Mark Sponsler sits in his
home office, surrounded by eight computers, studying a spinning pink
blob over the North Pacific. He’s looking for a storm—one big enough to
send a massive oceanic swell barreling toward the California coast.
Ideally, that swell will slam into an underwater ridge a half mile
offshore from Pillar Point, creating waves that are 60 feet high. And a
handful of lunatics will descend on Northern California to surf them.
This is Mavericks, the notorious break that’s home to some of the
heaviest surfable waves in the world. And Sponsler, renowned surf
forecaster and founder of Stormsurf.com, is responsible for
green-lighting the Titans of Mavericks big-wave competition held just
north of Half Moon Bay between November and March. But the contest
doesn’t happen every year; waves must be at least 40 feet high and
somewhat structured—as in, not exploding with Poseidon’s rage—hard to
predict in a winter that could produce one of the strongest El Niños on
record. That’s where Sponsler comes in.
Sponsler is a cautious weather scientist and
big-wave surfer. (He surfs at Mavericks often but says he draws the
line at 40-foot waves. On contest morning, he’ll paddle out with all the
competitors and watch just off to the side—the 58-year-old says he’s
too old and feeble to “keep up with those madmen.”) Most of his routine
forecasts rely on wave models parsed from National Oceanic Atmospheric
Administration weather data, but for important events like Titans,
Sponsler crunches the numbers by hand. He uses a mix of swell-decay
tables—old-school charts that estimate the rate at which swells steadily
lose power as they travel through the ocean—and his “secret sauce” of
algebraic equations. Finally, he compares his models against readings
from the Jason-2 satellite, which measures sea height to within about an
inch. (Even so, his models can be thrown off by opposing winds,
currents, and other swells.)
Sponsler began forecasting in his native Florida,
drawing “rustic and inaccurate” wave models based on satellite photos
from his local newspaper. Then, when he was working as a software
engineer for NASA’s shuttle program in the ’80s, a colleague changed his
forecasting forever. “He said, ‘Come here, I want to show you
something,’” Sponsler says. “It was the Internet. I was like, ‘I want
this.’”
With access to weather data from across the globe, Sponsler left
Florida to hunt waves at Waimea Bay and Sunset Beach in Hawaii—two
world-renowned big-wave breaks. Then he heard about Mark Foo’s death at
Mavericks. Foo, a legendary Hawaiian big-wave surfer and Sponsler’s
acquaintance, drowned after wiping out on a relatively unremarkable
18-foot wave. Sponsler says he thought to himself, “This Mavericks place
must be pretty serious.”
Sponsler paddled out for the first time in 1995, with pioneer Jeff
Clark, who showed him the ropes. Twenty years later, Sponsler says he
has it dialed in. “The game is to paddle out right before the sweet
spot, sit there, surf it, taste it like fine wine,” he says. “You learn
to pick out the very best barrel in a batch of a whole year’s harvest.”
As for this year’s harvest? Sponsler says this winter is almost
guaranteed to produce a number of swells powerful enough to “make the
call”—well over 30 if it’s anything like 1997, the last “super El Niño”
year. (A swell is essentially a sine wave through the ocean composed of
wave after wave.)
Sponsler wants to see a storm that’s at least 1,000 miles offshore,
covering 800 nautical miles, with winds in excess of 45 knots,
propagating a 15- to 18-second swell period. He says storms typically
follow the jet stream and work their way across the North Pacific.
“Mavericks is at the end of that pipeline; all the energy is focused
right there, in a perfect place to catch the ball when it comes,” he
says. But just because the storm’s a-comin’ doesn’t mean Sponsler can
stop running the numbers.
“There’s nothing worse than sitting here, it’s contest morning,
looking at all the data, going, ‘Where’s my friggin’ swell?’” he says.
“That’s my nightmare.”
