Word: surfer
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...first monster wave ate him up. Taylor Knox, a 26-year-old pro surfer, disappeared into the churning foam off Mexico's Todos Santos islands like a rag doll tossed into a washing machine. Then he got another chance. He spotted a second wave, even bigger than the first, and paddled straight for it. As he reached the crest, Knox smoothly swiveled, stood up on his board and started sliding down a slick expanse of water as steep as a cliff. Somehow he stayed in control, even though he flew 6 or 7 ft. through the air so that...
...official word isn't in yet, but the wave Knox rode may well have been more than 50 ft. high. If that's the case, Knox should win the K2 Big Wave Challenge, which at the end of this month will award a $50,000 prize to the surfer who caught the biggest wave of the season. And if he wins, he can thank Sean Collins, the sport's foremost practitioner of the science of surfcasting. Because of Collins and other surfseers, California's big-wave riders aren't wasting time chasing pikers anymore. They're hitching rides on waves...
Collins, who completed only two years of college, knows as much about meteorology and oceanography as most scientists. But he started out as a surfer who kept on wondering why great waves were so hard to find. In the early '80s, while he and his buddies were roaming the sparsely populated beaches of the Baja Peninsula, Collins began spinning out his first crude forecasts, downloading satellite weather maps in the middle of the desert with the help of an antenna strung from a cactus, a short-wave radio and a portable fax machine. In 1985 he helped set up Surfline...
Knox and some two dozen other top surfers showed up at Todos Santos because Collins had predicted a spectacular swell at that particular time at that particular place. They brought with them their longest surfboards, because the longer the board, the faster it cuts through water. A 50-ft. wave, after all, travels at speeds in excess of 20 m.p.h., and anyone who's too slow at the approach risks being smashed. Every so often, in fact, a big-wave surfer dies. This year Jet Ski rescue teams provided backup, and there have been no fatalities...
...company brought the Internet to West Africa, and in 1995 Ghana became the second sub-Saharan nation to have full connectivity. "We're sharing the same information as everyone else in the world," says Quaynor. His most prized client: President Rawlings, an avid Web surfer. Soon, Quaynor hopes, wireless technology will let the phone-short country leap straight into airborne access