Free Surf 98

The Coldest Ride

THE WAVES AREN'T BIG, but they're long and glassy, and the women have them all to themselves. They trade off on slow lefts that break, one after another, off a sandy beach strewn with cobble and seaweed. Beyond the surf, the September ocean is smooth.

This spot wasn't easy to reach; it took a full day of travel from Los Angeles on three separate flights, then this morning a local boatman shuttled us across the bay in a skiff. We carried the boards over the jungled isthmus of a tiny island to this beach, where the tail end of a swell is rolling in from across the Pacific.

But those trees lining the beach aren't palms—they're Sitka spruce. Out past the breakers, a salmon troller chugs by, and across the bay, wrapped in the clouds, stands North America's third-highest peak, 18,008-foot Mount St. Elias. We're a lot closer to the North Pole than the equator, which explains why six-time world-champion surfer Layne Beachley, perhaps for the first time in her 16-year career, came looking for waves this morning in an ankle-length parka.

Plunked down on the Gulf of Alaska 300 miles southeast of Anchorage, the fishing village of Yakutat (pop. 700) can't be reached by road and gets ferry service just twice
Ultimately, Layne Beachley's reasons for making the long, chilly trek are about the same as anyone's: "I just had to see it," she says.
a month. But Beachley and some of the world's best surfers are braving the cold water, soggy weather, and endless flights for a taste of true expedition surfing, complete with ditch boots and bear spray. Beachley, 33, is here with 22-year-old fellow Australian pro Claire "Bevo" Bevilacqua and Colleen Mehlberg, an 18-year-old from San Clemente, California. The trio and a photo crew were on their way up for a shoot for a women's surfing magazine, but it folded, so they decided to come anyway and sell the pictures elsewhere.

They aren't the only ones descending on Yakutat: Their first-ever-pro-female-surfers-in-Alaska mission is coinciding with the annual pilgrimage of another group of ten pro surfers, trailing an entourage of seven sponsors and cameramen. September is a good time to surf here, since it's after the midsummer doldrums, but more important, because the silver salmon are running and you can fish and surf in the same place.

Yesterday, down at the tiny Yakutat airport—a pair of rain-swept runways where a stuffed bear and a mounted moose head inhabit the parking-lot bar—the surfers were easy to spot amid the hunting and fishing camo. There was Beachley, wrapped in denim and turning heads as she floated across the terminal. There was Orange County recluse and big-wave seeker Nathan Fletcher, 30, bleary-eyed in a Thrasher sweatshirt. There were Reef McIntosh, a 26-year-old pro from Kauai, and three more Orange County riders: 14-year-old Ford Archbold, 18-year-old Erica Hosseini, and Jill Jacobs, 26. And arriving from Santa Cruz were Matt Rockhold, Jason "Ratboy" Collins, Josh Loya, Russell Smith, and Josh Mulcoy, a pack of pro freesurfers, aged 25 to 36, slouching from the luggage carousel in their tube socks and polka-dot shoes and cocked trucker hats, board bags in one hand and rod cases in the other.

Mulcoy, 35, is sort of the reason everyone is here: His pioneering expedition to Southeast Alaska in 1992 landed him on the cover of Surfer, dropping into a double-overhead barrel in front of snow-covered St. Elias. Ever since, a revolving roster of pro surfers has skipped the breaks of Fiji or Tahiti to come here each year, making a destination of this deep-woods, glaciated, and generally unlikely place.

The waves this morning aren't the sort you'd travel the globe for, and air and water temperatures are both in the fifties. Still, there's plenty to do. The photographers want some shots of the women huddled around a campfire in outfits provided by their sponsors. You know, real Alaska-looking stuff.

"I have trouble saying no," Beachley tells me, then laughs. She's a celebrity back home in Sydney—she dates the guitarist from INXS and gets chased down the sidewalk by paparazzi—so she's used to it. "If someone asked me to pose in the rain in a fucking bikini," she says, "I'd probably say yes." Her ensemble today, hot-pink cords and ditch boots, may be of questionable value for advertisers, but leaning over the fire with the wood smoke drying her hair, Beachley seems fairly content. She sits on the sand and looks out across the infinite icy ocean. Professional surfer or not, ultimately her reasons for making the long, chilly trek to the Gulf of Alaska are about the same as anyone's: "I just had to see it.