As Winter begins to kick in across Europe, many big wave surfers across the world will be keeping their eyes on the swell charts and the activity in the Atlantic in the hope that an XL swell will wake one of many of Europe’s big waves, including Nazaré which has become a world famous spectacle every time it goes XXL. We thought this was the perfect opportunity to release, for free, a feature we ran in Issue 590 of our mag which delves deeper into the workings and big wave scene of Nazaré.
Check out the full feature below. Written by Nicky Balboa.
“Nazaré is like a grand canyon. One of the deepest canyons in the world runs just outside (the break). A deep trench attracts all of the swell in the ocean and once that swell hits and rolls into the canyon it accelerates. All this power of water is shot up into one direction once it hits the shallower part closer to the cliff… All of that energy facing the shallower part just ejects up. That’s what it feels like in the water. All of a sudden out of nowhere you have these 50-foot waves popping up.It is incredible, like staring at a moving mountain that’s coming in your direction to eat you alive.” – Nic Von Rupp
In the quote on the opening spread of this story, Nic is of course talking about the world’s biggest wave, which is located in the town of Nazaré, Portugal. Locally it is known as ‘Praia do Norte’ or North Beach.In the season between October and March, the break can whip up faces in the realm of80 to perhaps 100 feet. To give you a little scale that’s a 10-storey building or three school buses stacked end on end. Von Rupp has surfed at other big wave venues like Pe‘ahi (Jaws) in Hawaii and Mavericks in Northern California but admits that the size of the waves at Nazaré are second to none.
Von Rupp calls it a “perfect mess” but indicates there are certain patterns to the lineup. “There’s three main peaks. The bombs are gonna come in one place, the second peak is gonna come in one place, and the third peak is gonna come in another place. But the water is constantly moving around. Those big first peak waves are right in front of the rocks.”
In the past decade, Nazaré has become the place where surfers go to break theWorld Record for the highest wave ever surfed. Starting in 2011, Garret McNa-mara hurtled down a wave that measured78 feet, and held the title until 2017. More recently, Sebastian Steudtner eclipsed that mark when he rode a cloud-tickling86-footer at Praia do Norte. Since 2011, seven out of the nine biggest waves ever ridden have been at Nazare. António Laureano is one of the younger charger on the scene. He first surfed Nazaré at 13years-of-age, and has been obsessed with it ever since. Now 20, Laureano is start-ing to push the limits in the lineup but has learned enough about the wave to under-stand that there are always unknown variables. “No one is prepared to surf Nazaré. We cannot control nature,” says Laureano.
Nazare, it seems, has become the new ‘Mount Everest’ of Surfing. Of course that’s not the first time the analogy has been made. ‘Outside Magazine’ writerJon Krakauer described Waimea Bay as the Everest of Surfing in 1994, while Cortes Bank earned the same moniker in 2012 from former ‘SurferMagazine’ editor,Evan Slater. Now, Nazare has superseded them both. However, the oft-used Everest tag isn’t simply about the scale of the wave. The great mountain in the Himalayas attracts climbers(many of them amateurs) from all corners of the earth who are deter-mined to risk all to stand atop of the world for a few brief moments. Perhaps there are few dinner table or boardroom boasts that trump ‘I climbed Everest’ but earnest attempts to put Everest on the bucket list can have fatal consequences.The year 2019 was a horror and eleven people died trying to climb the fabled peak.
Likewise, Nazare has become a focal point for zealots seeking the sense of conquest that might be experienced by slaying the world’s biggest wave. “It gets crowded with people flying in from all over the world, there’s constantly new people,”says Von Rupp. “Skis bring a lot of wake(into the lineup), plus it’s heavy machinery, so things get dangerous. Driving a ski at Nazaré is probably the most challenging part, it makes anywhere else look like peanuts. You are dodging huge shorebreaks, trying to get back out, and so you have to be very experienced to drive a ski out there. That’s why you’ve seen so many accidents over the years out there…people flipping skis.”
Things can go sideways in a hurry. In the 2017 award winning short “The Big Ugly’ a drone captures a wild scene as Pedro ‘Scooby’ Viana wipes out at the end of a big wave. His rescue partner Lucas ‘Chumbo’ Chianca zips in on the Jet Ski to make the rescue but moments after pick- ing up Viana the ski capsizes and the two are left floundering amidst roaring currents and colossal waves. A second jet ski driver, Everaldo ‘Pato’ Teixeira, even tually rescues each surfer (separately).
This two ski system a ski for towing and one for making rescues was origi- nally implemented by Garrett McNamara. Meanwhile, António Laureano outlines some of the other precautionary measures that have become part of the culture at Nazare. “There are spotters on the cliff,” says Laureano. “There are always two or three Jet Skis. The city hall has a safety protocol: they have firemen on the beach, a doctor, and two lifeguards.”
Chumbo and Scooby’s ‘Big Ugly’ moment was a close call, but a dance with Nazaré can mean paying the ultimate price. In early 2023, Brazilian big-wave surfer Márcio Freire (47) passed away while surfing Nazaré on a day where paddle- surfers and tow-teams shared the lineup. Freire was one of the big wave commu- nity’s own. A well-respected figure, Freire was a paddle pioneer at Jaws and part of the original ‘Mad Dogs’ crew that braved Shane Dorian describes the wave as a Maui’s giant A-frame peak sans skis, rescue-teams, or life jackets. Tributes for Freire describe him as a “happy spirit” who surfed with “a big smile on his face.”
Freire started off the session paddling but had switched to towing when he wiped out on a wave estimated to be 20-foot. He was reportedly wearing an impact vest, but not an inflatable jacket. Ski driver Lucas Chumbo recovered Freire and brought him to shore, but he was eventually declared dead on the beach. It was the first time a surfer had lost their life at Nazare.
The soaring cliffs of Praia do Norte may provide a spectacular viewing platform but their presence also adds another dimension of danger to the Nazare experience. If you don’t pick up a surfboard right away, there’s a good chance it ends up on the rocks. If you lose the ski in the wrong spot it can easily be smashed to pieces and if you don’t pluck a surfer from the swirl of treacherous foam, they may well end up on a perilous journey to the cliff base. Back in 2018, Ross Clarke-Jones was washed into a minefield of incongruous, boulders. Footage showed RCJ squatting at the base of a rock, using its front edge as a buffer as the surging water roared over him. In the end he managed to scramble up the cliffs and attributed his survival to his childhood experiences playing amongst the rocks at Terrigal beach.
Shane Dorian describes the wave as a “logistical nightmare” and Nic Von Rupp concurs that it’s a highly unpredictable environment. “When you tow you don’t really know what you’re getting yourself into,” says Von Rupp. “You think you are the king of the world because you are matching the speed of the wave and you are already standing up…but if the wave eats you up it’s so brutal, like you are getting torn apart by four trucks at the same time. It’s like a boxing match, you lose sense of what’s happening. It’s super violent and every time you fall you are risking injury.” Last year Von Rupp broke his shoulder, this season he’s already deal- ing with a knee injury.
Laureano has also been nursing a minor knee problem and encourages anyone who wants a slice of the cake to tread with extreme caution and take a methodical approach. “If it’s your dream to surf Nazaré, then you need to prepare your- self,” says Laureano. “Prepare your mind, prepare your body.” Instead of renting a ski by yourself, reach out to a local person, give them some money to run safety for you. “There’s a stairway to getting to Nazaré: get familiar with the local community, get advice from the local community and support it,” says Von Rupp. “Plenty of people have been very close to drowning out there and it all comes down to us locals saving people’s lives.”
