Apocalyptic Ledges

It was a winter’s day, August 2012, on the bony limestone coast of southwest Western Australia, and Grant “Twiggy” Baker and Paul “Antman” Paterson were hunting slabs. They had a personal watercraft (PWC) between them and a surfboard each and they were buzzing around in a cold raging onshore gale and twenty to thirty feet of fresh yet brutally hacked-up Indian Ocean groundswell, watching a reef break called, with brutal simplicity, the Right. “He was reluctant to go towing,” Paterson told me later of his companion, the soon-to-be big-wave world champion Baker. “It was so big! But we’re driving around it by ourselves, thinking, yeah, it’s quite surfable.”

“Surfable” is a relative term. The Right is possibly the world’s most fearsome surf spot: a shape-shifting freak of a wave that lunges out of 100 feet of water onto a rock platform maybe a dozen feet deep. Once a rider commits, the escape route is compromised by an even shallower section of reef that