Nazaré, Portugal, boasts the biggest waves in the world and is the Mecca of Big-Wave Surfing. In his latest book, sports journalist MATT MAJENDIE shares the highs and lows of the 2021-22 season, witnessing massive waves, wipe-outs, rescues, near tragedies and death-defying escapes. In this edited extract he gives us an insight into a daredevil’s ordeal while searching for the perfect wave…
One minute, Andrew Cotton is reclining in the December sunshine, the next, fighting for his life, a lone black blob teetering in Nazaré’s death zone. Whitewash surrounds him and for two-and-a-half minutes – a time frame that feels infinitely longer for his girlfriend Justine White, friends and teammates watching on the clifftop above – his life hangs in the balance. Things tend to go wrong quickly in Nazaré. One minute, he is being picked up on the back of a jet ski after riding a latest wave. As his rescuer Alemao de Maresias hits the throttle to surpass the crest of the next wave, the lip of it juts up just that bit higher than either anticipates.
The rescue vehicle lands heavily back on the water’s surface. Cotty, as he is better known to everyone, shakes the water from his eyes only to realise, as his vision returns, that his rescuer has been knocked clean off. He quickly shifts himself into the driver’s seat and hits full gas to try to evade the next breaking wave – only to be sideswiped and sent battering towards the rocks on which the Fort of Sao Miguel Arcanjo stands.
Those looking out for him on the walkie-talkies, the so-called spotters, are unsighted on the clifftop – their view blocked by the fort – and unable to help. Others on the fort wolf-whistle to the jet skis surrounding the rock as their drivers try to spot him and find a safe passage to rescue. The level of panic from the helpless above to the even more helpless in the water rapidly grows and reaches a crescendo.
Cotton is thrown against the two standalone rocks that jut out of the water’s surface between the fort and the open expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. They spit him out perilously close to the jagged caves below the fort, in which certain death awaits. One more big wave and he will be battered and shattered against the cliff face and will most likely end up dead. One of his peers, the Portuguese surfer Nic von Rupp, later estimates the chance of survival at this stage and in that position is about 10 per cent.
But, momentarily, the size of the waves offers some brief respite. The current whips him out to safety and his marine walk with death is at an end, 150 seconds of mayhem over. Cotton – by this point relatively breathless, battered and bruised – is finally picked up by a jet-ski driver. For those standing on the clifftop, that two and a half minutes feels markedly longer, and also lengthy enough for Cotton himself to consider a potential endgame.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is about as bad as it gets,’” he says, showered off and changed just hours after the incident. “I thought, ‘If the next wave gets me, it could be a really horrible, painful and slow death.’ There’s some gnarly caves, the rocks are super sharp and seaweedy. If you’re pushed down there, it would be horrible. Sometimes you watch the waves and they regularly break where I was. This time, for whatever the reason, they didn’t. It’s the roll of the dice, isn’t it?”
Cotton had previously decided not to go out on this particular day. With windy conditions and bumpy waves, it was an unnecessary risk just two days out from a competition. Now that he is in his forties, there is no longer the burning desire, the aching need to surf every wave, to be immersed in every single swell as he once did. But even now, when all his sensibilities say something else, he sometimes just can’t help himself.
Cotton’s instinct is to sit it out in the coastline home he is renting during the big-wave season in Nazaré. But on days like this, the strength of the villa’s location can also be its curse. There is something in the waves that, on such days, drags even a noncommittal surfer in, and stokes a fear of missing out, as jet skis bob in and out of the water and surfers catch the occasional clean wave only a few hundred metres in front of him.
Nazaré’s big-wave surfers have a propensity to shake off the near disasters – they have to, in order to mentally get themselves back in the water. The surfer from North Devon is not the first one to find himself stranded in big-wave surfing’s no man’s land. Others have been in the same watery limbo between life and death. Garrett McNamara, the first man to surf Nazaré on its big days, ended up there moments after breaking the world record in 2011 for what was then the biggest wave ever surfed – a 78-footer. Such is the speed with which moments of celebration can nearly end in tragedy along this stretch of the Portuguese coast.
Even years later, the Hawaiian McNamara’s wife Nicole likes to imagine she can locate a spot in those caves where he can improbably find himself a safe haven and where she could winch down food to him should he ever find himself stuck in there, confident he could see it out safely until the waves have died down.
In Nazaré, family-and-friend onlookers tell themselves all manner of things to reassure themselves, as they helplessly stand a couple of hundred metres above and avoid acknowledging that their loved ones might one day meet with tragedy. Up until this point – the start of the 2021–22 surfing season in the Portuguese fishing village – remarkably, no one has died in its perilous waters. And yet there is a foreboding for all those working in and out of the water of such an eventually on any given day. This is the nature of the surfers’ dangerous undertaking. The reality is it might even happen this season.
For Cotton, his own dice with death is a bad one but, he argues somewhat unbelievably, for those watching, there have been infinitely worse. For his girlfriend, it is her first time witnessing him in real trouble. Turned white, she is virtually muted, her walkie-talkie, normally used to communicate with those in the water, snatched from her by one of the spotters in an initially vain attempt to launch a rescue mission, which is only achieved thanks to the changing current of forgiving seas rather than all manner of safety operations in place on land and sea.
Cotton, Britain’s leading big-wave surfer, has broken his back and torn his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in Nazaré’s stormy seas on previous outings. Of his latest brush with the rocks, he says almost nonchalantly: “It’s not as bad as the back-breaker, and it’s more traumatic for anyone watching than for anyone going through it. But there was a moment where I thought, ‘I’ve really f—ked it here, this is really going to be it.’ But I’ve thought that a few times before. The nightmare is to get pushed into one of those caves – you’d never get out – so I’d definitely put it in my top five worst, maybe higher.”
Everyone has their Nazaré stories: knocked unconscious and face down in the water; the elbow dislocated at its socket and the arm pointing in the wrong direction on exiting the water; the handlebars of the jet ski knocking out a pair of front teeth; an earlobe ripped clean off. The list goes on. And yet they still return, big wave after big wave, swell after swell, near tragedy after near tragedy, for that ultimate adrenaline rush and that perfect wave – if such a thing exists or is capable of quenching their surfing thirst.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matt Majendie is a sports correspondent at the Evening Standard and has twice been nominated in the British Sports Journalism Awards. He’s also has worked for CNN, BBC radio, podcast series Bloodsport and writes articles for redbull.com. He lives in Bristol in the UK.
NAZARÉ: LIFE & DEATH WITH THE BIG WAVE SURFERS by Matt Majendie (Welbeck, $34.99rrp) is out now
Photography by Vitor Estralinha
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