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Outside Magazine April 2004
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Surf & Destroy (Cont.)

SIX MONTHS AFTER THE CHILE TRIP, on his way home from that crowded January day at Cortes Bank, Mike Parsons looked back at the hectic session—and the avalanching mania for big waves in general—with ambivalence. He'd ridden some beautiful surf, but he was also appalled by the mob scene. "I'd never seen more than one other jet ski out there before, and then all of a sudden there were 20," he says. "It was chaotic."

Of course, the Odyssey crew knew they had only themselves to blame for the zoo. Sharp had done a magnificent job of publicizing Cortes, and now his hype had come back to snake him. "You know what I'd compare it to?" Sharp asked me. "You meet the most unbelievable chick in the world. You wine her, dine her, have a few incredible dates. And then you go to pick her up at her house one night and there's a crack-house gang bang going on."

I asked Sharp if he sometimes wished he'd kept quiet about Cortes, which sits a relatively brief boat ride away from the world's most crowded surf zone. He shrugged the question off as unrealistic. "I suppose we could have kept the thing totally secret, and it might have been decades before someone would have figured it out," he said. "But there's a cost to this stuff. For us, it's paid for by going out and gaining publicity. To do it the other way, you'd have to have a real job."




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