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Outside Magazine April 2004

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Surf & Destroy (Cont.)

THE MASTERMIND OF THE ODYSSEY is a 43-year-old surf journalist turned surfwear CEO turned promoter named Bill Sharp, who says he's paid "six figures a year" by Billabong to run the project. Sharp earned a reputation as big-wave surfing's leading PR man back in 1998, when he dreamed up a marketing idea of brilliant simplicity: Every year, give $50,000 to whoever rides the biggest bomb of the season. (The award, which totaled $66,000 last year, is now fronted by Billabong.) Sharp also helped organize the epic 2001 trip to the Cortes Bank.

When Sharp took the Odyssey public, in the summer of 2001, he hyped it as "the Search for the 100-Foot Wave" and amplified interest by offering $250,000 to anyone who actually rode a wave that large. While many people scoffed at the cash incentive, surprisingly few surfers laughed at the idea that someone might actually ride a ten-story wave someday. Instead, they argued about where it could happen. Well-trampled spots such as Jaws (at Maui) and Maverick's (Northern California) probably don't have the underwater topography to handle that size. (In 2001, a wave in the 80- to 90-foot range was filmed at Maverick's, but it broke a half-mile outside the normal takeoff area and, thanks to choppy conditions, didn't look surfable.) Many believe that the Cortes Bank, a 25-mile-long underwater mountain range that surges from a depth of 5,000 feet to within six feet of the surface, is the most likely place. It's ideally situated to groom open-ocean swells of any size into rideable peaks.

But even if the Odyssey never lives up to Sharp's 100-foot conceit, his timing has been perfect, coinciding with a mainstream big-wave explosion that started with Dana Brown's 2003 movie Step Into Liquid, a wide-ranging surf flick that featured tow-in pioneer Laird Hamilton and climaxed with footage from the Cortes Bank, and will continue with Stacy Peralta's documentary Riding Giants, a smash at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival that's slated for nationwide release this summer.

Sharp's plan was to train and equip a rapid-response squad that could scramble on short notice to chase down giant swells at obscure surf spots worldwide. It quickly became clear, however, that stalking the mythical 100-footer led to unrealistic expectations, especially when the crew was encumbered by more equipment than airlines were willing to carry.

Sharp didn't miss a beat; he simplified his focus to finding great new tow-in spots in faraway places, even if they didn't always shock the world with sheer size. In the 21 months preceding our July 2003 trip to Chile, Sharp had taken teams to the Pacific Northwest, Australia, Hawaii, Mexico, Tahiti, and Europe, but the Odyssey hadn't found anything close to a legitimate 100-footer. The prize for the biggest rides over the past two winters—both in the 60-foot range—have gone to Brazil's Carlos Burle and Hawaii's Makua Rothman, neither of whom had any connection to the Odyssey.

Even so, the Odyssey has retained core credibility in the surf media, mainly because it involves two things that will forever intrigue surfers: big waves and, better yet, newly discovered big waves. One of their best discoveries, made in 2002, is a ghastly, heaving break in southern Australia, off the coast of an island they're keeping secret. Sticking with the Homeric theme, they've named it Cyclops.

"In any given year, the biggest wave might not be ridden on our program," Sharp acknowledged to me early on. "We hope it will, but there's no guarantee. The Odyssey is really just about expanding our toolbox of waves. It's about the adventure."

However you spin it, the Odyssey surfers are gutsy. Greg Noll, the fearless bull who helped pioneer big-wave surfing in Hawaii in the fifties and sixties, says that taking on waves this big, whoever you are, requires remarkable physical courage. "Anytime somebody has the balls to step up to the edge of the horizon and take a peek over the side where nobody's looked before, they deserve all the respect that they can get," says Noll, now 67 and living in Northern California. "Anybody wants to call bullshit on it, put them behind a fuckin' jet ski and see how it works out."

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