How big is big?

S.J. Cahn

It is inside an everyday building on Superior Avenue.

Inside a sparsely furnished Newport Beach office.

It is chaotic. It points to chaos. It is the room where the

biggest waves in the world are first found, a modern-day map room

strewn with old navigational charts. Cheap rolls of paper are piled

on top of one another. There are drawers full of coastline charts

waiting to be examined.

And hovering in the middle, tossing aside one crinkled, white map

before laying out the next, Bill Sharp pauses, just for a moment.

“What’s the next one we’re going to find,” he asks as he looks

over a map of the north Pacific Ocean.

He goes on to explain just how you pinpoint, from thousands of

miles away, where a 30-, 40- or 50-foot wave might break.

It is disconcertingly simple.

By looking at far-off regions of the world. By knowing storm and

wind patterns. By calculating what shores will receive the waves

those winds produce.

“You’re just able to say there’s a probability that there will be

a spot,” says Sharp, a former editor of Surfing and Surf News

magazines and a near lifelong Newport Beach resident who now lives

with his family in Newport Heights.

Being able to turn that probability into success has landed the

41-year-old Sharp squarely in the swirling center of big-wave

surfing.

“Bill has proved himself to be one of the most perceptive, astute

promoters of the sport,” says Sam George, editor of Surfer magazine.

“He really has no peer.”

“He’s definitely found his niche and certainly spearheaded in that

arena,” adds Graham Stapelberg, vice president of marketing for

Billabong USA.

Sharp is among the few dozen surfers who venture into oceans where

collapsing walls of water jack up to twice the height of mansions in

West Newport, where the waves are a dozen feet thick and the only way

to survive is to be dragged behind a jet ski into the dumping pits

that are -- to use a word tamed by overuse -- extreme.

It is an extreme story that began as a version of most every surf

adventure, with a boy on gentle, friendly waves. And the story might

have remained like most but for two distinct moments.

ON HIS KNEES

In Sharp’s case, the first taste of surfing was riding rafts at

Little Corona. It grew under the influence of a brother, Mike, 11

years his senior, who was out surfing before his younger brother

could venture to the beach.

In that environment, “Surfing was always in the house.”

By the time Sharp was in the 5th or 6th grade, he had followed his

brother’s lead into the sport “big time.”

For his 8th grade graduation from Harbor Day School, he went to an

old Newport surf shop, George’s Surfboards, and walked out with a $45

used Infinity kneeboard.

That purchase would turn out to be a momentous one. It propelled

Sharp into a vanishing niche of the sport. Kneeboarding was already

retreating from the mainstream scene by the early to mid-70s; today

it is a footnote, practiced by few, including Sharp, who’s also a

standout stand-up surfer. At Corona del Mar High School, he’d earn

one of the few spots for kneeboarders on the school’s surf team. At

16, he started traveling to Hawaii -- a winter ritual he kept up for

22 straight years.

By the end of his four years at Corona del Mar, he was “fairly

good at it.”

He also was captain of the team, proof he was better than “fairly

good.”

He won a lot of contests at Corona del Mar. He won a lot more at

San Diego State University, where he started the surf team after

beginning college there in 1978.

“We were the young adventurous guys,” Sharp says of the SDSU team,

recalling that time as one when you could “feel stuff happening.”

Among that stuff was getting photos in magazines, making the

National Scholastic Surfing Assn.’s national team -- again, as a

kneeboarder -- and getting to travel in circles that suddenly

included the sports’ elite.

It also offered him an entry into the surf industry. On one of

those national team trips, Sharp thought to pitch a story to go along

with photos Surfing magazine was expecting. Later, he’d land a

three-page photo spread in Breakout magazine.

But that entry, Sharp figured, was nearly all he’d get.

“There was no notion of a career in the surf industry,” Sharp says

of the early 1980s.

There was, in essence, no surf industry. Newport’s Bob Hurley, for

context, was still shaping surfboards and was years removed from

selling Billabong clothes in the U.S. or starting his own line of

surf wear.

And so Sharp expected to follow his father’s career path and

become a real estate investment broker.

“That was my destiny,” he says, leaning forward in his office

chair.

He was properly preparing for that fated job by earning a finance

degree at SDSU.

It was a destiny he might have followed, if his youth were defined

solely by the purchase of that kneeboard. If his family had not left

the confines of Lido Isle, Sharp might not be leading the big wave

revolution.

He might just be among the thousands who surf before work and on

the weekends, grabbing waves whenever they can.

Instead he can say with complete sincerity: “I’m just trying to

get to go surfing and have somebody else pay for it.”

IMMERSED IN ENCYCLOPEDIAS

When he was 10, Sharp’s family was among the first to move to Big

Canyon.

There were few other families and even fewer 10 year olds. Coupled

with going to a private school, Sharp suddenly found himself with no

friends nearby to play with.

And so he turned his attention to an unlikely substitute -- the

encyclopedia. Between the ages of 11 and 13, he’d make his way

through the weighty books.

He understatedly calls himself a vociferous reader.

“It was probably one of the best things I ever did,” he says.

Twenty years later, the effect of those two years is easily seen.

Sharp’s eyes are constantly searching his environment, rarely staying

still as he takes in the familiar surroundings of his office, a local

restaurant or the beach at 54th Street. It’s easy to imagine those

eyes calculating how best to maneuver around a 50-foot, churning

wave.

Behind those eyes is a mind quick to make connections between

disparate ideas, tying them together in cohesive packages that

frequently play up, but are not limited to, his business background.

It can be on real estate. It can be an easy joke. It can be a

moment with his 5-year-old son, Griffin.

Sharp “lives up to his name,” George says.

It’s a mind with enough behind it to qualify him for the high-IQ

group Mensa. Sharp was a member for years, a tidbit he

characteristically won’t bring up -- though his wife, Kathy, will.

“He’s a nerd that likes to surf,” she says of her husband of seven

years -- they’ve been together 19 -- whom she playfully calls

“Densa.”

Sharp has that particular kind of take on the world that’s hard to

ignore. He is, in a word he’d likely not approve of, learned.

A YEARLONG JOB

All that bookishness would serve Sharp in an unexpected moment,

when the publisher of Surfing magazine called him a few months before

his college graduation and asked him to come in for a job interview.

Sharp put on a suit and tie, thinking it was a job selling ads.

After a long-winded speech punctuating how he could reel in ads

better than anyone, he learned the job was as an editorial intern.

“Oh, I can do that, too,” Sharp responded.

He graduated on a Sunday, and at 9 a.m. the next morning was at

work.

“I couldn’t even type,” he says.

Sharp still wasn’t convinced he’d found a replacement career.

“I thought I’d do it for a year, and then I’d get a real job.”

But the years passed. He learned “the art and science of editing,”

magazine construction in the “classical fashion” -- pre-computer. He

helped bring the magazine into the computer age.

All of it during the ‘80s, when surfing had its first big boom,

when OP, Stussy and Mossimo hit the mass market. The magazine went

from 108 pages to 240 pages.

He eventually became editor and helped start other, related

magazines.

“He helped guide the magazine into the professional era, in which

it exists today,” says Surfer’s George.

But eventually the repetition got to him.

“It’s like Mexican food -- same ingredients, different mix,” Sharp

says.

And as the ‘80s ended, Sharp left the “one-year job,” figuring he

was well prepared to try his hand at the apparel business.

KATIN CALLS

Along with his best friend, Rick Lohr, Sharp approached the owner

of the Katin surf brand with the offer to market the label as its

wholesalers -- essentially how surfwear makers Billabong, Hurley and

Quicksilver succeeded in America.

With his contacts from years at Surfing, Sharp along with his

partner managed to build the business with $3 to $4 million in annual

sales. At its peak, it had 53 employees.

In 1997, Katin was approached by ski business K2, which was

looking to expand into the surf market. Sharp and Lohr sold Katin to

K2, while agreeing to stay on as heads of the K2 subsidiary.

It was a match that didn’t last long. On Dec. 29, 1998, he

resigned as president of the company.

It proves another important facet to his personality.

“I can’t stand to be in the back of the bus, wondering where we’re

going,” he says.

Leadership comes naturally to him; it’s a matter of being able to

withstand criticism, to think clearly in nearly every situation.

You learn how, and then you do it, he says.

“A vast majority of people don’t want the responsibility that

comes with it, and they fear having to stand up in front of people,”

he says matter-of-factly.

Those who were in Newport-Mesa in the mid-90s might remember a

prime local example of his leadership.

Sharp helped organize the city’s surfers, forming the Newport Surf

Council to battle the city over its three-decade ban of surfing

during certain hours of the summer.

His point: Newport was the only city that did not have some part

of the beach set aside at all time for surfing.

He went to council meetings. He drummed up press coverage. And, in

a slight victory, he and others got the city to relax the “black

ball” restrictions slightly.

Sharp’s dedication to opening Newport’s breaks came from his years

of surfing up and down the city. Strangely enough, however, he didn’t

start at Newport’s contribution to big-wave surfing -- the Wedge.

He surfed Newport for five or six years before going out at the

very tip of the Balboa Peninsula, where an unnatural bit of human

engineering has created a swirling backwash of a wave that can break

15 to 20 feet on a strong south swell.

He’d surfed the famous Pipeline in Hawaii before venturing out

there, back when the Wedge crew was a tighter, more unfriendly group

that it is today.

He was heckled. He was abused.

It took a long time, Sharp recalls, a smile twisting up his face

as he laughs, to break in there.

Still, it was clear he would eventually make his way out there.

“I always had an affinity for big waves.”

BANKING ON BIG WAVES

It was an affinity that would not be satisfied by the Wedge or a

spot just off the Newport Pier, called the Newport Point, that breaks

rarely.

It would take much, much more.

In perhaps the most audacious surf adventure since surfers

wandered into remote corners of Central America and Indonesia, Sharp

and a handful of other surfers piloted a boat 100 miles off the coast

from San Diego to a spot, the Cortes Bank, where the ocean floor juts

almost to the surface.

Sharp had been scouting the spot for a decade, since back when the

biggest waves there were unridable. Emerging from the open ocean,

they simply were too fast for surfers to paddle into. Even worse,

“sneaker sets” -- extra large waves breaking out beyond the usual

monsters -- were impossible to avoid.

But the ‘90s were witness to revolutions in the sport. The most

dramatic was tow-in surfing, where surfers are pulled behind jet skis

and flung into the massive waves. It changed the limitations on wave

size.

“I knew the tow surfing thing would be really important to

surfing,” Sharp says, pointing out in his detailed manner that, since

the invention of the three-finned thruster surfboard more than 20

years ago, little about surfboards has changed.

Wetsuits also have improved dramatically, making surfing in

near-freezing conditions possible. Another was surf forecasting,

which has evolved from rumor and word-of-mouth into a science of

worldwide storm watching that can differentiate between weaker swells

and the long-period waves that break the biggest. Now, instead of

lucking into a swell at a spot such as Todos Santos, an island off

Ensenada, Mexico, surfers can know with precision when and how big

the waves will break.

In January 2001, armed with these new tools, Sharp and the crew of

surfers on what was called “Project Neptune” discovered 60-foot waves

at Cortes Bank that won that year’s Swell XXL Big Wave challenge for

surfer Mike Parsons.

It was a double victory for Sharp. The trip proved that huge waves

were breaking in unknown, undiscovered locations. And the contest,

with its $60,000 first prize, was the successful staging of a

different kind of surf event that had its genesis late one night in

Sharp’s Newport home.

EL NINO BIRTHS AN IDEA

Sharp was up about 3 a.m., feeding Griffin and watching CNN. It

was fall of 1997, he was still running Katin, and the news was filled

with reports about the arrival of El Nino, the now infamous weather

pattern that brings heavy rains and snows to California.

Sharp, like every other surfer, remembered what else El Nino

brings: big waves. But instead of dreaming about waves he might ride,

Sharp’s mind moved ahead and realized that somewhere, someone would

ride the biggest wave ever.

By the next afternoon, he had built the framework for what would

originally be called the K2 Big Wave Challenge.

Unlike other surf contests, which take place in a day or over the

course of just a few, this contest spanned the entire El Nino winter

of 1997-98.

And rather than judges subjectively choosing the best rides, there

would be one way to win: Ride the biggest wave.

“What Bill did was, in a sport of ‘men who ride mountains,’ Bill

created Mt. Everest,” George says. “He put a number to the size. He

single-handedly changed the scale of how surfers measure big waves.”

It was also a concept that the mainstream media -- not to mention

mainstream America -- could easily grasp.

“It captured their imagination, unlike competitive surfing,”

George explains.

And it provided yet another opportunity for Sharp to alter his

career slightly, without veering far from what he’d learned or at all

away from the sport.

With his time at Katin winding down, he could return to the surf

media and get more aggressive at marketing and promotion.

“Great,” he thought at the time. “Now I can do anything I want

other than have an apparel company.”

That thought was followed by: “I know surf mags.”

So for three years, from 1999 to 2001, he could be found

publishing and editing Surf News, a non-glossy monthly that made

money from day one.

At the same time, he was continuing to promote the yearly big wave

competitions while getting more and more involved in other surfing

promotion, focusing strongly on marketing video and Web-based

material -- though Surf News never had a Web site since, Sharp says,

there was no way it would add to the bottom-line.

Then Sept. 11, 2001, happened, and the magazine’s ad contracts

dried up, turning what he’d foreseen as a hard quarter into a time to

put Surf News on hiatus.

“I’m just going to focus on these events,” he decided.

It was a thought, like many of his others, that was

well-calculated.

“A lot of people were doing good surf magazines,” he says. “Not a

lot of people were doing good event planning.”

Surf News and Sharp Media Inc., of which Sharp is the president

and sole shareholder, quickly morphed into an

“events/publishing/media relations/sponsor management” company.

He is one of the behind-the-scenes guys. He now works with the

American-based Foster’s Surfing Tour. He was a main media contact for

this summer’s Boost Mobile World Championship Tour contest at San

Clemente’s Trestles surf spot. He deals with Hollywood requests and

projects. Much of the video of surfing played on L.A.-area TV

stations goes through his office.

And all along there were the big waves. And another, bigger idea.

ON AN ODYSSEY

It is that idea that has Sharp buying his old navigational charts

and setting up a map room of the world.

It has him following swells off the coasts of Australia. Seeking

out the right curve of coastline off British Columbia that will take,

full on, the swells from storms in the north Pacific. Plotting

potential trips to Ireland from that small, messy room in his office,

which is stocked with Lonely Planet guides.It is all part of Sharp’s

latest big-wave adventure: the Billabong Odyssey, a three-year

worldwide quest to find the biggest wave in the world. To find the

next Cortes Bank.

“The whole thing is to try to do something that no one’s ever done

before,” Sharp says. “Every tall mountain has to be climbed.”

Just beginning the second year -- there have been trips to a

formerly unknown spot off Australia, a return trip last month to

Cortes Bank and scouting missions to British Columbia -- the

Billabong Odyssey looks to be striking gold again.

Video from the Australian trip shows a heaving, thick ice blue

wave with a tube as wide as it is tall. For those familiar with the

Fijian break Teahupoo, it is a right break version of that awesome

wave.

The adventure was originally titled “Project Seamonster,” building

off Project Neptune’s success. This time, Sharp hoped to get

sponsorship outside of the surf industry.

But forces worked differently. At about the same time, Billabong

had gone public and was looking for a way to gain a “big-wave

identity.”

“It was kind of a meeting of the minds, really,” Billabong’s

Stapelberg says. “It was kind of good timing on both ends.”

And, again, Sharp came up with a minor public relations coup: The

goal would be to find a 100-foot wave.

It’s a number, Sharp figured, that would again capture the

mainstream’s imagination as both awesomely large but also easily

understood.

Once again, Sharp’s idea, combined with his relentless promotion,

generated media attention, both within the surf industry and outside.

“It’s a formula that works,” Stapelberg agrees.

A formula that got write-ups in newspapers in America, including

the Los Angeles Times, as well as overseas in countries such as South

Africa. It also will be the basis for a movie, trailers for which

have been running at Orange County theaters.

OUT OF HARM’S WAY

The project, and Sharp himself, are not without critics. His

consistent, successful promotion -- he’s been part of the surf

industry for 20 years now -- has brought him some enemies.

And since the original K2 challenge, there have been concerns that

a big-wave contest would result in a surfer’s death.

But so far, that tragedy has been avoided in large part because,

as dangerous as big-wave surfing is, the addition of high-tech

equipment -- from the use of jet skis to cell phones and GPS

navigation devices -- has actually made it safer.

“The irony of it all is that tow-in surfing is probably safer than

big-wave surfing,” Stapelberg says.

Tow surfing also is not a solitary sport, a big change from its

paddle-in cousin. It requires teams of two surfers, one driving the

jet ski and the other riding the waves. As a result, surfers are

always looking out for each other.

Sharp, typically, is the one ensuring the situation is under

control.

“He’s the drill sergeant of the crew,” surfer Mike Parsons says.

“He makes sure we’re safe.”

Sharp focuses on the details the rest of the surfers would

overlook as they just jumped right into the water, Parsons adds.

Sharp says he’s never gotten into a situation he couldn’t handle,

though he admits “I’ve been near a lot of radical stuff.”

His greatest surfing-related peril wasn’t even in the water. It

was while shooting photos from of surf along Hawaii’s famed North

Shore. He climbed up rocks in order to look down at the waves, and on

the way back down, the hill turned out to be steeper than he’d

figured.

At one point, he was hanging by one arm from a tree, having to

swing over to another branch.

“If I’d missed it, I would have fallen and they wouldn’t have

found the body,” he says.

While Sharp appears remarkably nonchalant about the danger, the

reassurances only go so far with his wife.

“It can be very difficult,” Kathy Sharp says. “It’s nerve-racking.

It’s dangerous. I can’t stop thinking about it.

“It’s like living on the edge.”

But her voice quickly softens, and she’s quick to point out: “It’s

wonderful he gets to do what he loves.”

THE SHARP FAMILY

Watching Sharp surfing with his son -- even on a winter morning he

makes sure Griffin wears sun screen -- it is clear that it isn’t the

work that he loves most.

“He’s a great dad and a loving husband,” Kathy Sharp says.

The couple also has a 3-year-old daughter, Carly.

There is also the obvious fact that Carly and Griffin are blessed,

perhaps too much, with having a “cool dad.”

The kind of dad who jumps into the Balboa Bay Club pool with his

kids. (“We love it,” Kathy Sharp says. “We’re there every day in the

summer.”)

The kind of dad that teaches his son to wash sandy feet off in

puddles, pointing to a deeper, better one to use.

The kind of dad who, well ... it would be impossible, and

incomplete, for a portrait of Sharp not to include what everyone

agrees is his defining characteristic: his bleach-blond hair.

“Radical blond hair,” Stapelberg calls it.

“We get a lot of looks at the Bay Club,” Kathy Sharp says, adding

that she insists he keep blond.

Sharp bleaches his hair knowing the reaction he’ll get, she says.

In contrast, “He doesn’t judge people.”

That attitude is apparent when Sharp talks about surfing. It is a

sport where divisions -- between shortboards and longboards, guy

surfers and girl surfers, locals and tourists -- can be intense.

Sharp’s intensity -- there’s no lack of it -- just isn’t directed

that way.

“It can be whatever you want it to be,” he says. “It’s the

7-year-old Roxy girl or the 72-year-old San Onofre longboarder.

“It’s all about having fun. Whoever’s having the most fun, wins.”

He pauses. Again, it’s just for a second, and this time seeing the

end of the joke he’s making.

“And I have to be a leading contender.”

* S.J. CAHN is the managing editor. He can be reached at (949)

574-4233 or by e-mail at [email protected].