When Maverick’s Blew Up: Reflecting on 30 Years Since “Week of the Peak”

The highs and lows from those fateful sessions were captured in High Noon at Low Tide, filmed cliffside by Powerlines Productions’ Eric W. Nelson and from the water by Steve Spaulding. Nelson remastered the film in 2004 with interviews and insight from numerous Maverick’s legends like Jeff Clark, Peter Mel, Darryl “Flea” Virostko, Grant Washburn, Mark Renneker and more.

“It wasn’t all time, but it’s what put Maverick’s on the map,” Nelson said. “Nobody believed that wave was as big as it was. And when the Hawaiians came over, Mark Foo, Ken Bradshaw and Brock Little, that legitimized it. It was like, ‘Wow, the legends are here.’”

For then-23-year-old Evan Slater, who was there from start to finish, the week began as a dream scenario. Fresh out of college, he had moved from Southern California to San Francisco with his future wife to milk Maverick’s dry that winter. It was quite a year to commit to Mavs. 

Slater, who eventually became editor-in-chief for both SURFER and Surfing Magazine, is not one to invoke nostalgia or “the good ol’ days.” But in the moment he knew it was something special. Thirty years later he still knows it. He was among the handful trying his hardest to get just a bit further under the ledge and survive for five days straight. Keep in mind that this was well before user-friendly forecasting, inflatable vests, professional water safety and jet skis were the norm. Just a bunch of guys relying on weather radios, wits, air and prayers. 

“At the time, everyone who was there that week felt like they were a part of something special that hadn’t happened outside of Hawaii,” Slater said. “Basically, we felt like the spotlight had turned from the North Shore to Half Moon Bay. And we were on stage because we were there anyway.”

The consistency of waves inevitably led to cameras, and the footage from High Noon at Low Tide, reveals surfers themselves to the brink and beyond. There’s no shortage of wipeouts (a guy known only as “Nacho” dived headfirst off a hollow 20-footer) and thrilling, down-the-line rides at breakneck speed. These were also foundational sessions for Mel, Flea, Zach and Jake Wormhoudt and others cut their teeth at the slab 50 miles north of their homes in Santa Cruz. 

Every day brought new challenges at Maverick’s. Even clean days had brutally spectacular beatdowns. In Moriarity’s case, it was a case of howling offshores, a no-no at the wave. His unintended iron cross is still a sight to behold all these years later. “Standing up, it felt good,” he recalled to Nelson. “Then I looked down and I saw nothing underneath me. Nothing, like 35 feet down. Just the bottom of the ocean.”

“I think that emboldened a bunch of guys,” Grant Washburn said. “It was like a worst-case scenario, a guy making the biggest mistake ever and he actually came back up okay.”

The late Vince Collier, one of SC’s heavies, summarized the difficulty succinctly in HNLT, “It’s not like one swell is coming through,” he said. “It’s like the whole ocean bottoming out on the reef.”

“It was years of big wave surfing were packed into one week,” Mel said in the film. 

“It just became routine,” Slater said. “Your 10’4” became your 6’3”. The guys that were out there every day just got acclimated to the intensity and craziness that Maverick’s is. A lot of people were just trying to catch crazy ones without understanding the consequences, which is why the end piece of the whole story was just a knife in the heart.”

That wound opened on Friday, December 23, when the trio of Hawaiians walked out to Pillar Point. The terrible irony was that Friday was relatively mellow compared to what had come through earlier that week. Nelson and Spaulding filmed Foo, Bradshaw and Little paddling into glassy 15-20 foot faces. Then Foo, aged 36, took one last wave. 

“Everyone had tears in their eyes,” Jeff Clark reflected 10 years after the incident. “Because we knew we’d lost someone today.”

“With Foo dying… it was one of those things where everything became real,” said XXL winner Mike Parsons. “You don’t always come up. That changed things for me.” 

Slater was on the boat that found Foo’s body floating near Pillar Point Harbor. Almost like dark divine intervention, the weather shifted for the worse. Wind turned onshore for the first time in more than a week, rain soon followed. Strangely, two more big-wave surfing deaths occurred in the following years: Donnie Solomon at Waimea Bay in February 1995 and Todd Chesser at Outside Alligators in 1997.

“All of us who were so committed to that pursuit at that time, each year we were reminded of the consequences,” Slater said. 

Despite the danger, the genie was out of the bottle. Maverick’s wasn’t going anywhere. The story born in 1994 grew and wedged itself into surfing’s collective consciousness. 

“The awareness changed after that,” Slater said. “It became a spot the entire surf world was interested in seeing. It was a place you could make a career. That did not exist before. Now there are kids who grow up aspiring to be big wave surfers, and Maverick’s is their north star.”

“It was a time of great teachings,” the ever-astute Renneker concluded at the end of HNLT. “And we pretty much learned all there is to learn about Maverick’s. The lessons learned were for the most part wonderful. But some of them were tragic and (left) heartburn. And I don’t think any of us who were there have forgotten in any way.”