally approach it, what you can survive and what that takes to surf the biggest waves in the world.
I was just like a sponge.
It was just amazing.
So what's next for you? I've got to get home.
I'm a plumber.
Gotta get home.
- I've got two jobs.
- So you're used to barrels? Used to lots of water leaking everywhere.
Today's our last day.
And we're going to go paddle around and just really get to know the canyon and its surroundings.
And just enjoy it and get ready to come back.
I got invited here to Nazaré by Dino and the city hall and it far exceeded my expectations.
The waves are giant, powerful and challenging, and I consider it a second home now.
I've surfed waves all over the world, chasing swells everywhere.
There's all these guys searching for this hundred foot wave, and everybody wants to ride the hundred foot wave.
I know it's here and I know it's for real and I know it will happen.
So mark my words, we'll be riding one out here someday.