At an awards ceremony Saturday night, 24-year-old Santa Cruz surfer Alessandro “Alo” Slebir will finally find out if he set a new world record while riding the towering wave at Mavericks last winter — and whether he captured the Holy Grail of surfdom: a 100-foot wave.
The record to break is an 86-foot wave ridden by a German surfer at Nazare, Portugal, in 2020. Early, unofficial estimates put Slebir’s at 108 feet.
Making big wave history would be “awesome,” Slebir said. “If not, I got to ride the tallest wave of my life and I’ll never forget it.”
Santa Cruz big-wave surfer Alessandro “Alo” Slebir stands near the Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse, which sits above Santa Cruz’s heralded surf break Steamer Lane. (Photo by Jim Seimas /Santa Cruz Sentinel)
That swell at Mavericks, a half mile off the coast of Half Moon Bay, hit two days before Christmas, on the same day and amid the same storm that destroyed the Santa Cruz Wharf.
The waves were so big they created their own wind and blew out the settling fog. Slebir’s descent was so dangerous, so hallowed to the surfing community, that videos of it have been set to requiems for the souls of the dead.
“I just definitely remember the feeling of the wave sucking up behind me, and that alone just gave me the sense that I knew it was going to be the biggest wave that I’ve ever ridden,” he said. “I never felt that on a surfboard.”
A photogrammetry analysis that is more Pythagorean Theorem and less artificial intelligence will determine whether the wave will make the history books as the largest ever ridden.
The viral, international attention Slebir’s ride received and the potential for it to make the Guinness World Records is re-animating the surfing world, casting a fresh glow on the local surfing spot, and renewing a sense of nostalgia for the local surfboard shaper who discovered these colossal waves 50 years ago.
“It’s a validation that this is the real deal,” said Jeff Clark, 68, who pioneered the enormous surf break in 1975 and is the first person known to ride it. He was 17 back then, when only Hawaii was known for big waves.
Mavericks legend Jeff Clark participates in the opening ceremony of the 2018/2019 World Surf League Big Wave Tour Mavericks Challenge at Mavericks Beach in Half Moon Bay in 2018. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group)
Over the past decade, the surfing spotlight has shifted from Mavericks to Nazare, (pronounced NAH-zah-ray) a fishing village 75 miles north of Lisbon. There, 80-foot waves routinely crash close to shore and the surfing events that followed have turned the community into a global tourist and surfing mecca. Surfers have set five world wave records there. Sebastian Steudtner, who holds the largest wave record, has been sponsored by Mercedes-Benz.
Then came Slebir’s wave.
Most surfers along the California coast consider 15- to 20-foot waves too huge and scary to attempt. The sets rolling in at Mavericks that day were five times that size.
As a kid, Slebir was weaned on surf videos. At 14, he and his dad paddled 28 miles from Santa Cruz to Monterey in a day. He is sponsored by spirits and supplement companies who help pay his travel expenses, but still works in construction during the off-season. He was chasing giant waves in Hawaii when the forecast called for a supersize swell to reach Mavericks and produce the kind of colossal waves he had never witnessed.
He flew home, thinking he “would have probably regretted it for the rest of my life” if he missed what became one of the biggest swells ever recorded at his home break.
He headed into the surf that morning — 30 years to the day that legendary Hawaiian surfer Mark Foo was killed there in 1994 in a “two-wave hold down” that can plunge surfers 40 feet deep and pummel them underwater so long that a second set of waves will pass overhead.
On most days, Mavericks surfers paddle themselves out into the breaking waves. But on that morning, with monumental waves crashing and southern winds stirring up the water, nearly all paired up with partners on motorized watercraft who towed them to the top of the waves. Veteran photographers, videographers and rescue crews joined them.
Frank Quirarte, piloting his new Yamaha WaveRunner, narrated a play-by-play for his Instagram live feed.
“Something’s going on,” he said. “The ocean is bubbling up … It’s coming now, for sure.”
Quirarte had switched to a still camera when Slebir, towed on a Jet Ski by his longtime surfing buddy Luca Padua of Half Moon Bay, hurled to the crest of the gigantic wave and let go of his tether. The wave looked like it could peel for miles. Adrenaline kicked in as he dropped down the wall of water.
With the sheer force and lift of the wave, Slebir was speeding down the glacial face at up to 40 mph, but it was rising so fast it seemed like he wasn’t moving. For a moment he felt like he was surfing backwards.
Big-wave surfers, photographers, and safety personnel watch from the channel as Santa Cruz’s Alessandro “Alo” Slebir rides a wave at Mavericks, located off the coast of Half Moon Bay, that was estimated to be 108 feet on Dec. 23. (Audrey Lambidakis – Special to the Sentinel)
“You’re riding this wave,” he said, “and your body is going into almost a survival stage.”
He barely remembers the final turn off the trough and he didn’t hear the cheers that arose.
Clark, who knelt beside Foo 30 years ago when the surfer was pulled lifeless from the sea, watched Slebir’s epic ride that day from the back of a Sea-Doo, set up to pull flailing surfers aboard.
“That wave that Alo got was a freak of nature, a unicorn,” he said.
The legend of Slebir’s wave grew through the holiday week. The New York Post wrote about it. ESPN did a segment on it. And over the past nine months, a team of judges has been measuring it, pinpointing the exact location of the wave’s base, then stacking images of Slebir’s crouched pose on top of each other like a totem pole up the face of the wave.
Bill Sharp of Big Wave Challenge, the sport’s new governing body, was on the judging panel that analyzed photos of Slebir’s ride from six angles. If a new record is set, it will be accepted by Guinness World Records, the London-based company said.
The long-awaited reveal will happen at the end of a Saturday night banquet. Slebir is up for this year’s Men’s Biggest Wave award against two surfers who rode immense waves in Hawaii the day before.
Whether he breaks the record or not, Slebir said, the hype of his ride shows off Mavericks as “one of the scariest waves in the world and it deserves that respect.”
Sharp, who is keeping mum on the results until Saturday night, said Slebir’s ride was extraordinary.
“However big it was — 60, 80,100 feet — there’s this gaping mouth of death behind him,” Sharp said. “No matter what happens, he rode it perfectly and it kicked him out grinning ear to ear.”