Word: surfed
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Born in California but raised in Hawaii from age 2, Hamilton, 40, became the acknowledged dragon slayer of surf--a glamorous outsize personality who tested the limits in everything he did, often as camera shutters whirred. A thrill 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...
...summer of 1992 Hamilton and some surf buddies were taking turns dragging one another on surfboards behind a boat, "and a little light went on in our heads. We thought this might be an incredible way to surf big waves," he says. They tried it out that winter when the surf got up, and suddenly they were gliding onto big waves with ease. Then they started using shorter boards, which are more maneuverable. Foot straps held the surfers in place as they were towed onto waves by jet skis at speeds of about 40 m.p.h., with top speeds reaching...
...wasn't enough for surfers to know how to mount and ride a 100-ft. wave. They needed to know where and when to find the giant swells. Enter Sean Collins, a college dropout and son of a Navy navigator, who began compiling surf forecasts while riding the waves of Baja California in Mexico in the 1980s. Using data from ships at sea, weather reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, satellite photos and readings from ocean buoys, he began predicting with remarkable accuracy where and when the big swells would hit. In 1985 he launched Surfline...
...With surf forecasting in place and the new tow-in technique being steadily refined, the records have started to pile up: in 1998 Ken Bradshaw from Sunset Beach in Hawaii rode the first wave over 60 ft.; in 2002 Brazilian Carlos Burle surfed a 68-ft. swell; and this year Cabrinha reached the 70-ft. threshold. Sharp says storm patterns have been relatively subdued in the past few years, but he thinks that when the next El Nino warming of the Pacific happens, adding 20% to 30% to the power of storms likely to impact prime surfing sites, surfers will...
Maybe no one should be out there in surf that is as high as an eight-story building and breaks every 20 seconds with the force of a Union Pacific train. But, as Hamilton would be the first to say, big-wave surfing is not about playing it safe. It's about the thrill of taming that killer wave...