Half Moon Bay >> Nobody expected it would be easy to take home the purse of the newly dubbed “Titans of Mavericks,” the 10th big wave surf contest Friday held at the break near the Pillar Point Harbor. Still, Santa Cruz native Nic Lamb was up for the challenge, taking home the champion’s $30,000 share of the $120,000 contest purse.
The high-risk, high-reward entertainment didn’t come without a price.
After taking off deep in the bowl and successfully escaping it to get a pair of strong early scores, Lamb had to wait through a long lull in the one-hour, six-man final to see if strategy would pay dividends. Just four sets broke in the final, and he held on — though unwittingly, since there is no live scoring for the athletes in the water — for the win.
“I’m over the moon right now,” Lamb, 28, said. “I can hardly believe it. It feels good.”
Earlier in the day Lamb, 28, was caught inside for three waves while Jet Skis tag-teamed trying to bring him to safety. Ultimately they pulled him out of the impact zone, and he was back to competing for waves in no time.
“It’s tricky to know what’s going on out there,” Lamb said. “There’s a lot of water moving, a lot of moving parts.”
The swell was west-northwest with wave heights growing throughout to faces exceeding 30 feet in the semifinals and final. A fog delay at the beginning had organizers concerned, but it blew over within 10 minutes of the scheduled start time.
A good day for Lamb became a tumultuous one for Santa Cruz’s Ken “Skindog” Collins. Collins, 48, made an early exit from the contest after a crushing wipeout ruptured his ear drum. He had surfed well enough to secure second place in the heat and move into the semifinals, but he decided to protect his health and not surf with the injury.
“I’m super frustrated because physically I feel 100 percent,” Collins said in an interview on Redbull TV. “I just can’t go back in the water because I have a hole in my head and it will fill up.”
Collins’ spot went to Dave Wassell of Hawaii. He had the highest score of any fourth-place finisher in the first four rounds. But since he competed in the fourth heat, he had to surf back-to-back heats and didn’t make it out of the semifinals.
The jaw dropper of the day came from Jamie Mitchell of Australia who, after a late, drop deep in the bowl of a 25-plus-foot wave, briefly disappeared behind the crest. Defying the realm of the possible, he barely crawled under the lip of the heavy slab to freedom and finished off with a couple cutbacks. Mitchell’s brief venture into no man’s land earned him the top wave score of the day, a 9.37 out of 10, and the $5,000 Best Barrel award.
The competition was stiff. Greg Long, the 2008 Maverick’s contest winner, successfully landed several of the late, critical air drops that Maverick’s is notorious for. One tied him for the second highest wave score of the day, an 8.83, and helped him claim the Boldest Drop $10,000 prize.
Tyler Fox of Aptos brought style to Maverick’s rarely seen. The goofy footer carved aggressive cutbacks on his back side that, together with daring drops, earned him a high score of 7.5 and a place in the finals heat, where he finished fourth.
Travis Payne of Pacifica took second after getting into the contest as the only wild-card entry when Shane Dorian of Hawaii withdrew with a back injury. Long finished third, Mitchell wound up fifth and Carlos Burle of Brazil wrapped up sixth. Santa Cruz surfers Anthony Tashnick and Zach Wormhoudt went out in the semifinals, while Ryan Augenstein and Shane Desmond dropped off in the opening rounds.
But it was Lamb’s consistency throughout the day that took home the big prize. He finished the day with the best two-wave combo score in the final.
“My last wave that I caught felt like a really good wave,” Lamb said to a crowd of reporters after the competitors boat docked. “These guys are the best in the world so it feels good to be on top.”