In a venture that’s going to take some quite serious sponsorship money up, Billabong yesterday announced that they are launching a three year global expedition to find and surf the world’s biggest waves. Hasn’t this been done before with Quiksilver’s “The Search”? You may think. Well, no not really, while the Search trekked round in a boat tracking the best swell at isolated breaks, the idea behind the “Odyssey” is big wave riding of the tow-in kind. The success -perhaps not least from a publicity point of view- of the Cortes Bank expedition sowed the seed for this more ambitious project. The Odyssey will take top big wave riders, jet-powered tow craft and the latest in forecast technology to track down the biggest swells the earth has to offer, there is already talk among surfers of the possibility of finding and surfing a 100 foot wave.
"After Cortes Bank, everyone is convinced that there's a 100-foot wave out there somewhere," said big wave surfer Ken "Skindog" Collins of California. "If we can find it, I know it can be ridden. I know I want to give it a try." The surfers are paired in teams of two, taking it in turns to surf and tow. Billabong has said that surfers involved include Laird Hamilton, Ken Bradshaw, Dave Kalama, Brock Little, Brian Keaulana of Hawaii, Mike Parsons, Brad Gerlach, Peter Mel, Ken Collins , Flea Virostko of California, Shane Dorian, Luke Egan and six-time world champion Kelly Slater.
That’s quite a roll-call. But hang on, three years, won’t that mean that Kelly will start missing his Cheerios? Cunningly enough the expedition is made up of three separate trips a year utilising the winter swells of both the northern (October to March) and the southern (June to August) hemispheres. The first expedition is due to set out in October this year, and although the precise locations of the waves surfed will remain under wraps, we do know that the maiden voyage will focus on some key locations in the Pacific Northwest between San Francisco and Canada's Vancouver Island. Preparations are under way for future excursions to other coastlines identified as having high-surf potential including the Hawaiian Chain, Chile, South Africa, Ireland, Tasmania, New Zealand, and the South Pacific Isles.
Mike Parsons insists that prize money at stake is not behind the involvement of all those big name surfers, "Most of the surfers would probably pay to come along on something like this. The Billabong Odyssey is about going where no one has ever gone before. A thousand people have climbed to the top of Mt. Everest, but how many people have ridden an eighty-foot wave? This is something special." That said, there is prize money involved, and it’s not to be sniffed at. Each year the guy who surfs the biggest wave of the year will get US $1,000 in prize money for every foot of wave surfed. Not only that but whoever surfs the biggest wave of the entire expedition will get a minimum of $250,000 and if anyone surfs the so-far elusive 100 footer that figure could be as much as doubled. Nice.
Quite how they are going to decide exactly how big a wave is I don’t know, presumably by consensus.
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