Picture an ocean wave 10 stories high. It has the potential to destroy entire coastal towns, snap ocean liners in half, and reduce an entire oil rig to rubble.
Waves are feared, awe-inspiring, and eagerly taken on by surfers. They can be vicious, majestic, or downright monstrous in size. They can drown hundreds of thousands in their wake, yet there is some strange quality about them that makes them the subject of paintings and stories, and keeps them sought after by both scientists and surfers alike.
Among these aquatic phenomena are rogue waves, ones that can reach a hundred feet in height, but whose behaviour defied our known laws of physics until only recently. In the continuing quest for information, scientists follow these monsters — as do surfers, who continue to perfect ways of traversing them.
In The Wave: In Pursuit of the rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean, author Susan Casey follows those people, investigating the mysteries the waves hold, and the stories of those who have died from, lived to tell the tale of, or fanatically track rogue waves. While these waves are only barely understood — they were only formally recognized by the scientific community in 2000 — Casey explores everything from the effects of tsunamis, to the introduction of “tow-surfing” to allow surfers to ride gargantuan waves. She also addresses the primary question surrounding these waves: how do they work? Given their catastrophic history, what possibilities are there for waves to strike those who live close to sea level?
Casey has an affinity for recounting her adventures in great detail. When she isn’t paying respects to the ships and coastal towns that have perished at the hands of freak waves, she puts the reader straight into her shoes on the beaches of Tahiti, swimming in Hawaiian rapids, or on a boat in California, bouncing on the same waves that killed three people that same day. We see the surfers on a sunny day in Tahiti, nervous in the anticipation of a potentially fatal encounter with a 60-foot wave that eventually lands on a rocky cliff. From that perspective, she brings a personal touch that even those who have never so much as stepped on a surfboard can relate to.
However, for a book within the science genre, it contains less than two chapters’ worth of explanation of the actual scientific significance of rogue waves. Rather, Casey repeatedly discusses her encounters with surfers — particularly Laird Hamilton, who acted as her guide — which often follow the same cycle of remarking on how large a wave may be, and assessing what newbie surfers were doing incorrectly on such advanced waves. Casey tells interesting stories, but runs the risk of becoming bland after cycling through similar comments through the first hundred pages or so.
That being said, the book is an entertaining read for its variety of compelling stories. The narrative cycles between the scientific modelling issues with freak waves, the destructive power of waves, and a day at the beach with anxious surfers. The latter in particular is so well-written that the mere description of adrenaline junkies nearly gives the reader their own shot of adrenaline.
Looking at waves from the angle of each group that studies them, Casey gives us a thorough picture of what these waves do, as well as of their broader social significance.
The Wave comes strongly recommended to surfing hobbyists. For the average reader, it makes for an interesting read, but eventually gets bogged down by the level of intimacy with the surfers’ personal lives. The Wave gives a deeper appreciation of both the daredevil dealings people undergo for the sake of an adrenaline rush, and ferocious power of monstrous ocean waves.
