What it’s like to surf the world’s largest waves

Mystical. Unruly. The feeling of endless water. Big-wave surfer Maya Gabeira has no small words for the giant swells of Nazaré, Portugal. It’s hard to find a single wave’s peak, where it will break. “It just comes from everywhere,” she says. One bone-breaking, breath-stealing wave nearly killed her. Another wave landed the Brazilian the women’s world record for the largest wave ever surfed—and a third broke that record, setting a new one.

“It was just so much water,” she recalls, “and would shift so much, even when you were in it—that it just felt like you were going down forever, like a mountain.” 

The waves roiling atop Europe’s largest underwater canyon—some three miles deep and 120 miles long—have long mesmerized and terrorized the small coastal community of Nazaré.

No one attempted the giant swells of winter—at least not until American surfer Garrett McNamara, at the urging of dedicated locals, came to investigate in 2010. “As soon as I walked up to the lighthouse, I saw the biggest waves I’d ever seen,” he says, but conditions were terrible. “It was like, OK, this is going to be amazing as soon as we get the right wind.” He studied the waves and then rode a record-breaking, 78-foot-tall monster in 2011. Now it’s common to hear this once quiet fishing village described as surfing’s Everest, or its Holy Grail.

Swells from winter North Atlantic storms are focused and amplified by the canyon into the crashing giants of Nazaré.

Surfing these waves means coming close to the force of nature and respecting it as nonnegotiable. The underwater features supercharge an unforgiving wave volume, speed, and unpredictability. There’s also a beach break—waves crash on shifting sands, not rock or coral. “Because of the storms, because of the winds, because of the big waves—the sands are always moving,” says Portuguese surfer António Laureano, at 19 among the youngest in the big-wave community. The waves are often “bumpy,” making for jagged rides that magnify the challenge. One can try to outsmart them—the first wave of a set of several “kinda cleans the bumps,” he explains. But there are no hard or fast rules.

Except that one cannot tackle the biggest waves alone. Surfers are motored toward these moving mountains by a tow-in partner on a Jet Ski. That Jet Ski often is backed up by a second one in case things really go wrong.

Before getting towed in by Jet Ski, surfers must put on special gear to survive the cold, falls, and getting pinned under waves.

Up at the nearby lighthouse, “spotters” with walkie-talkies scan for good sets of incoming waves. On the cliff and the beach below are often devoted townspeople, maritime officials, rescue teams, medics, families with watchful eyes. “Here you can yell to the surfers and they can hear you,” McNamara says. “You can feel the ground shaking and you actually get misted by the waves.

If watching these rides is a mixture of hope and dread, measuring them is a mixture of science and headache. There’s no end line etched in chalk, no easy reference point. “We’re talking about a dynamic situation, so we’re talking about water particles [that] are moving all the time,” says Miguel Moreira, an associate professor in the Faculty of Human Kinetics at the University of Lisbon, one of a few experts puzzling out better ways to measure for surfing records.

Even surfers can’t really tell a wave’s exact size. “You know if it’s big, but you don’t know how big,” Laureano says. Gabeira knew her 73.5-foot wave was “the most radical” she’d ever surfed— because of the sound of it exploding behind her. McNamara wondered, “What are you guys excited about?” after his record breaker. He says he was "just surfing with my heart and just enjoying the ride—but always focusing on the exit."

Surfers have long hunted for such giant waves.“That’s always been the chat—‘Where is the 100-foot wave’?"” says British surfer Andrew Cotton. “And Nazaré is a village, and the waves break right in front of the lighthouse." He’s still incredulous. “How was the biggest wave in the world hiding, all this time, in plain sight?” 

One thing is certain. The waves have changed the town—and those who ride them. For Gabeira, pulled unconscious from what surfers call a rinse cycle of deadly waves in 2013, her brush with death made her more humble, “more human.” Laureano can’t explain how he or other surfers survive at all: “Sometimes I just feel I just have some superpowers.” 

Perhaps by some unearthly osmosis these surfers do possess them. 

“The energy and the power that the waves have is something from another world,” he says. “It’s magic.” And mystical. Unruly.