Five wanderers disappear on California’s Big Sur coastline
Words by Joe Carberry
In a world fraught with uncertainty, escape is an oft-sought commodity. And there’s no better place to lose yourself than California’s Big Sur, a 90-mile section of rugged seascape between Monterey to the north and San Simeon to the south—a perfect place to lose ourselves on a fall weekend.
“Where are you guys?” crackled Vince Shay through the cell phone. “Bad news,” I answered sheepishly. “We were stuck in L.A. traffic for three hours … and I just locked my keys in the van.”
My passengers, SUP Art Director Rob Zaleski and Associate Editor Dave Shively, seemed ready to leave me at the Chevron pump with the locksmith. But the van—loaded with four standup boards, paddles, camp stoves, drybags and enough processed food to keep us alive for weeks—was mine. So they were stuck with me.
It was close to midnight when we rolled up on Vince and Fletcher Burton, who were bedded down on a dark roadside. Vince, a 39-year-old videographer and Fletcher, a 31-year-old contractor, had driven up from Pismo Beach hours before and scouted what little of our route was visible from the road.
Our plan was to paddle a 10-mile stretch of coastline faced by vertical cliff walls and towering rock spires, and affording no access to the outside world. We’d search out a campsite somewhere along the way, our criteria being shelter and, most importantly, an empty surf break.
We slogged the boards down an old dirt road through a shuttered state park, where Dave and I strapped drybags onto the noses of our 12-foot boards. Fletcher and Vince, who opted for smaller rides in anticipation of the surf to come, seemed to be second-guessing their choice. Fletcher’s overloaded 10-footer was sinking up to his shins, and Vince wobbled like a drunken carnie on his 11’0”.
He’d be off his board soon enough. Our first stop was the carcass of a blue whale that Vince had spotted during his reconnaissance the previous day. The blue whale is far and away the largest living creature on the planet, stretching more than 100 feet and weighing nearly 200 tons. This one had been struck by a passing ship a few days earlier, and sharks had been feasting on the giant mammal’s greasy flesh.
As we paddled towards the whale, I noticed streaks of oil spreading rainbows across the dead-flat water like gas spilled from an outboard. Before the endangered species was protected in 1966, whalers would routinely take more than 13,000 gallons of oil from a single blue—a factoid the boys were clearly unaware of when they decided to clamber onto the whale’s belly-up carcass. Dave, Vince and Fletcher apparently had a bucket-list item to check off: whale walking. They hopped on the great beast’s underside, taking pictures and ooing at the sizeable chunks taken out of its tail by passing great whites–which, fortunately, we’d yet to see.
Rob and I sat back and enjoyed the shit show, which got markedly better when the three stooges tried to remount their boards. The dead whale blubber was caked to their shoes and as they stepped back onto their rides, each of them began slipping and sliding, falling repeatedly into the potentially shark-infested waters. Blubber was everywhere, and the smell of dead fish hung like a pall. Vince fell in near the whale’s head, blubber covering his face. “I just threw up in my mouth!” he screamed.
We moved on but the whale remained with us the rest of the trip, a silent but very smelly rebuke. Thankfully, the ocean did not hold the same grudge: The miles slipped by easily as we wove in and out of sea caves, playing with the soft swell. Big Sur’s notoriously rough seas were calm, glassy as a mountain lake. Aside from overcast skies the conditions were ideal. A little swell here goes a long way.
After passing a few different waves that looked surfable, we came to a pristine cove with a grassy shelf just above the beach, a perfect spot to bivy. A small wave broke off a castle-sized rock in front of our camp, with a right and left-hander on either side of it. We were home.
We dumped our gear, cooked some lunch, and then surfed till we couldn’t walk. The waves were anything but big, but the faces were clean. And our egos were boosted.
The whale-walkers had a hard time getting traction on their boards, slipping and sliding on the leftover blubber. They rubbed sand and kelp all over their boards until they gained footing. Fletcher shredded every wave he caught, while Dave paddled into the biggest wave of the trip, a head-high, peeling right that came out of nowhere.
We built a fire at the high-tide mark and huddled close to it during the cool evening. I can’t remember Campbell’s Chunky ever tasting so good. We crawled into our sleeping bags on the soft, grassy chaparral and slept heavily.
In the morning, we enjoyed one more exhausting surf session, packed up and paddled the last of our eight miles to our takeout, enjoying the awe-inspiring coastline’s vertical rock-walled channels and exploring thick kelp beds.
Big Sur has a history of playing host to wanderers like Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck and Henry Miller. Count us among the lucky. Count us among the lost.
See more of Zaleski’s fantastic photos here.
This piece originally appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of SUP magazine.
