Surfer Bruce Irons wipes out at Pipeline in Hawaii during the 1997-98 winter season. (AP Photo/HO/Sean Davey/Courtesy of Casagrande Press)
Every surfer has a story, whether it's about that perfect wave, that nasty shark or that hilarious beach bum.
Paul Diamond, a dedicated surfer and surf camp instructor, has collected 30 such surfing stories for his new book, "Surfing's Greatest Misadventures: Dropping in on the Unexpected."
The 288-page book features stories that range from the serious, such as a beginner surfer's experience during the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka, to the absurd, including an account of a once-only homeless surfing competition in California.
Diamond, who lives in Seattle, spent a year gathering and editing the stories.
"The range circles the globe. Everywhere there is an ocean, there is going to be a surfer," Diamond said. "Surfers are always trying to seek out new places to surf and they do it in a more haphazard ways than other adventurers, like mountain climbers, and that makes for good stories."
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SHARK ATTACKS
The book opens with writer Matt George's "Red Water" -- a somber telling of the October 2003 shark attack of Bethany Hamilton, who was 13 when a tiger shark snapped off her left arm while she was surfing in Hawaii.
George leads the story using a device similar to the Elizabeth Bishop poems "Giant Toad" and "Strayed Crab," which are written from the animals' point of view. But he instead writes from the point of view of the tiger shark.
Stretching the truth came back to haunt contributor John Forse who lost all the toes on his right foot in a lawnmower accident two decades ago. Forse, a surfer since 1962, started telling people that he lost his toes in a shark attack.
Pretty funny, until April 1998 when he was surfing in Gleneden Beach in Oregon and a shark really attacked him and left eight teeth marks in his right thigh.
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SURVIVAL
Contributor Ran Elfassy's "Lesson Six" tells how his sixth surfing lesson in Ahangama, Sri Lanka, turned horrific when the deadly 2004 tsunami pulled him and his wife out to sea. Elfassy recounts his anguish after he loses sight of his wife, Delian.
"Life without her, the looming thought I tried to deny with each step but which crept ever nearer, was a nightmare that would always end with Delian slipping, falling into a cruel current that I was powerless to save her from. What would I do without her, if I survived and she didn't?" Elfassy wrote.
Luckily, his wife survived.
In "Heavy Water," big-wave surf rescuer Shawn Alladio writes about an ominous surf spot called Dungeons in South Africa "because it's cold, sharky, powerful, and lined with jagged rocks."
Alladio, 44, was hired for water safety at the Red Bull Big Wave Africa Surfing Contest in 2001 and by 11 a.m. had 35 rescues. Ian Armstrong, a champion big-wave surfer from South Africa, took off on giant wave that crashed fast, smacked him on the back of the neck and sent him falling 25 feet.
Alladio had timed the wave intervals and knew she had only 16 seconds to retrieve Armstrong on her WaveRunner personal watercraft. Armstrong had suffered a temporary paralysis and was screaming, "I can't feel my feet."
Alladio, who owns a company that provides water safety training to the military and law enforcement, pulled Armstrong onto her craft and drove both of them to safety.
"I made a decision to risk my life and my equipment. I decided to do everything I could to intervene on behalf of Ian," Alladio said in a phone interview. "It was a miracle that he came to surface. The odds are that he shouldn't have come back up."
She remains friends with Armstrong, who gave up big-wave surfing after the incident. It took him six months to recover.
Alladio said she decided to contribute the rescue story, "because if he wasn't rescued, he would've died."
Paul Chavez is an asap reporter based in Los Angeles.
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