On the morning of Tuesday, 11 February, giant teepee-shaped waves marched into Nazaré, the famous surf break on the west coast of Portugal. They moved in a latticed formation that looked deceptively organised. Only when a jet ski whipped a surfer into them could you see their otherworldly scale. The surfer would drop, drop, drop, and then drop some more in a kind of slow motion that defied the speeds at which they travelled, the bottom of the wave seeming to recede, or the crest of the wave continuing to grow taller – or both. It was spectacular to witness in person. The wave dwarfed each surfer so much they appeared ant-sized. I emailed a phone pic to my mum and wrote, “Zoom in to see surfer.”
By Jamie Brisick– Photography: Owen Tozer
“It feels like I wrote this piece a whole lifetime ago, but it was only a few months. I’m scrutinising it for things that feel exaggerated or hyperbolic, given all that’s happened since. But testament to the freakish hugeness that is Nazaré, the above description still stands.”
I watched from atop of the cliff that overlooks Nazaré with a few thousand fellow spectators. One was Carina, from Austria, on her third trip to Nazaré this winter to see the big-waves. “I can’t get enough of it,” she said. Gary, a senior citizen from North Carolina, USA, was travelling around Portugal with his wife. “It’s like the Grand Canyon,” he said. “You’re seeing it, but you can’t believe it.” Jennifer, a 20-something musician from New York: “I suffer from depression, and when I came across Sebastian’s feed on Instagram, and all those huge waves, I don’t know… I just felt happy.” Sebastian is the German surfer Sebastian Steudtner, a competitor in the event; Jennifer told me that she’d tracked the swell from her home in Tribeca. When she saw the contest was on, she immediately booked a flight.
My story was similar. Three nights earlier I was modestly drunk at a bar in London with my pal Owen Tozer, a surfer and photographer. He’d seen the swell forecast, and that the Nazaré Tow Surfing Challenge – the annual big-wave event in Nazaré – was likely a go. The following morning, Storm Ciara battered the UK with hurricane-force winds – the same winds that would bring the massive waves to Nazaré. As the windows of our respective London flats rattled, we exchanged text messages teeming with thumbs-up emojis – and booked flights.
“A bygone world, the way we spectators huddled so closely to watch the action. Was there sneezing? Coughing? Where were th
