As he looks out from his balcony, over a crumpled, dried-out wetsuit, Andrew Cotton can see it all.
A stretch of sand, a salt mist, a cliff and a red lighthouse.
Above all, Cotton can see the waves of the landscape. They are smaller today, relatively speaking at least, but still present in the background of white water bubbles and white noise.
When the swell is right and the surf is up, it’s a different story on a different scale.
The small town of Nazaré, 60 miles north of Lisbon, is where the towering waves — some as high as 10-story buildings — hit the shore.
For generations of local fishermen, these conditions have meant danger and death. For Cotton they are life and a way of living.
“Weirdly, somehow, I’ve turned it into a job, so when it’s big, you go out there,” he says.
“You go out there all day and do what you have to do.”
When it’s one of those days, cotton doesn’t even need to be seen. When the world’s biggest, most profitable wave hits, he knows it as soon as he wakes up, before he even opens his eyes.
“Being here, I know how big the waves are by how much the windows rattle,” he adds.
“It can really be something else, you know? The ocean can be scary when there’s no waves. When it’s big here… it can be scary.”
The wave of sight has many beginnings.
One 130 miles out, three miles down and millions of years back in the silent cold of the Atlantic Ocean.
From there a deep, submerged valley formed, which penetrated the Portuguese coast. It rises just above the coast of Nazareth and when the conditions are right it carries a great body of water into the strange moving mountains.
Another event is 14 September 1152. Legend of the day says that a local hunter was saved by a holy vision from falling over the mountainside and into the wild sea below, forever linking Nazaré with heaven, hell and high water in the Portuguese imagination. .
For Cotton and other big wave surfers, Nazare’s waves are more modern and less dramatic. This was an email sent by Dino Casemiro in 2005.
As a child, a fisherman’s son Casemiro would steal box lids as local women packed the catch and use it to catch waves.
“They told me I was going to die,” he says of his family’s reaction to taking his makeshift bodyboard to Praia do Norte, the beach where the biggest waves break.
“They saw the waves as demons. In my view, we have a love-hate relationship with the sea. Love because it gives us food and tourists, and hate because it takes the lives of our relatives. “
Casemiro persevered, but a few days of wavering and doubt were too much.
“We sat on the sand looking at perfect, big waves with no one on them because we didn’t have the confidence, skills and equipment to ride them,” he added.
However, Casemiro knew some people who could.
Two-in surfing, where surfers take turns to drag each other over waves with jet skis, was pioneered in Hawaii a decade ago, allowing daredevils to ride the otherwise inaccessible, fast-moving monsters. was allowed to happen.
When his local wave was at its wildest, Casemiro took a photo, plugged his camera into his computer and went surfing online instead.
“I looked for the most popular surfers in two and big wave surfing, but that was 2005,” Casemiro says.
“Everybody has Instagram and Facebook now. It wasn’t easy then, but Garrett already had his website and a ‘Contact Me’ button in the corner.”
A woman’s voice is heard on the radio.
“You’ve got three big waves coming at you.”
Jet skis, powered by cotton, skim the steep face of the wave. The surfboard, ridden by Garrett McNamara, goes in the opposite direction. Below the point of no return.
The angle is not perfect.
“I wanted to get into that wave very deeply,” says McNamara.
“I held that rope until the last second. It forced me to the bottom of the wave, closing it as hard as I could.
“When I looked back out to sea, the entire horizon was black.”
It was November 1, 2011. Six years after Casemiro’s first email to McNamara, a year after McNamara stood at the lighthouse in Nazare, announcing that he had found his holy grail and surfing the biggest wave ever in 15 seconds. Who is
The footage is absorbing and disturbing.
McNamara races downstream, but seems to crawl toward the bottom of the wave, as it swells almost as fast as he can ride it.
It is being moved towards the camera, but the perspective is out of sync. McNamara appears to be shrinking rather than growing, as the crust rises skyward behind it.
And all the while, tons of water splashed over him, hanging onto the face of the wave only by a thin, white thread from his plank.
“You don’t hear the wave,” McNamara added. “You’re going so fast that all you can hear is the wind rushing past your ears.
“You’re not even really thinking. You’re in a state of flow, following your heart.
“It’s exhilarating. It’s like driving under an avalanche, but instead of trying to avoid it, you’re taunting it.”
As the spray settled, the ripples from his feat traveled faster.
A few days later, surfing legend Kelly Slater tweeted what had been done to him.
“I just saw a shot of Garrett McNamara from Portugal on a stupidly big wave. He should post this thing ASAP.”
A week later, he did. The footage was first released to ESPN, giving primetime United States audiences their first look at their fellow American. By the next morning, he led the bulletin in Portugal and soon, it was everywhere.
“It went nuts,” McNamara remembers. “Bananas! The media storm we had to endure after the ride was bigger than the wave.”
The wave was 78 feet (24 m) high, a world record. As interview requests poured in from around the world, McNamara spent the next three weeks repeating her story, and the sight-wave story, to television presenters, radio hosts and newspaper reporters.
It was a victory for him, but also for town planning.
Casemiro’s idea that Nazare’s waters could provide more than fish and summer tourists found support at City Hall.
“We didn’t have a huge budget and we realized that doing something with the big waves would save us 20 to 30 years of development,” explains Pedro Pisco, part of a small municipal team, along with Casemiro, who had decided to conquer Praia do Nortiz. The waves
Together they recruited a small band of surfers, provided equipment and devised a strategy to sell their small town to the world.
The rest of Nizare considered it a bad bet.
“In the beginning, no one believed us, not one person,” says Casemiro.
“It was really hard. Everyone made fun of us. They said we were wasting our time at Praia do Norte. No sponsors believed in us.”
Initially, after McNamara’s rise to prominence, even the skeptics seemed right.
Jet skis were underpowered. Their engines would flood or choke on stray plastic bags, leaving riders and surfers bobbing dangerously in the path of incoming waves.
Even when he was working, English Cotton admitted that he was less skilled as a driver.
“I wasn’t up to scratch, I really blamed it,” he says of his turn at motor control.
Another failure occurred a day before the world record. A broken jet ski and a chute for cotton.
They weren’t even going to get out the next morning. But then things changed, McNamara, Cotton and their Northern Irish teammate Al Maini changed their minds and, together, they caught the wave that changed everything.
