HBO’s “100 Foot Wave” offers few visual clues the world outside of the compelling docuseries is in the grips of a 100-year pandemic that will kill millions of people.
The show’s hero and protagonist, Garrett McNamara, is not filmed wearing a mask despite the close quarters of many scenes that are featured in Season 2’s first and second episodes. And he is by no means alone.
But COVID-restricted plane rides to Portugal are soon required as rare early season conditions at Nazaré prompt a reunion of the world’s best big-wave surfers. They include McNamara, Ian Cosenza, Lucas “Chumbo” Chianca and Kai Lenny.
“We saw this big swell on the map,” McNamara says from his house in O’ahu, Hawaii. “It was the best-looking swell that I’ve seen, with the best conditions. And it looked like it was going to be the best waves we’ve ever seen.”
The rush to Nazaré in October 2020 as the remnants of Hurricane Epsilon approach proves worthy, indeed, with some of the biggest waves in the decade since McNamara’s discovery of the spot provide ample fodder for the sport’s biggest stars.
But the logistics tell another story. The first sign of trouble comes when McNamara’s young daughter breaks down crying at the news she won’t be allowed to accompany her mother to the traditional viewing locale for the day’s surfing, on the lighthouse at the top of Nazaré’s majestic cliffs.
The tensions mount from there.
“The hype of this swell was so intense,” Lenny says. “It was the biggest swell ever.”
Germany’s Sebastian Steudtner soon rides a wave that has the hordes drawn to the lighthouse cliffs that day roaring like a surfing crowd had rarely roared before.
Guinness World Records would eventually mark Steudtner’s wave as the biggest ever ridden at 86 feet, a record that still stands. Officials number the Nazaré crowd at 30,000.
Chianca catches a similarly massive wave, and says the reaction was unlike anything he’d experienced before.
“As soon as he got off the wave, the cliffs were like ‘YAHHH,’” says Cosenza, who was providing the tow for Chianca. “Everybody is screaming.”
“It was like Brazil versus France in the final of the World Cup,” Chianca says.
Other veterans of the Nazaré scene had never seen anything like it. But it isn’t only the crowd on the banks. The number of surfers and accompanying jet skis in the water creates a logjam at the lineups and a dangerous snowball effect for the process of swooping in and grabbing a surfer after their ride — or after they had wiped out.
“I think it surprised everyone how many people turned up in October,” McNamara tow partner and big-wave star Andrew Cotton says. “That many jet skis, that many people. And everyone’s hungry. Everyone wants it.”
Whether it was the opportunity for thrills, fame, fortune, or the anticipation and bottled up energy from lockdown, the early crests of the biggest waves have a crowd of as many as six jet skis poised in the hopes that magic is at hand. The radio channels of the teams’ walkie-talkies are also overcrowded and becoming jammed with interference.
“The energy in the water was very intense,” Chianca said. “You could see that everybody in the water was feeling a heavier, more tense energy.”
“We were in the middle of a pandemic, you know,” says McNamara’s wife and spotter, Nicole. “People were scared during that time. Now you have these big scary waves coming. So I think it just increased everybody’s fear and survival mode.”
A significant police presence grows and begins erecting barricades to limit the flow of people coming into the area, which had become an “astronomical amount,” according to Nicole McNamara.
It’s apparent the lack of social distancing in such a massive crowd has the real potential to spoil a good thing as news coverage of the event spreads globally.
“You can’t have football matches, there’s no crowds, and then you got 30,000 people on the cliff, watching people surf,” Cotton says. “So then the city hall had to juggle that.”
One week later, a surfing ban is indeed put into effect, a prohibition that lasts six weeks and empties Nazaré of many of its surfers who flock there in the colder months to catch waves that grow to reach the height of tall buildings. Even Nazaré pioneer Garrett leaves.
As “100 Foot Wave” shows, some surfers test the rules. But the local police force proves mostly up to the task, doling out warnings and fines to nearly anyone who enters the waters.
“Now the cliff looks exactly what it looked like before Garrett,” a local says.
