King of the Waves

In his slick, black wetsuit, Raph Bruhwiler looks even more slender than he really is. On the water he is all grace, his almost willowy body seeming to rise naturally on the board. He appears relaxed and almost motionless while his board cuts up and down on the wave face.

With his trademark effortless style, this Vancouver Island boy is making waves around the globe. In December 2006, he placed fourth at the Nelscott Reef Tow In Classic in Lincoln City, Oregon—a competition that draws some of the biggest international names in big-wave surfing.

The big-wave contest is the Everest of the surfing world—where powerful waves the size of three- and four-storey buildings dwarf the surfers who are attempting to ride them. These are special waves, created by a unique confluence of space and time. In few places do the right geographical and climactic conditions combine to focus a far-travelled ocean swell into the perfect, peaking giant. And only rarely do the meteorological conditions co-operate, with storm swells generated by a weather event far away arriving on a calm and windless reef.

Given this one-in-a-million combination, scheduling a surfing competition can be as difficult as organizing a G7 summit. The competitors were put on notice for three months. “They were watching some storm up in the Bering Sea,” says Raph. “They emailed us a week before, saying conditions were looking good for the 8th of December. Then we got the call a few days later saying it’s on in 48 hours.” Surfers around the globe booked last minute flights and Raph hopped in his car and booted it down to Oregon.

The wave at Nelscott Reef was surfed for the first time in 2003, but years before that, in 1995, the near-seismic waters were spotted by John Forse. He tried to surf it (after using a zodiac to get out past the pounding beach break), but found out the hard way that this wave was too big and too fast to catch by traditional means. However, it was perfect for tow-surfing—where a surfer is whipped into the sweet spot by a jet-ski. And so the Nelscott Reef Tow In Classic was born.

Raph and his brother Sepp were invited to the inaugural contest in 2005. Most of the pairs at Nelscott have been towing together for years; in giant breakers bigger than most people’s houses, you depend on your buddy for a lot more than just a ride.

Sepp wasn’t so interested in big waves, but Raph entered anyway with a towing partner from France. In 2006 Raph switched things up again and partnered with Keith Malloy, from California. Although Raph and Keith had surfed together for years, they had never towed together before.

“It’s the rescuing—that’s when it gets hairy,” explains Raph. “I had one bad wipeout at Nelscott. You get tossed around under the water for maybe 20 or 30 seconds. That doesn’t sound long, but when you’re getting thrown around and it’s all dark and you’re feeling like your limbs are going to be ripped off, it’s a long time. Meanwhile, Keith’s up there looking, waiting for me to come up. He can’t rescue me until he knows where I am. I had just come up to the surface and there was another 30-footer coming down on my head.”

Somehow, Keith managed to pluck Raph out. “We’re good,” Raph smiles. “We’re partners now.”
In order to survive the wipeouts, Raph works on breath-holding exercises. “When you relax, you can hold your breath for a long time. You try to relax underwater, but you’re getting so tossed around that you can’t. So you’ve got to practice holding your breath while doing things.” So Raph swims laps and skips rope while holding his breath.

Training started at a young age for Raph. His hometown Tofino is now Canada’s undisputed surf capital, but even as early as the 1980s, when Raph was growing up, a surf scene was burgeoning. “For me and my brothers and sister, the ocean was our backyard. Playing in the ocean was all there was to do. We didn’t have wetsuits. We didn’t even know what cold was.”

A friend of Raph’s dad used to take the kids out on his longboard and a few years later Raph got his own, “An old clunker that would probably be a museum piece now.”

Raph’s first taste of competition came at age 13. A local surf shop asked him to enter as part of a four-man team. He wasn’t keen on it, but finally decided to join in. “All these guys were laughing at me. I was just this skinny little guy and they all thought they were up against this little twerp. That just made me try harder.”

Raph won the competition.

“That was really the transition. There were all these guys I had looked up to and then I actually beat everyone. I still really do it for the fun, but that was definitely a turning point,” he says.

While some surfers specialize in big waves, Raph doesn’t consider himself a one-wave kind of guy. “To me, a good surfer is a good all-round surfer—someone who can surf anything and not just one type of wave. I’ll surf one-foot waves, I’ll surf 50-foot waves and anything in-between.”
But judging the size of a wave is difficult, even for this pro. “To me, it looks small all the time. Then I see a picture of me on it, and I think ‘Holy cow that’s a big wave!’”

Raph and his wife Joey became parents just over a year ago. Their baby girl is named after the ocean. “Being a father does change things for sure. I don’t want anything to happen to me. I want to watch Aqua grow up. You think about it the night before, but when you’re out there, well, it’s just such a thrill to be on those waves.”

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Going Hard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.