Rare Birds: Ghost Tree | The Surfer's Journal

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“Some lucky day each November great waves awake and are drawn

Like smoking mountains bright from the westAnd come and cover the cliff with white violent

cleanness.”—Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) “November Surf ”

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“It’s a hanging tree,” Don Curry concludes. “Ridingthe thing is a near-death experience every time.”Erik Landry, in a position to agree.

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During a strong fall swell in 1879, a young Robert LouisStevenson wandered out of Monterey and made hisway south along the fierce, jagged coast of Pacific

Grove into Pebble Beach.“The Pacific licks all other oceans out of hand; there is no

place but the Pacific Coast to hear eternal roaring surf,” theauthor of Treasure Island and Kidnapped would later write. “WhenI get to the top of the woods behind Monterey, I can hear theseas breaking all ’round….”

Wandering south through dunes and windswept trees,Stevenson’s excursion brought him to an eerie forest of bone-white cypress trees perched on a dramatic bluff overlookingthe northern tip of Carmel Bay. Bleached and twisted by agesof sea spray and wind, the trees seem to writhe amid shadowythickets of bishop pine.

“Ghosts fleeing before the wind,” Stevenson wrote,“welcome you to Pescadero Point.”

Centuries-old middens of shell are all that physicallyremain of the native Esselen people here, but anyone who’sspent any significant time on this wild coast will tell you theirspirit remains a powerful presence. Furthermore, a “lady in lace”

has historically freaked out motorists on 17 Mile Drive bywandering down the middle of the famous road where it windspast this promontory.

Yet, the supernatural hubbub is by no means restrictedto terra firma. When the air chills and the great ocean swellsawake, a much deadlier apparition is known to lift from thewaters just off the point.

Ghost worldGhosts exist. Perhaps only as rumors first, whispers of sometitanic pitch out in the fog, up the coast, far offshore. Perhapsnever breaking at all, existing only as theoretical combinationsof submarine topography, wind, and swell. But sometimes thereal thing materializes, standing up out of the sea, once, twice,maybe a half-dozen times a year like some beautiful mythcome to life.

When Billabong began posting photos of the XXL BiggestWave Award Nominees for 2003/2004 on its website lastwinter, the contenders were a rogue’s gallery of the world’s mostnotorious waves: Jaws, Todos Santos, the Cortez Bank, Teahupoo,

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Mavericks…and then in early March something new appeared:a grainy shot of a monster right with the caption, “Don Curry.Ghosttrees.”

It was a dark, spooky image with a weird, purplish tint shotfrom an odd, outlying perspective that depicted Curry crankinga huge bottom turn as a 40-foot bomb plunged into the framefrom stage left. Before long, other photos of Russell Smith andBrian Gorrell joined the shot of Curry on the site and everyonewas asking, “What the hell is Ghosttrees?”

Anatomy of a ghost“Yeah, I was bodysurfing Pescadero Point in the early ’60s,” saysFred Van Dyke. “I’d come down to the Monterey Peninsula alot of the time when it was too flat or windy in Santa Cruz,although I wasn’t particularly thrilled by the cold water wellingup out of that deep trench. This was before wetsuits, of course.

“It could be huge. It was not unusual for 10- to 12-footwaves off the point. It was like Sunset Beach or any island break.It broke hard and was unpredictable,” Van Dyke remembers.“I was always looking for a big, tough wave, and Pescadero

appealed to me in the same way that Steamer Lane did.”There are only a few surfers in every generation with the

wherewithal to attempt a wave like Ghost Tree. As Peter Mel says,“It’s really not even a so-called wave, it’s more a phenomenon.”Yet the few men with enough guts and water sense to paddleout from Stillwater Cove and attempt the foreboding right-hand break have become part of local legend over the decades,inspiring each successive generation’s hell-men to re-pioneerthe place.

“We looked at it as far back as ’66 or ’67,” says Mike Curtice,a longtime surfer from Monterey. “We’d be surfing the wavein Stillwater and use the point wave as an indicator. The firstguys I remember actually paddling out there were John Clancyand Dan Robinson, and then some of us followed a couplemonths later. We’d ride the corner in only the five- maybesix-foot range, but I really wasn’t too into it. It was thrillingjust to survive the thing.”

“The first time I saw Ghost Tree break was in 1974 when Iwatched Joey Lynch and Mashmakhan on a big, big ThanksgivingDay swell,” says Don Curry, the 45-year-old Carmel chargerwho named the place.

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The ultimate water hazard, Ghost Treebreaks off the 18th hole of the worldfamous Pebble Beach golf course.

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“Oh yeah, Michoacan,” Curtice laughs. “His real namewas Mike Harris. He was into surfing all the huge mysto breaks.He was like a lysergic Jeff Clark, just nutty as a fruitcake. Iremember watching him take off on big, perfect rights at Carmeland go left into these gaping close-out barrels.”

“The first time I saw Pescadero break was in the mid-’70s,”remembers Frank Ono, one of the few surfers to ever make ahabit of paddling into the spot. “I just saw this…BIG TUBE.It was so heavy. This big west swell had just created this hugehole. I’d heard stories of people surfing it. Michoacan surfed itand then Robin Jeffers was surfing it.”

“It’s amazing that people should remember that,” laughsRobin Jeffers, the grandson of the great poet and a world-classsailor. “The wave is big and round, but it broke way too close

to the rocks for me. I paddled out when it was huge in ’77 andwent for it, but never caught anything. I was only 18 and myskill level was never up to that wave.”

Then, in the ’80s, a crew of young Pacific Grove surfersbegan to lay the groundwork for Monterey Peninsula rocksurfing by seriously campaigning some of the hairier breaksaround Point Piños such as Freights, Boneyards, Ulus, and Cats.

“Mike Bauer was definitely a major impact on hisgeneration,” Don Curry explains. “A really hard-charging guy.Super comfortable at the rock breaks—a lot of those PG guyswere—they grew up dodging rocks.”

Mike Bauer, generally regarded as the finest wave rider ina group that included Bo Hickman, Brent Bispo, Scott Vucina,Billy Brewer, Rick Firpo, Jimmy Schallerer, and John “DeFlo”

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DeFloria among others, remembers how the tight-knit crewchallenged each other to ever-greater extremes, a process thateventually led them to Ghost Tree.

“We started surfing Pescadero around 1989-1990,” Bauersays. “We’d been riding all these other breaks bigger and biggerand moving south to Point Joe and Big Reef…it was a naturalprogression that finally led us down there. It’s a hairy, hairyplace. Really scary. If you make a mistake at the takeoff, you’reinto the boulders. It’s a lot more dangerous as a smaller wave,because it doesn’t clear that nightmarish boneyard. We surfedit at 10-15', maybe close to 20'. That’s paddling into 25-28' faces.I tell you what, it’s a tough place to paddle into.”

Frank Ono, a longtime fixture in the Moss Landing lineupwho will be 54 this year, first paddled into Ghost Tree in 1996

and surfed it regularly for much of the last decade. As a result,he knows the place intimately.

“The swell comes out of the deepwater trench at a really highvelocity and hits this shelf, and it’s not a true shelf, it’s actuallya series of rock pinnacles. Because the shelf isn’t uniform, allthese boils and eddies throw ribs of waters up the face of thewave. But these pinnacles still stop all this swell at once and thebottom of the wave sort of drops out while the top’s lifting, soif you’re not really moving fast when you go to drop in, youbecome part of the lip.”

To summarize: A surfer dropping into Ghost Tree mustnegotiate (a) the ledging slab lip; (b) the minefield of boils;(c) any sort of side current drawing off the point; (d) the bullkelp; (e)the seam of rocks that lines the inside; and (f ) the intim-dating knowledge that a pachinko ride through an underwaterlandscape of pinnacles awaits those who fall. “Plus,” adds DanGlispey, who served as harbormaster in Stillwater Cove in themid-’70s, “there are some really big fins out there.”

“The wave doesn’t seem that big until after you’ve committedto the drop,” Ono continues. “Then it starts to grow and you’re,like, ‘Sumbitch, man, this is the real deal.’ The wave is so thickthat it puts the light out.

“This one time I stroked for the first wave of a set. That’sa big no-no. It’s building and growing and it won’t let me in, soI whirl around and start paddling as hard as I can back outtoward this 15-18' wall of water, which is coming at me in slowmotion. I’m thinking, ‘Should I paddle up the face? No. ShouldI turn around and paddle in? No. Should I just wait, ditch myboard and dive under it? I guess so.’ I got heavily rag-dolled untilmy lungs were bursting. I tried to relax and get my bearings,but it was as black as a cave down there. Finally, I catch aglimpse of light maybe 12 feet up, so I start kicking as hard asI can. Anyway, I pull a hamstring on my way up and take thishuge breath of foam just as another huge set wave lands onmy head and drags me mercilessly through the inner series ofpinnacles. I just went pinballing through them,” Ono laughs.“Man, you can’t buy those kinds of thrills.”

Ghost in the machineIn December of 2001, Ono was on his sailboat when he gota call from his buddy Rob telling him someone was towingPescadero.

“I just wanted to puke,” Ono says. “It was such an intimatething, this relationship we had with Pescadero. I was bummed,then a bit jealous, I guess. Then, I just let it go, figuring thereare plenty of places around here to kill yourself.”

Don Curry remembers the day as well. “I felt kind ofbummed because it wasn’t one of the boys. None of us had theequipment to do it at the time, but it was bound to happen. Idon’t know how Peter found out about it or who tipped him off.”

“Funny thing is, I actually saw it on TV while I waswatching the Pro-Am at Pebble Beach,” Peter Mel explains.“I was, like, ‘Whoa, it’s only a six-foot swell and there’s awave breaking out there.’”

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Ghost Tree is frequently a very uglywave against a very gorgeous back-ground. Adam Repogle admires the view.

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Interest piqued, Peter Mel and Adam Repogle drovedown and mapped things out during the next significantswell. On their third try, they caught it under the rightconditions and the day quickly turned historic. Patrick Trefzcaptured startling images of the surfers dwarfed by the Ghost’sthick, glacial, avalanching lip that landed Mel on Quiksilver’sinfamous “18th Hole” poster and Repogle on the cover ofSurfer Magazine.

“It’s funny, I’m reading about it now and it’s like a wholenew spot. Where’s Ghost Tree?” Mel laughs. “There was acouple shots they called the 18th Hole, but it never stuck.Which is okay with me. It’s Curry’s spot. Let him name it.”

It’s a generous attitude from a genuinely magnanimousguy, but Mel also recognizes that Curry is big-wave surfing inCarmel and the Ghost Tree’s planted right in his backyard.Curry, after all, grew up monitoring giant reef breaks from

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the bedroom window of his boyhood home in the CarmelHighlands. Today, at 45 years old, Curry is still built like anNFL fullback. He’s spent the last 30 years riding everythingfrom Moss Landing to Big Sur, and his extended campaigns atMaverick’s throughout the ’90s culminated with an invitationto the inaugural “Men Who Ride Mountains” contest.

Yet Mel and Repogle’s groundbreaking session was a hugewake-up call and Curry realized he needed to re-prioritize.

Investing in a PWC, Curry and his close friend, Armin Yeager,disregarded Maverick’s, choosing instead to concentrate onbig waves around the Monterey Peninsula. The gambit paidoff, and before long, Curry and Yeager were charging huge wavesat Ghost Tree. Yet on January 12, 2004, their new venturealmost turned tragic.

“Armin didn’t really get into the wave, but he let go of therope,” Curry says. “He wasn’t able to cut back and keep hisspeed, so he exited the wave before it broke. I didn’t realize it,so I kept following the wave, thinking he was on it. Next thingI know, Pete’s pointing at the outside and yelling, ‘Hey, there’sArmin!’ So I look out there just in time to watch him takeanother huge one on the head.”

“Armin took it so gnarly,” Mel remembers, shaking hishead. “I thought he was…it was so scary. I was bummed. It wasthe first time I’d ever seen something like that. I mean, I’ve seenguys get held down but this was like held down and going intothis No Man’s Land of rock. No one could help him.”

Despite the dangers, a handful of tow teams from bothcounties began to appear at Ghost Tree during promising swells.The break proved to be fickle, however, and often the 14-mileride around Point Piños from the Monterey wharf was rewardedwith barely rideable slop. On one forgettable day, a star-studdedlineup including Garrett McNamara, Flea, and Barney rodebumpy eight- to 10-foot “crap.”

Giving up the ghostYet, a month later, when 60-plus-foot wave faces beganheaving off the toothy submarine lip of Carmel Canyon andspilling with a terrible ferocity into Stillwater Cove, the proswere nowhere to be found. The Monterey buoy was recordinga 24.5-foot west swell at 17-second intervals, but the Santa Cruzcrew made the wrong call and went north, leaving Ghost Treeto only three teams.

“That day was mental,” Mel remembers. “We drove in theother direction to check Mavs because Jeff [Clark] had green-litthe contest for the next day. We thought, you know, south windsdon’t like that place. Then, I saw the footage and I was kickingmyself.”

The first team into the water was Russell and Tyler Smithof Santa Cruz and Randy “Flintstone” Reyes, a Watsonvillecharger “who’s been around forever.” The three surfers set outaround Point Piños on two PWCs at noon and endured 30minutes of torture in the rough seas.

“My brain was so joggled by the time we got there I thoughtI had a concussion,” Russell says.

“I was so seasick I was puking,” Tyler admits. “Then weturned the corner toward Pescadero Point and there’s just thishuge bombie, a 60-foot closeout. It was becoming whitewater,then it would back off, then double up again and go top tobottom. Half the wave was the big barrel and half the wavewas the lip.”

“It looked like Teahupoo but right and just bottoming out.Just going square,” his brother adds.

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On a west swell, the Ghost gets “big and round.”Ken “Skindog” Collins ponders exit strategy whiledodging boils, rocks, and bull kelp at 30 mph.

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Exercising extreme caution, the trio towed each other intothe giant ledging monsters while a crowd began to gather onthe adjacent bluff for a visceral perspective on the waves’ sprayand roar.

“That first one, I was just bouncing down the face doingfive-foot airdrops the whole way. Bouncing down and down anddown,” Russell remembers. “At the bottom, it kept bottomingout, getting bigger. Twenty-footer, 25-footer…it just kept gettingbigger and bigger.”

Surfing in survival mode with one eye on the horizon,the three surfers skirted disaster again and again, executingthe hairiest rides and pickups of their lives.

“I got Flintstone into one that he had to straighten outon and the whitewater sandwiched him,” Tyler says. “As I wentin for the pickup, I somehow lost my board off the machine, butI still got him on the sled. When I turn us around, there’s 10 feetof whitewater bearing down, so I just try to bronco up it. Aswe’re going up and over the foam, I see my board and I think,‘Oh there you are, you’re in the lip.’ Well, my board hits me inthe head and knocks me off the ski. DONK. Flintstone, whowas on the Boogie, jumps up onto the driver’s seat. With onehand on the throttle, he grabs me by my wetsuit, throws meonto the back and gets us out of there. It was insane.”

Thankful to be alive, the Smith brothers and Reyes beganthe long, arduous trip back to Monterey just as Don Curry,Ed Guzman, and Dougal Hutchinson arrived around two p.m.

“Don is like The Terminator,” Tyler laughs. “We’re half-dead on the ski, barely hanging on from the chop, and Don justgoes by standing! Doing like 40, going chgg-chgg-chgg overthe chop.”

With assistance from Guzman and Hutchinson, well-respected, underground veterans from Santa Cruz, Curry towedinto what many considered the wave of the day, a seismicdisplacement of water that had spectators (and even the sheriffswho showed up to chase them off Del Monte Forest Foundationland) gasping and shouting.

Considering the size of his achievement, Curry was fairlynonplussed. “Until we actually have a good day out there, ithasn’t really been ridden. The optimal day’s going to be 35-45'at 17-22 seconds on the Monterey buoy with glassy or east windsfrom 295-310 degrees. We’re really looking at a northerlydirection. February 26 was marginal. It was all west and thewind was wrong.”

The wave of the day may have belonged to Curry, but21-year-old Brian Gorrell gets an award for the hairiest takeoffs.Arriving with Kelly Sorenson shortly after Curry, Hutchinson,and Guzman, Gorrell was charging into the wave behind themain boil, significantly deeper than any other surfers on this day.

“That boil is my nemesis. I took off deep and tried tomake it through the boil. When I saw it wasn’t going to barrel,I straightened out and the thing caught me from behind. Itjust freight-trained me. I was doing flips and rolls underwaterall the way into Stillwater Cove.”

“It’s a hanging tree,” Curry concludes. “Riding the thingis a near-death experience every time.” j

As Ghost Tree pioneer Peter Mel says,“It’s really not even a so-called wave,it’s more a phenomenon.

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