How I Surfed a Tsunami and Lived to Tell About It

BY PAUL MCHUGH

I’m the sole paddler I know of — or have ever heard of — who has surfed a tsunami.

Does this claim sound grandiose? Might it seem more cloaked in modesty if I say it took me more than 30 years to screw up the nerve to tell my story?

Back in the day, I had good reason for reticence. I had been the outdoors editor/writer at The San Francisco Chronicle for a long time. Sustaining my journalistic credibility at this paper, I reckoned, was a major chunk of Job One.

And of that astonishing, terrifying, exhilarating tidal wave ride, I had no proof, zero witnesses, and not a single photo.

Thus, any account could easily be dismissed as a bare-faced, self-serving boast. Publishing such a yarn might hole my professional rep below the waterline, I considered. And therefore, I didn’t.

An outdoors beat does tend to draw poseurs, of which we’ve all seen many. Exploiting such a plum role for self-glorification seems boorish. I never wished to do so, not unless I could be, um, like, totally coy and subtle about it. I loathe braggy “What-A-Guy!” narrations, especially when a writer’s aim is obviously to coax a reader to exclaim, “What a guy!” at the story’s end — aloud, and in a roomful of attractive companions.

But it’s all true, and it was much less about bravado than sheer life-or-death consequence.

Earthquake

A highly relevant and objective fact about my tsunami ride pertains to the morning of April 25, 1992. Shortly after 11 am, a 7.2 Richter quake erupted at the Mendocino Triple Junction, a major Pacific Coast tectonic fault.

Just under an hour later, I sat alone, afloat, and unknowing of the quake. I was smack dab above an ocean reef just south of the famed Mavericks surf break, off Half Moon Bay, in my Phoenix ARC squirt boat. This was a fairly flat day, so I hadn’t scored many rides.

But then, I saw a long, tall bar of white begin to take shape on the far horizon. Initially, I thought it was a fog bank. Yet, I’d never seen a big, pale, hazy clump of fog become so high and wide as it slid toward shore. It headed straight at me — while also demonstrating a surreal velocity. Since there was no wind to speak of, the phenomenon seemed bizarre.

I did not indulge myself in any of the five stages of grief. However, I did whip rapidly through some other states, including puzzlement, disbelief, reluctant acknowledgement, dread, and then finally, near panic.

I’d sailed aboard many boats at sea, ever since childhood. Plus, I’d been a surfer for more than 20 years. Never had I seen an ocean wave act remotely like this.

A map showing the area where Paul McHugh surfed the tsunami. Photo: Paul McHugh

Realization

What I observed could be nothing else — besides a tsunami. Once that sank in, I moved on to my next conundrum: WTF should I do?

Due to decades of getting my butt spanked by big swells, I knew the safest place to deal with an extremely large wave would be as far out as I could get, in deep water. That meant heading westward off the reef to paddle straight at the thing.

But I simply could not make myself go there. A tactic like that felt akin to patting a coiled rattler on its head in an attempt to charm it out of chomping on me.

But I also knew that about a half-mile past my stern, a north–south navigation channel led into Pillar Point Harbor (at Half Moon Bay). That channel was at least a tad deeper than this reef.

I spun my boat end-for-end so I could paddle frantically that way. But I never managed to reach the channel.

At least, I didn’t get to it before the wave hit me. However, after it hit, I zoomed there in jig time.

How my situation developed

Some background may help explain the event. The aptly named Triple Junction is where three huge hunks of planetary crust collide: the North American Plate, the Pacific Plate, and the Gorda Plate. As they ram together, they create a tectonic demolition derby at the north end of the famed San Andreas Fault.

Once upon a time, at an office of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in Menlo Park, a visitor could spot a visual record of earthquake activity just by entering the front door. On a sizable map, each temblor of the past century scored an orange dot to mark its epicenter on the California landscape or off its coast.

A string of dots thickened remarkably as you went north up the San Andreas. At the Triple Junction, it appeared as if a graffiti artist had just wantonly squirted a whole can of Day-Glo on the site.

As ol’ school, boogie-woogie bard Jerry Lee Lewis might put it, that place has “a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.”

What a tsunami is (and is not)

There’s a common misperception that an open ocean wave is a display of moving water. Well, that water does move, yet it also doesn’t.

It bounces up and down but doesn’t travel horizontally. At first, and for a long time, what appears to be hustling along is just a pulse of sheer energy, using water as a medium. That is especially true of a tsunami.

Think of a patch of ocean floor as a drumhead; amid a potent earthquake, Earth’s crust demonstrates a lot of flex. When a quake whacks it like a mallet drumstick, the sea floor bounces. Energy radiates outward from that strike much as sound does from the inverted bell of a kettle drum in an orchestra pit.

Big swells seen on the open sea are visible energy forms transmitted through water. The energy travels in a similar way to notes of a ballad soaring through the air — without transporting any air itself — from a singer’s lips to your ear.

A surf wave

If you gaze out from a cliff upon the sea at a passing parade of blue corduroy swells, you are watching the amplitudes and troughs of an energy pulse traveling by. Yes, the water goes up and down to outline the crests of that pulse, yet the water itself does not travel toward shore. Not till the pulse starts to depart from the deep ocean.

When the energy shape (which extends below the water’s surface, too) begins to “stub its toe” on the shallows, the energy distorts and bounces upward, inducing water to rise to fill in the newly unstable form. Soon it proceeds to “break,” and hopefully award a surfer a nice, smooth face to ride while he or she is being chased by the foamy and folding peak.

But these waves that surfers love to ride are usually big storm swells imported from far off. They’re generated by sustained winds that rub energy into the surface of the sea, blowing for a long time in a single direction. Ideally, that storm then fades or turns aside while its waves keep on a-comin’ to deliver rideable waves in some otherwise calm location.

Such waves may have pulse crests, oh, 16 to 22 seconds apart, that travel across the ocean at some 50-80kph before arriving to shoot up into a rideable tower at a break like Maverick’s.

A tsunami wave

Meanwhile, a big tsunami in the open ocean can travel at amazing fighter plane speeds, 800kph or more. That pulse may exhibit an amplitude (crest height) of only a meter or less — and so goes entirely unnoticed by a ship at sea. However, the wavelength, or distance between those low crests, can run up to 500km in distance.

When a pulse of such might smacks the shore, it delivers a ton of oomph. A plethora of watery tonnage begins to be borne along by the stalled and collapsing energy shape, too, as it accordions into the shore. A tsunami thus builds and delivers its own massive tide; and so, its synonym, or “tidal wave,” does seem particularly apt.

My tsunami wave

The quake that created my wave didn’t top the scale, and so neither did its watery pulse. Its initial lump traveled at only 500kph, hitting Monterey Bay about an hour after the initial shake.

That pulse traveled on a straight line from the Junction. What came toward me next was a sort of vibrational stepchild, the energy radiating — and dissipating — off to one side of its principal route.

However, it had begun moving onto the ramp of shallowing waters (the same sea floor bathymetry that launches the Maverick’s surf wave), and so it already was stubbing its toe.

Still traveling incredibly fast, it began to take on the look of a more conventional wave, but with a very low green face and a huge pile of white, roiling foam atop its crest.

Furiously seeking to figure it out

A prevailing cliché about any adrenaline boost is that it prompts a “fight or flight” response in the human body. Actually, it presents a few other options as well, including “freeze,” or “furiously seek to figure it out.”

That latter choice has been my reigning favorite over the years, especially when it can be mated with “take fast action.” This, I attempted to do.

But it soon became blindingly apparent that rotating my paddle shaft at a race pace wouldn’t accomplish much. A tsunami simply cannot be outrun.

What was tumbling toward me no longer traveled at 500kph, though. My wave wasn’t aligned with the main pulse, and its lower amplitude had begun to drag and slow on the bottom. How fast did it move now? I’d estimate, somewhere above 100kph.

I kept flinging glances over my shoulder at the onrushing threat. It felt as though I’d been shoved into a nightmare, and now I tried my damnedest to sprint from a monster. But frustratingly, I could not make my feet do ’nuff stuff! It was obvious: No way now could I ever evade this monster’s gnashing white maw.

Eaten by a tsunami

Paul McHugh is enveloped in the whitewash from a big California wave. Photo: Paul McHugh

I could also perceive that just a tenth of the wave appeared as green face. On top of that rolled an immense heap of foam. Mere seconds remained before it would gobble me up. I understood that, once swallowed, I’d not be able to take a breath without choking.

As I furiously paddled, I also hyperventilated, seeking to saturate my lungs and blood with as much oxygen as I could.

Then my stern tilted, shot up the face, and in the next instant, my world went blank — by which I mean, blanc. Not the gentle whiteout of a mild snowfall, say, but a far different pale critter, one forceful and chaotic and turbulent. Especially, the latter.

The interior of that mass of foam resembled an old carnival ride, Tilt-A-Whirl, but less predictable. Up, down, forward, and reverse became vague concepts.

Performing an effective Eskimo roll in deep foam is rough, so my fate seemed to hang on remaining upright. If my kayak began to tumble, if my spray skirt popped, and my cockpit got stuffed with water, I’d be swept along for the whole ride. Its finale would be a whack into the shore.

When that happened, what might I hit? And…could I even hold a breath that long?

A truly bracing experience

My luck, such as it was, consisted of the long surf experience I’ve described as well as a whitewater period going back another decade. So, my bracing skills were reasonably good.

A snug cockpit fit makes a kayak feel like the lower half of a paddler’s body. Each twitch, pitch, or hitch of the hull informs the paddler where and how to throw a stroke, many of which are brace strokes that can keep the kayak from overturning — just think of that paddle blade as a temporary pontoon.

Amid that heaving foam pile, I threw more brace strokes in more wildly different directions, much faster than ever before in my life. What can I say? I felt motivated.

Surfing the face of a tsunami

I felt a slight stiffening of water resistance under my hull. I remained buried in a foam pile, yet I sensed this wave now slid right over that boat channel. It had begun to assume a more classic shape, which gave me a brief chance to escape before this looming bugger hustled onward to the last set of shallows.

So, I dug my paddle blades deep and stroked hard. I broke out of the foam pile and slid at high velocity down the steep green face, which I found had approximately doubled in height. And, I finally could take a breath! Truly, a treat.

Still, I couldn’t waste a fraction of a second. The dice needed to be tossed on whether I could gather the momentum to slice back through the foam pile and escape off the back of this wave before it hit shore.

My Phoenix ARC was low-volume with extremely sharp rails. Its top trick was the ability to turn on a dime and give a paddler eight cents in change. So, that’s what I tried for.

Exit out the back

After charging headlong straight down, I cranked my hardest bottom turn right at the trough, and then shot back up that steep face on my gamble to pierce its foam.

In a trice, I was fully immersed in that churning, fluffy stuff and forced to throw a lot more braces. I felt myself teeter on the edge of being imprisoned in its milky grip once again.

But, suddenly, I burst out through the last wisps and began falling through clear, open air while the wave swept on and left me behind.

To keep from landing flat and jamming my spine upon impact, I heeled over to come down on a brace stroke and a boat rail. I landed softly in surprisingly calm, slick water.

Then my lips stretched as wide as they’d go as I panted like a rabid pooch, seeking to backfill my severe oxygen debt. At the same time, I searched the horizon to see if any more of those phony “fog banks” might pop up. But I observed zilcho. It looked like I’d experienced a one-off. So, yay. And, whew!

A zero-sum aftermath

Once installed back in the barn, i.e., at my office desk, in addition to handling a lot of ordinary chores over the next couple of days, I also searched out news about this latest California quake.

I read of some $75 million in damage done to small coastal towns near Cape Mendocino, just inland from the Triple Junction. I read of quirky, amusing details, such as a second-story toilet still brandished aloft on its drainpipe, although the rest of the home had pancaked to the ground around it. That happened up north of Petrolia.

However, I never found anything about anybody being swept away or even jostled by a tidal surge anywhere around the Greater Bay Area. Not even an item about some zillion-dollar yacht getting bonked into a dock, dinging its teak and infuriating its skipper.

I’d feared to hear of beachcombers getting knocked off their feet while their dogs drowned, but apparently, nothing remotely like that occurred. Did a public tsunami warning — issued when I’d already paddled out to surf — keep everyone out of harm’s way?

Or, might it be that the tsunami’s sideband energy had dissipated far more rapidly than I had imagined it could? After all, the surge that had hit Monterey in one hour had taken twice as long to enter the Bay and reach Berkeley.

My final notion was that Mavericks’ funnel-shaped, north-facing bathymetry and sloping offshore ramp could have built a unique manifestation, just for my personal enjoyment.

Big waves painting by Dianne Levy that was gifted to the author. Photo: Paul McHugh

Beyond the event horizon

As a compulsive journalist, writer, and storyteller, I confronted a dilemma. Not only did I lack a witness or any hard evidence of my experience, but I didn’t even possess any sort of strong local “hook.”

So, after thinking it over, here’s what I chose to do: Nothing. At least, until now.

It’s my hope that this tale holds some revelation of what might surprise you out at sea, and perhaps provide some hint of how to handle a tsunami event in a littoral zone — that is, if the thing happens to crop up at a size modest enough to be handled at all.

Other than that, I guess the takeaway ought to be a classic line: Never turn your back on the sea.

This article first appeared on GearJunkie.