Greg Long had spent more than 15 years of his life chasing big waves. Surfing giants was all about the rush, the adrenaline, the achievement. Finding bigger and better waves, pushing his personal limits. But surviving big waves? That was all about preparation.
“There’s consequences to what we do,” Long says. “Each one of those boxes we don’t check as far as the preparation, it’s just opening up a slightly larger margin for error for something to go wrong.”
In December 2012, on his never-ending quest to ride the greatest wave of his life, something did go wrong. Long was held under by a set of mammoth 50-foot waves at Cortes Bank, an underwater sea mount 90 miles southwest of Los Angeles. Six minutes later, unconscious and just barely alive, he was pulled to safety and given oxygen aboard his support boat.