Surf Up in Lincoln City, Oregon
Surfers from around the world converge on Lincoln City for the thrill of riding 30- to 40-foot waves
It looks like a small-scale military invasion is getting ready to launch.
Jet Skis are being unloaded from trailers onto rollers and moved toward the Pacific Ocean by groups of men snapped head-to-toe into black wet suits. They're all running in tight, compact strides. Equipment is checked and rechecked. Someone's having a problem with a battery. Everyone's in a hurry.
To the east, a band of pink sky has stretched out along the coast range. To the west, there's the entirety of the ocean, and it's crashing loudly on itself.
The surf was up, which is why everyone was here.
Fifteen years ago, there wasn't a sign on this corner asking tow surfers at the Nelscott Reef to contact the Lincoln City Dispatch Center before and at the conclusion of surfing. There was no sign saying "Surf Safe."
There was no sign, because no one was surfing the reef a half-mile offshore. No one was doing it in 1995 when John Forse, one of the event's organizers, tried it for the first time.
On Friday, some of the top big-wave professional surfers in the world dropped in on this Oregon coastal city, dropped in off the reef and took part in the second Nelscott Reef Tow-In Classic. The purse was $20,000, but no one seemed concerned about the money. What they were looking at were 30- to 40-foot swells, and what they saw was fun.
"Unbelievable," Peter Mel, a Santa Cruz, Calif., resident, said after his morning heat. He followed that with "awesome . . . perfect . . . glassy . . . just oil . . . crazy," and some rat-a-tat-tat noises that don't translate well between quotation marks but clearly equate to happiness, bliss and/or being stoked.
A little after 7 a.m., Jared Corcoran, a 35-year-old graphic designer for Oregon State University, parked his car (with surfboard inside) at the Tanger Outlet Center and walked about a quarter-mile down to the corner of 11th and Coast. There he joined a growing group watching the commotion.
Corcoran said he'd told his bosses: "Look, there's this surfing that takes place once a year -- I gotta go."
Waves do that to some people.
Corcoran, who had his Blackberry to keep in semi-contact with the office, wandered around and checked out the sights. Asked later if it made him want to challenge the waves, he said: "No." And he wasn't sticking around all day.
"I'm going to go surfing," he said.
The holding period for this year's event began Oct. 1 and was to run through Dec. 31. When the forecast looked good, contestants would have at most 72 hours to get here. By Tuesday, the forecasts looked good for Friday, so the event went to green.
South African Chris Bertish had been on Hawaii's north shore Wednesday, was in Oregon on Friday and said he's thinking about Mexico next. When asked how many different world locales he'll surf this winter, Bertish said: "Depends on the swells."
While many of us sit in our offices, there is an entire culture that follows the forecast.
There's that scene in "Hoosiers" where Gene Hackman takes out the tape measure and has his players check the dimensions on the court. His point is that every basketball court is the same size everywhere.
But surfing isn't basketball. It is an arena that changes, swells, crashes.
In the middle of it, Bertish said, you can hear the noise, the roar. But everything slows down and comes into focus and then you hope you find the safe zone in time.
The ocean plays by its own rules. When it fires up and cooperates, you gotta go, be it to Hawaii or Mexico or California, the South Pacific, Europe, or Oregon.
Oregon, a place where, as Corcoran says, "The water's cold, the waves are fickle and it's sharky."
The first thing to know about Forse, 59, who owns the Nelscott Reef Surf Shop, is he was bitten by a shark about seven miles south of Lincoln City in 1998. That's three years after he first took a shot at surfing Nelscott.
In 1995, he maneuvered a small boat past the beach break, anchored, paddled out, looked around and thought naughty words. Still, he tried to paddle into a wave, couldn't get enough speed and got blown off the back. "And this big brother was right behind it," Forse said.
Not good.
But Forse was sure it could be done, especially with a WaveRunner. Guys such as Laird Hamilton had been using personal watercraft to drop into huge waves in Hawaii for a few years. Jet Skis and similar machines allow the surfer not only to get to waves but to be towed in at a great enough rate of speed to ride them.
Forse took to talking the Santa Cruz contingent into trying it in Oregon.
"I think they kind of thought I was nuts, more than anything else," Forse said.
He'd show Polaroids and video to pros such as Peter Mel and Adam Replogle.
"I thought it'd be an awesome tow wave," Replogle said.
"It took Adam to get me stoked about coming up here with the skis," Mel said.
They finally did -- in 2003. Waves were in the 30- to 40-feet range, and no one else was out. Forse took a couple of runs and got beaten up pretty good, he said. The other two, Forse said, "ripped it to shreds like it was four-foot Malibu."
Right then, that idea that he says he'd been "mind surfing" for years became reality. He could hold a big-time surfing competition in Lincoln City.
You can't really see much from here, can you?" Mel said Friday, looking over his shoulder.
He was correct. From the beach, all anyone could really see is froth and maybe the occasional ski bobbing high. The only clue that anything was going on beyond the beach break -- a break that had put a pretty good hurt on Mel when he was playing in it before his run -- was a black helicopter circling and swooping in for video.
But on the hill, a decent pair of binoculars got anyone a decent view of the action about a half-mile out to sea.
Most gathered in an empty lot where a couple of shops had set up to sell surf ware. The Kernville Steak and Seafood House had halibut tacos, burgers, hot dogs and clam chowder for sale. Mostly, people ooohed and aaaahed, winced at particularly nasty looking spills. A lot of people said, "Niiiiiiiice."
Two houses up, thousands of dollars of video and photo equipment was perched on tripods. The judges sat on the roof of a rental house shouting out which color was up and riding. "I don't know how it could be judged, it's just so far away," Mel said.
Judging seemed to be the least of anyone's worries down on the beach. They were raving about the swells. At some point after his heat, Mel had jumped on a Jet Ski and piloted his rather brash mentor, Vince Collier, toward a wave, pretty much forcing Collier to surf it, the first big wave he'd caught in a long time.
"I'm the Bobby Knight of surfing in Santa Cruz," Collier said later on the beach.
Collier is 47, with vision and back problems -- problems that had brought him "further and further from surfing."
But in Santa Cruz, the guy's a legend. Mel, 37, spoke of Collier with admiration. They'd been around each other, riding waves, traveling, being surfers for a long time, and he knew Collier was struggling.
When Collier grabbed that big wave, Mel said he "lit up like a fish."
Down the beach afterward, Collier was talking to a camera crew, and he was choking up.
"I feel like I got reborn again," he said.
And that was enough. He walked off, excited for the second heat, excited for another shot at those perfect, glassy, oily, crazy waves out at the reef.
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