Men's Journal

Rusty (left) and Greg Long; moments after pioneering a break in the Azores Photo credit: Cody Doucette

For the Long brothers, pioneering giant surf breaks is an art, a science — and an enviable way of life.

By Kitt Doucette

Rusty Long can fall asleep anywhere, anytime, in two minutes. A short while ago he was unloading the car and laughing about the drive up from San Clemente at 4 am in the rain, but the moment he learned that our flight to Boston was canceled, he simply shrugged his shoulders, laid himself down atop a pile of surfboard bags, and immediately fell asleep amid the chaos of Los Angeles International Airport.

This ability to sleep whenever and wherever comes in handy when you spend nine months a year traveling the world to ride its most dangerous waves. When not surfing the greatest hits of the genre — Mavericks in Northern California; Waimea Bay on Oahu’s North Shore; and Playa Zicatela in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, where huge waves breaking close to shore make the whole beach shake — Rusty, 28, and his brother, Greg, 26, travel to remote corners of the globe in search of undiscovered epics. Over the past five years they’ve established themselves as leaders in the next generation of big-wave hell men, pioneering breaks in Baja, South Africa, Ireland, Western Australia, northern Chile, and California. (A “big wave,” in the Long brothers’ world, means any wave that’s tall and heavy enough to seriously injure or kill someone.)

From Boston we were to catch a flight to the Azores, a group of nine islands in the middle of the North Atlantic between New England and Portugal. Rusty had done his research, studying bathymetry charts, weather patterns, swell models, and satellite images on Google Earth to spot the kind of potential setups — a triangle of whitewater, a shallow shelf dropping abruptly into deep water, a headland jutting out into the ocean farther than any others — that, with the right swell and wind combination, could yield the kind of barely rideable waves for which he and his brother are known.

Swell models — computer-generated forecasts that turn marine and weather data into animated projections of wave heights, periods (time between crests), and direction — play a crucial role in modern surf adventure. They allow you to predict and track virtual swells across the open ocean and help determine how large and powerful they might be at various times. Greg and Rusty check the models four or five times a day in search of blobs of purple and white, the colors used for the biggest waves.

All of this research and modeling, alas, had been foiled by a much more commonplace malady: rainy weather in Boston. The Azores would have to remain unridden a while longer. Waking up Rusty with a gentle nudge, we rebooked our tickets for the next available flight — four days later — and drove back to Greg and Rusty’s hometown.

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San Clemente is the epicenter of SoCal surf culture. Located at the northern edge of the Marine Corps’s Camp Pendleton, a rare block of open space that separates Orange County from San Diego, the city is home to myriad surf companies, surf magazines, surf shops, surfboard shapers, and virtually all of the economic machinery it takes to run the industry. It also has one of the densest per capita populations of surfers in the world, the result of two things: beautiful beaches free of development and consistent year-round waves.

The house the boys grew up in is tucked quietly within the confines of San Clemente State Beach among a dozen homes reserved for long-term park employees and lifeguards. Their father, Steve Long, worked as a lifeguard supervisor in the California state-park system for 26 years, and it’s no wonder his boys love the ocean. “It was their backyard growing up,” he tells me. “The ocean and the beach were their babysitter and their playground.”

Several years of training and competing in the junior lifeguard program cemented the boys’ skills and strength in the ocean not just as surfers, but also as swimmers and divers, and local surf contests up and down the coast filled most of their adolescent weekends. Trips down to Mexico in the old family RV offered the boys an early taste of surf adventure, and when they were 15 and 17, they made their first pilgrimage to Killers, a big-wave break at Todos Santos, eight miles off the coast of Northern Baja.

“After that first session, I was hooked,” Greg says. Rusty adds, “It grows on you. You paddle out on a 15-foot day, get beat a couple of times, catch the biggest waves of your life, and realize that you can handle the beatings. Then you want to ride even bigger waves, and so on and so on…”

During the next three years, the brothers took both their wave-riding and their training seriously, transforming themselves from scrawny surf rats into lithe athletes with body-fat percentages in the low single digits.

Although they still competed in local and national surf contests — Greg won the United States National Amateur Championship at age 18 — the boys’ main focus soon became finding and riding big waves, and after three more years, their appetite grew beyond the crowded lineups of Hawaiian hot spots. Armed with fresh travel budgets from sponsors such as Ocean Pacific, they hit the road, following winter swells around the globe while competing in a newly formed big-wave circuit.

To the degree that their routine these days can be pinned down, it goes something like this: December through February in California, keeping an eye on Hawaii and Baja just in case a big swell develops; March and April exploring such corners of the world as Rapa Nui (Easter Island, in the South Pacific), Tasmania, and Western Australia, where they keep a camper van; May and June in Puerto Escondido, where Rusty owns property; July and August in South Africa; just about anywhere in September; and Europe for October and November. One would be tempted to call their schedule “grueling” — if it didn’t seem like so damned much fun.

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After an evening surf with Rusty, I walk back to the house and find Greg in the kitchen, pacing back and forth and talking excitedly on his cell phone. The models have forecast a large western swell to hit California and Baja in three days, and the conversation turns to wave angles, wind predictions, and travel logistics. Surf spots from Oregon to Baja are suggested, but no decision can be made until the last minute. “A lot can change really quickly,” Greg explains between calls. “So many variables are involved, and although the forecasts help, they’re never totally accurate.”

He tells me that he once made a trip out to Cortes Bank, a submerged mountain 100 miles off the coast of Southern California where some of the biggest waves in the world break. He traveled 18 hours round-trip over dangerous ocean waters in the hopes that the wind and rain would slacken for a mere three-hour window before the next storm was forecast to hit. It paid off: He got to surf waves seven stories tall.

“There are so many almosts,” Rusty says. “For every score, you get skunked three times. Wind, tide, swell direction, weather — it all has to come together just right.”

While Greg resumes his phone calls, I stumble across an article in a surf magazine about a three-day big-wave bender he and Rusty went on a few Decembers ago. One of the largest swells in four decades was brewing in the Pacific, with waves forecast to be in the 50-to-80-foot range at most of the premier big-wave breaks. The brothers set their sights on a trifecta — surfing Waimea Bay, then hopping on a plane to San Francisco and driving three hours south to ride Ghost Tree near Monterey, then driving 12 more hours south to Ensenada to board a boat for the eight-mile crossing to Killers — and decided to do it all during the same three-day swell.

Having already ridden the first two with a total of seven hours’ sleep in two nights, Greg paddled into a five-story wave at Killers, earning him a biggest-paddle-in-wave nomination for the Billabong XXL awards, big-wave surfing’s highest honor. The Longs are no strangers to the awards: Rusty was nominated for the Monster Paddle award in 2006; two years later, Greg won the biggest-paddle-in award as well as best overall performance, and last year Greg edged out his brother for Ride of the Year honors before triumphing at the Eddie, the oldest and most prestigious big-wave contest in the world, beating out Kelly Slater in giant surf.

Their styles on the water reflect their personalities, with Greg surfing aggressively and competitively, riding deep in the tube and cutting waves to pieces with powerful carves, and Rusty surfing patiently, smoothly flowing between elegant, relaxed turns. Neither brother, though, is about to let the pursuit of a trophy or title get in the way of their good time. “Contests are an important part of big-wave surfing,” Greg says, “but the greatest joy for me comes from leaving the first set of footprints on an isolated beach, paddling out into unknown waters, and being the first to ride a wave somewhere.”

The swell Greg is tracking this time comes later than predicted, but he is on it, scrambling to load up his van in the dark, dashing down to Baja, and taking a boat nine miles off the mainland to ride 40-foot waves — all in a day’s work. Rusty and I are off to Boston and the Azores again, and will meet up with Greg in a week. As we taxi up the runway for our red-eye, I look over at Rusty, already fast asleep.

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If the Hawaiian Islands and Ireland had a torrid love affair and their bastard child spoke Portuguese, Azores would be its name. After landing in Ponta Delgado, we quickly light out for the far territories, where low-lying rock walls divide the countryside into thousands of asymmetrical green shapes speckled with cows and sheep. In the small towns, houses with whitewashed walls and pink-tiled roofs line narrow cobblestone streets. Volcanic rock surrounds the islands, thermal hot springs bubble up through caves, and waterfalls pour over 800-foot cliffs. The islands’ mountaintops were once thought to be vestiges of the lost civilization of Atlantis — the parcel doled out to Poseidon when the rest of the gods divided up the Earth.

For three days we drive around the island, with Rusty checking and rechecking various locations through WWII-era Russian binoculars. His equanimity in the face of a wave drought is admirable; far from seeming perturbed, Rusty appears to exist in a state of near-constant expectation. Then, as if on command, the clouds clear and I stand on a deserted headland watching 15-foot waves crash over a shallow rock reef. After quickly pulling on his wetsuit, Rusty skips across lava-rock boulders the size of tractor tires, tiptoes over the sea urchin–infested tidal zone, jumps into a small keyhole in the reef, and weaves his way through piles of whitewater that dwarf both him and his surfboard.

He surfs for two hours, catching a dozen waves with fluid efficiency. Beyond simply riding the heavy water (or just struggling to survive the drop), Rusty seems to join it. When he eventually drags himself from the surf, he just smiles and says, “Some fun ones out there today.”

Every time the wind shifts, though, we look at the computer, cross-referencing different models to predict where we might find something better. After a day of this, we decide to gamble: Rusty sees a small triangle of whitewater in the grainy black-and-white satellite image where the wind is forecast to turn offshore, so we pack our bags and hop a small plane for a 30-minute flight to another island in the archipelago.

All we find is rain. People in the airport stare at our surfboard bags and call us crazy. We spend two days wearing out our windshield wipers looking for anything resembling a rideable wave until Greg shows up, and just like that, the waves turn on. We emerge one late afternoon from a thick cloud on top of the island into a sun-spotted overlook above a fresh ocean swell, with lines of perfect 12-foot waves stacked to the horizon. Four large waterfalls cascade off the cliffs rimming the bay while the setting sun turns the electric-green cliffs a soft pink. Forget about Atlantis: This is surfing Shangri-La.

I put my wetsuit on and watch as Greg drops in. Stalling at the bottom of his first wave, Greg watches calmly as thousands of gallons of water pitch up and over his head. Reaching his hand out to touch the wave face, he stands perfectly still on his board while the water peels flawlessly down the reef, encasing him in a perfect almond-shape barrel.

Dinner that night is a celebration. Rusty and Greg have a few beers and start to tell stories — something about a stolen car in South Africa; typhoons and food poisoning in a Philippine archipelago; spending a month in the rain on Easter Island only to have the wave they were waiting for go perfect on the eve of their departure…

Of course, our wind switches again, the swell fades again, and it’s time to move on again. Greg says the models look amazing for Morocco, but when I say goodbye the next morning, the brothers still aren’t sure where they’re headed next. Greg puts up his hands and arches his eyebrows. “Maybe Morocco…maybe Ireland, maybe Spain… We’ll have to just wait and see.”

Rusty grins from ear to ear. Then he goes back to sleep.

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This article originally appeared in the May 2010 issue of Men’s Journal

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