One of the most often asked questions I get is, “What is the biggest wave you ever rode?”
Or, “What is the biggest surf you ever saw?” That one sometimes comes with, “in Orange County.”
Just to get that first stuff out of the way, the biggest wave I ever rode was at Makaha, on the west side of Oahu, in December of 1969.
At that time, it would have been considered 30 feet. In recent years, they have gotten better at estimating wave height, so it was probably closer to 40. In my mind, that sucker was at least 300 feet.
That was the biggest “rideable” surf I ever saw. Biggest surf was off the coast in Oregon, don’t even know how big it was. But it was huge.
OK, now to the story for today. The “Orange County” version. I have a couple of days that stand out as “the biggest,” or at least “one of the biggest.” One is the biggest “south swell (summer).” The other is the biggest “north or west swell (winter).”
Let’s start with the summer version. There have been some epic south swells. Probably the most famous would be the day in 2014 produced by Hurricane Maria off the tip of Baja. They call it the “100 year” swell. But, sadly, I can’t comment on that one because I wasn’t around that day, I was surfing on the other side of that storm in Southern Mexico.
The biggest south swell I ever personally saw, and rode, was on Aug. 19, 1969. That was a banner year for surf.
I had gotten up early in the morning and drove to the Wedge in Newport Beach. I was with Mickey Munoz. We thought the swell might be so big that we could board surf that famous body-surfing spot.
There was a low tide early in the morning. At that time, nobody had board surfed it yet, we wanted to be the first. Bud Browne came to film us. But it wasn’t working right. So, we raced back down to Cotton’s Point.
On today’s wave height scale, it was probably 20 feet. We called it 15 then. At the peak of the swell…
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