Brad Gerlach Dominates 68-foot wave!
They say big-wave surfing requires cajones the size of watermelons…
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You are now looking at the biggest wave of the past twelve months. What do you think? Pretty big, right? Ridden by occasional MTV star and leviathan surfer Brad Gerlach, this monster of a wave measured in at an adjective-defying 68 feet.
Not your prosaic, day-to-day water bump, I’m sure you’ll agree. Just to put things in perspective, think five double-decker buses, six African elephants or 11.33 average 6ft tall human beings standing on top of each other.
But Gerlach, who tow surfs alongside fellow Cali-charger Mike Parsons, has balls size large and made of steel. Even though he was testing a new board, the 40-year-old San Diego local went for broke on the last wave of the day during the now historic tow-in session at Todos Santos, Mexico.
“It was getting dark and everyone knows there’s a lot of sharks out there.”
“I was actually getting a bit annoyed,” says a casual Gerlach. “It was getting dark and everyone knows there’s a lot of sharks out there. But then the wave came and we were in the right place at the right time. These things have a lot to do with luck.”
Did he even realise how big the wave was? “No, I had no idea. And I wasn’t scared, either. I was pretty much in the zone. It seems odd, but when you’ve had a lot of waves and you’re really in the zone, that’s when it’s safest to surf these waves.”
The ride netted him the 2006 Billabong XXL title and $68,000 ($1,000 per foot). Interestingly, in 2001 it was Parsons who won the event, with Brad manning the Jet Ski and pulling him into the wave. Since Parsons shared the prize when he won it, Gerlach graciously returned the gesture, splitting the 68k between them.
So how does he feel about the whole experience? Brad takes his time, as though searching for the right words, then says: “It’s… poetic.”
Gerlach runs the National Surf League’s The Game in California. To check out Gerlach’s episode on MTV’s Made series, go to www.mtv.com. For more on the 2006 Billabong XXL, go to www.billabongxxl.com.
This story originally appeared in Huck #001.
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Brad Gerlach (text) by Vince Medeiros is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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