Word: reefs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Pete Cabrinha had ridden killer waves before, but this time, as he surfed down the face of a giant swell rolling in over the notorious Jaws reef off Maui, Hawaii, last January, he couldn't find the bottom. "It was growing in front of me and growing behind me, so it felt like I wasn't getting anywhere," recalls Cabrinha, 42, a veteran surfer from Hawaii. There had already been 10 "horrific wipeouts" that morning. As Cabrinha was gaining speed going down the wave, its breaking lip was closing in fast from behind. People watching from the shore began shouting...
...like running and tapping the dragon on the tail and getting away with the flames all around you," says Jeff Clark, a longtime big-wave surfer at Maverick's reef, south of San Francisco. But not everyone escapes the dragon: three big-wave surfers have lost their lives in the past decade. Nevertheless, chasing the big wave has been embraced by the $4.5 billion surfing industry, which uses dramatic photographs to promote the extreme image of the sport to younger consumers...
...junkie, he surfed the highest waves, bungee jumped from a 700-ft. bridge and broke the European speed record for windsurfing. He even stunt surfed in the opening sequence of the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day. But since childhood Hamilton had been mesmerized by the huge outer reef breaks that appeared after some Pacific winter storms. He regularly surfed the biggest waves he could catch: "It is as if you are on a racetrack, and it is moving too, [and] all of a sudden turns pop up and bumps are flying at you ... and that is part...
...Nino warming of the Pacific happens, adding 20% to 30% to the power of storms likely to impact prime surfing sites, surfers will have a chance at 100-ft. swells. Two jet skiers claim they saw 100-ft. waves breaking several miles outside San Francisco's Maverick's reef in 2002, and Hamilton says he has seen 100-ft. waves on the outer reefs between Hawaii's Oahu and Kauai islands. "Using these machines and the little boards, we're going into outer space," says Clark, pioneer of the big swells of Maverick's reef. "We don't know where...
...this was fairly straightforward, but then the class collectively experienced a collision of tectonic plates. To explain: Geological movements portrayed in ambiguous pictorial form are difficult to understand, no matter how many times you explain them. I’m still not entirely sure how exactly a coral reef is formed. It was a debilitating experience for our collective egos to be unable to explain to each other what looked like a simple illustration, and rather than go to office hours in between writing papers for concentration classes, a lot of people took the much easier route of giving...