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A mental, extreme, radical, nasty day of destruction at Ho'okipa.
Maui is usually the place for sun and good weather... But wow! Last 48 hours have been crazy! Rainy, cold and windy like hell! I even had nightmares all night last night hearing the rain crashing on the window of my bedroom. One of my nightmares was that it was snowing outside. Twelve cm of snow covering the ground and people were throwing snowballs at each other at Ho'okipa... When I woke up this morning, I went to look outside to see how bad it really was, but No, it was just a bad dream. But the rain falling from the sky was just as big as snowflakes... And the wind was just as strong as it is in a snowstorm.
Later by 11:00AM, I went to have a look at Ho'okipa. Wow! The 45 knots wind had brought huge waves breaking all over the place. A mast and half high wave took the first guy out there right on rocks. Even surfers were going on the rocks. It was the nastiest Ho'okipa day I've ever seen in my life!
I finally rigged up my 4.4 and I went out... My objective was to throw the highest jump of my life... After some chicken jibe in front this big waves, I finally fund my way out into these big waves. It was looking like the movie
"The Perfect Storm". I tell you, the guy in front of me was looking like an ant on the top of a mountain. Super over- powered, I tried to surf front side some waves but the wind was to onshore and too strong to do radical stuff, but the backside surfing was incredible. We were just flying doing backside aerials off the lip. No errors were permitted out there. The punishment of an error in this kind of condition would be the rocks for sure.
It took me a while before even thinking about my goal of doing the biggest jump ever in the history of windsurfing... But after getting used again to that small gear, I started doing a few big air... But not as high as I wanted...
Here we are, a huge set of mast high waves showed up right in front of me... It was the ultimate moment of the session. Going big was scary like hell but I had to do it for the crowd... Rain on my face, I got a lot of speed for a few yard before hitting that fat wave in front of me then I took off... just like a space ship going for the moon... Wow! The wind took me so high (15m) that I got scared and I let the gear go. I was just like a cat trying to land on my legs... My gear ended really far from me and got barreled a couple times by the rest of the set of waves. I had to swim all the way from outside to the rocks to get my gear. Lucky, my gear was waiting for me just right in
the channel almost inexistent.
After that, the wind dropped and I had to forget the dream of nailing the highest jump ever... But the forecast for tomorrow is the same... So, I will have another chance to accomplish my goal!
In short, the best words to describe that January 18th 2002 are: Sick, destruction, hell, mental, extreme, radical, nasty...
Eric Girard |
Josh Seymore |
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