When the great waves crush Jojo Roper under the sea, it feels like being in a car crash. He is battered from head to foot in the cold, dark depths, far from the warm blue water of the surface.
“Imagine getting punched in the face and ribs and everywhere on your whole body for 30 seconds, and with your breath held,” he said. “It kind of feels like that.”
But then he does it again. And again. And when you ask him why, he can’t quite explain. “I just want to do something that’ll stand out for ever,” Roper, 35, told me in San Diego last week.
Like other big wave surfers he is driven by a compulsion: to ride a wave that is not only tall, but somehow epic, historic, one that people will remember.
There is much less agreement about how they get to that wave in the first place.
For years the sport has been split between those who use a jet ski to tow them to waves that would otherwise be unreachable and the purists, like Roper, who believe the true challenge is still to paddle into the wave under their own steam.
Now that divide has been sharpened by complaints that the pursuit of bigger and bigger waves, encouraged by television’s hunger for spectacle, has led to some of the world’s best big wave spots being ruined by jet ski congestion out on the water.
Laird Hamilton, one of the best big wave surfers in history and a pioneer of tow surfing, told Stab magazine that his sport had become “kinda like the gold rush” because of the desperate hunt for the tallest wave.
He said: “When you get too many skis in the line-up that ruins the whole thing. It becomes like a feeding frenzy.”
Roper went further.
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“You could tow anybody into a giant wave,” he said. “As long as they make it, it’s all good. If they don’t, it’s deadly. Anyone who can stand on a surfboard can catch a giant wave. But if you’re trying to position and paddle with your two arms, it’s a completely different story.”
The son of a famous surfer, Roper has been riding the waves since he was three. Last year he won Surfer magazine’s coveted trophy for the biggest paddle-in wave of the year for catching a 50ft wave at Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco, California.
Like most top surfers he will let a jet ski tow him when the waves are otherwise inaccessible. The problem comes when the waves are a little smaller than that and the jet skis don’t get out of the way.
Last month he was paddling in Nazaré, Portugal, a big wave spot popularised by 100 Foot Wave, a HBO documentary series released in 2021. The place was besieged.
“It’s horrible,” Roper said. “It’s become this shitshow there. A lot of people give up because there’s so much jet ski carnage, you’re dealing with the skis flying around you, and the wake from the skis and all this different stuff. And it’s just like, it’s not attractive.”
Other surfers disagree. The as yet unconfirmed record for the biggest wave ever surfed stands at 108ft. It happened on December 23 last year when Alessandro “Alo” Slebir, a 23-year-old big wave surfer and construction worker, was towed into an enormous wave at Mavericks, a surf spot in northern California. The World Surf League and Guinness World Records are assessing his claim. Videos of his feat have been viewed more than half a million times on YouTube.
Sam George, author of the forthcoming Child of Storms: A Surfing Memoir in Progress and former editor of Surfer magazine, said that the use of jet skis had transformed the sport — and reset the parameters for what surfers could do without them.
The first mention of a big wave surfer was in the mid-19th century in Hawaii, where historical accounts record a chief called Abner Paki, who preferred to go out when the waves were bigger when no one else wanted to.
Big wave riding, loosely defined as surfing waves 30ft or higher, developed through the late 1940s and 1950s, where surfers on longboards would paddle out and do their best to ride the biggest waves available to them.
Then, in the 1990s, three top surfers — Hamilton, Derek Doerner and Burtin “Buzzy” Kerbox — were messing around in the water and realised that if they were towed in, it was easier to catch the wave.
It brought about a revolution in the sport. Previously, big wave surfing had been limited to a handful of spots: a few in California, some in Hawaii, places where waves were known by their specific names. But suddenly waves they had never ridden before were open to them.
Surfers quickly switched from longboards to shorter, manoeuvrable boards. They added foot straps. They bought jet skis that towed them out on a line.
George said: “Suddenly there was this whole new quantum leap in big wave performance, where, virtually overnight, the whole game was changed. Because suddenly these guys could get into bigger and bigger waves and ride them the way that surfers were riding small waves, because of the increased manoeuvrability and speed of those little boards and the foot straps.
“It was the most significant shift in surfing endeavour or performance in 150 years.”
Yet by the early 2000s, some surfers were rebelling against being towed into waves. They preferred to paddle.
George said: “They liked the lone man against the sea. And even a lot of the top surfers that were really good at being towed in, they thought, this is too easy, and it somehow diminishes the majesty.”
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This schism, and the reversion back to the old ways was, he said, unique within professional sports.
“It’s really amazing when you think about it,” he said. “Name another sport where some of the top practitioners have decided that we want to go backwards. We want to basically compete at Wimbledon using a 1975 Jack Kramer wooden racket.”
Crucially, the paddle-in purists didn’t just revert to the old ways. They started pushing the boundaries of what was possible with paddle-in surfing, riding bigger waves than anyone could have imagined.
George said: “The towing guys proved, hey, we can, we can ride the tube on 50ft waves. The guys that went back to paddling, they went, well, maybe we can do that too. And sure enough, they proved that it could be done.”
Big wave surfing remains incredibly dangerous. Roper has lost two friends to the waves, and says he feels fear every time he’s in the line-up, waiting to ride out.
He believes that the obsession with measuring the exact height of the waves misses what is so enthralling about the sport.
“Everybody’s really into, like, this one is bigger than that,” Roper said. “Everybody’s so worried about which one is bigger in feet or metres, or whatever, than the next.
“At the end of the day, I don’t care what number it is, it’s just either like big, really big or really f***ing big,” he said. “The goal is to just catch a wave that’ll stand out for ever.”
