The wave was bigger than anything Laird Hamilton and Brett Lickle had experienced — 80, maybe 100 feet high — and though they were fleeing it flat-out on Hamilton's jet ski, it chased them down and squashed them like a steamroller. "The only conversation we had was Laird yelling 'Go go go!'" Lickle remembers. "Then it was like hitting the eject button on a jet fighter."

Hamilton, riding on the rescue sled being towed behind the jet ski, dove off at 50 mph as Lickle took the avalanche full bore. Buried deep under the foam, Hamilton's 20-pound surfboard was driven fin-first into Lickle's calf, flaying him open from his Achilles tendon to the back of his knee. "It felt like someone crushed my leg," Lickle says. The pain of the bone-deep gash was blinding, but irrelevant. Because if Lickle couldn't somehow kick his way back to the surface, then swim a mile to shore, he knew he'd never see his wife and kids again.

The wave that overtook the two surf veterans was one of thousands of giants that raced across the northern Pacific ahead of a historic December 2007 storm, a cyclone that formed when a dying tropical depression over the Philippines met a frigid blast tumbling down the Siberian steppe, found warm water, and went nuclear. "The moisture supercharged the storm," says Sean Collins, chief forecaster and president of Surfline.com. "It was like throwing dynamite on a fire."

Within a couple of days, a 1,000-mile line of hurricane-force winds was rushing east across the loneliest stretches of the Pacific. Mountainous swells piled up on one another, ripping weather buoys from their moorings. "Swell data showed 50-foot waves," Collins adds. "Occasionally there was a 100-footer." Bill Sharp, director of the Billabong XXL Big Wave Awards (the Oscars for surfing's top daredevils), says, "It's the most extraordinary week I've ever seen in big-wave surfing."

In the surf world, news of phenomena like this travels faster than the waves. Before dawn on December 3, scores of Hawaiians were waxing their big-wave surfboards and tuning jet skis as forecasters predicted a swell that might flip the switch at Oahu's famed Waimea Bay. But Hamilton had a hunch the forecasts were wrong, that the best surf would be at Maui, 120 miles east. By daybreak, with Maui's North Shore under siege from unsurfable 50-foot walls of water, Hamilton revised his prediction: Storm clouds and mist obscured reefs farther out that might focus the chaotic waters into peeling waves. So Hamilton and 47-year-old partner Lickle hatched a new plan, setting out on jet skis from Spreckelsville for a reef called Outer Sprecks.

"If anyone had any idea of the waves on the way, they would have turned on the tidal wave warning systems," Hamilton says. No small craft, much less surfers, would have been allowed on the water. In retrospect, Hamilton could have used the warning — he and Lickle would soon be battling for their lives at the mercy of the waves.

It took another day for the waves to make landfall in central California, but there too surfers were jockeying to be first on the water. At the foggy crack of dawn on December 4, as half a dozen tow-in teams left Half Moon Bay for the offshore break called Mavericks, California's most famous big-wave spot, another 25 teams motored out from Monterey Harbor, 100 miles south, to a remote corner of rock-strewn shoreline known as Pescadero Point. Many surfers call it Ghost Tree.

The ominous name comes from bleached trunks of dead cypress at the end of 17 Mile Drive, the Monterey-to-Carmel road along some of the most dramatic coastline on earth. On rare winter days with the proper westerly angle, waves are focused by the deep Carmel Canyon to rear up 60 feet in deadly proximity to car-size boulders. Don Curry, a chiseled 48-year-old surfer and personal trainer, made his name here at Ghost Tree and at Mavericks. "The waves are right there," he says. "It's the only place you literally feel the waves shaking the ground. If you don't make the drop, you'll bounce off the rocks. You're dead."

In the days before jet skis, a few brave locals paddled out to challenge Ghost Tree, but the consensus was that the wave heaved in too fast and broke too close to allow anything more than scratching in at the end. Curry, for one, charged other big waves nearby, and on the biggest days he could always count on one surfer to paddle out with him: a larger-than-life contemporary named Peter Davi.

Davi was a big, bearish surfer of Sicilian descent, one of the few who had paddled at Pescadero. One of six children with roots in the Monterey Peninsula generations deep, his grandfather Pietro Maiorana was a pioneering seine fisherman during the days of Steinbeck's Cannery Row.  Although not above accepting an occasional tow, Davi believed surfers should have the physical prowess to earn their waves.

On December 4 longtime friend Anthony Ruffo and Randy Reyes gave Davi a ride on their jet ski out to Ghost Tree, where photographers, resting surfers, and spectators were floating outside the big waves. Among them was Kelly Sorensen, owner of Monterey's On the Beach surf shop, who had sponsored Davi for 21 years with clothing and gear. Sorensen watched as Davi and Mavericks regular Anthony Tashnick tried to paddle in. "Tazzy" managed two short rides, but the waves were too fast and mostly rolled underneath them. Davi paddled his eight-foot-six board over and sat on the back of Sorensen's jet ski, and the two marveled at the horrifying wipeouts and barrels big enough to drive a bus through.

Curry, a tow-in regular at Ghost Tree since 2002, rode a 60-footer on March 9, 2005. That day's poundings were also legendary. Justen "Jughead" Allport broke his leg in four places, and Tyler Smith took a 50-footer on the head, his brother's rescue attempt nearly killing them both. Several of that day's waves, including Curry's, earned surfers coveted XXL award nominations for "Ride of the Year." So Curry wasn't surprised to see 25 teams vying for waves, some of the overamped newcomers clearly not waiting their turn.

"The biggest weaslers I've ever seen," says Ken "Skindog" Collins, who claims that events like the Tow-In World Cup and the XXL (which he won in 2006) have spawned a legion of gasoline-powered aggronauts who are so determined to drop in, they neglect the unwritten ethos of crowded surf breaks. The backlash against towing in has caught the attention of regulators overseeing the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which contains both Mavericks and Ghost Tree (small jet skis were banned in 1992, but a loophole still allows three-seaters and larger). Barring a late deal, this is the last year towing will be legal in central California's heaviest arena.

"When we started towing Mavericks in '98, there were plenty of waves and not enough people," Collins says. "By the next year everyone who deserved to tow-surf, because they could paddle, had a ski. But then everyone else had one too, showing up when it's 10 to 15 feet, cutting across paddle surfers and taking waves from guys who are worthy. Some of these guys were just trying to get the next Body Glove ad or win the XXL. From now on, if you win the XXL and you weaseled a wave, I'm going to throw a rock at you."

Up at Mavericks, Peter Mel had surfed two amazing waves and was up on his third when it hit an undersea ledge, throwing him off-balance and burying him. With no time to avoid a six-story wall of water, Mel simply ducked, covered, and prayed. "It was like I was run over by Niagara Falls," he says. "I thought it was going to tear the limbs off my body." His partner Ryan Augenstein rushed in, but his jet ski stopped dead; the ocean was so churned, the impeller couldn't get a grip in the foam, like a car spinning its wheels in snow. As another wave bore down, the ski suddenly caught, Mel grabbed the sled, and the two shot to safety. "It was one of the most amazing saves I've ever seen," Mel says. At 12:30 a rescue team motored out; a crab boat named Good Guys had gone down, its two fishermen lost to the waves.

Down at Ghost Tree, Ruffo had tow-surfed into four scary bombs. Davi was determined to tow into at least one wave on his traditional paddleboard. "I'm 45 years old and I want one of the fucking waves," he said from the back of Sorensen's jet ski. "Those were the last words I heard him say," Sorensen says.

Laird Hamilton had guessed right. The farther offshore from Maui he and Lickle got, the clearer it became that the storms' big swells were setting up hills of water 50 feet high, hills that were crashing over the reef and offering rides three quarters of a mile long. "It was absolute perfection," Lickle says. "Not a drop of water out of place." As the waves grew, the pair found it nearly impossible to control their skittering boards, so they returned to shore to pick up Hamilton's favorite: a six-foot-seven wood missile shaped by Hawaiian Dick Brewer, thin as a water ski, heavy, and fast. By the time they returned, Outer Sprecks had gone mutant.

Helicopter pilot Don Shearer, who's flown film and rescue missions during Maui's hairiest swells, flew in under the low ceiling and was completely awestruck by waves 12 to 15 stories tall. "I've seen every big swell that's come in since 1986," he says. "This was far and away the biggest I've seen in my life."

"They were sucking the water off the reef, breaking top to bottom," Hamilton says. "We could barely get into them, even at full speed."

The aluminum fin on Lickle's board had bent, so Hamilton lent him his Brewer. The foot straps were too wide, but Lickle couldn't resist the opportunity to chase down "the two biggest waves of my life." But as he blasted down his third the entire wall reared up in front of him. With no chance to outrun it, Lickle swung to the top, narrowly flying over the back. He was done. Then the horizon went dark: It was a rogue wave, straight out of The Poseidon Adventure. Hamilton wanted it. Lickle pegged the throttle.

After letting go of the rope, Hamilton felt as if he were flying. Plunging down the wall, he had to make split-second adjustments to deal with the warbles and ripples in his path while also focusing far ahead in case the wave lurched up into a closeout. Then he realized that was exactly what was happening. Tearing along at 40 knots, Hamilton's only hope was to dive into the wall, kick like hell, and pray he didn't get sucked downward as the wave thundered shut.

Lickle, tracking behind, was horrified when the wave closed out. Then his buddy popped up unharmed, but waving frantically: The next one was even bigger. Hamilton grabbed the sled and Lickle nailed the throttle, shooting toward land at 50 mph. It wasn't fast enough.

"The wave hit us like we were going backward," Hamilton says.

Lungs near bursting, Hamilton and Lickle finally surfaced in choking foam a foot thick. "I could barely keep my chin above the surface," Lickle says. Another wave followed, then another, dragging the pair a third of a mile until they reached a calmer stretch. Then Hamilton heard Lickle say something like "tourniquet." Pulling his leg out of the water, Hamilton was shocked by the carnage. "It had to be taken care of right there," Hamilton says. Almost a mile of sea and shorebreak lay between them and safety. "Or he was going to bleed to death."

Shearer's helicopter flew over, but he couldn't see the pair in the foam. Hamilton ripped off his wetsuit and tied a sleeve tight around Lickle's leg. Then he spotted the jet ski a quarter of a mile away, floating perfectly upright. He gave Lickle his vest and said, "I've gotta go."

As Hamilton swam off, Lickle felt more alone than ever before. "I've got kids, 12 and seven," he says. "I had bled out to the point of weakness. I was just drifting, wondering if I'd ever see my family again."

Lickle's light-headed fog broke when the jet ski arrived with his butt-naked buddy at the helm. The ignition lanyard gone, Hamilton had used stashed headphone wires to MacGyver a replacement. When he punched the ignition, the waterlogged ski fired right up.

Hamilton screamed into the radio for EMTs as Lickle knelt on the sled, trying to keep his calf closed for the grueling 12-minute race to Baldwin Beach Park. By the time the ski ground into the sand, paramedics were waiting.