This article was taken from the March 2016 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Mark Sponsler is surrounded by eight computers as he studies a spinning blob over the North Pacific on one of the screens. He's looking for a storm; one big enough to send a massive swell barrelling towards the California coast. Ideally, that swell will slam into an underwater ridge about one kilometre off Pillar Point, creating 20-metre-high waves. And a handful of lunatics will descend on Northern California to surf them.
The founder of Stormsurf, Sponsler, is responsible for collecting the data needed to green-light the Titans of Mavericks big-wave competition held between November and March at the notorious break. The contest doesn't happen every year; waves must be more than 12 metres high and surfable. That's where Sponsler comes in.
A former software engineer for Nasa's shuttle programme -- and a keen surfer himself -- 58-year-old Sponsler has been designing computerised wave models since the early days of the internet. But he says that for important events like this, he crunches the numbers by hand using swell-decay tables -- charts that estimate the rate at which swells steadily lose their power and momentum as they travel through the ocean -- and his own algebraic equations. Then, he confirms his forecasts via the Jason-2 satellite, which can measure sea height to within a few centimetres.
After 20 years of forecasting (and surfing) Mavericks, Sponsler says he can paddle out right before the sweet spot of a swell and "taste it like fine wine. You learn to pick out the very best barrel in a batch of a whole year's harvest."
The super El Niño of 2015 is almost guaranteed to produce a number of qualifying swells, Sponsler says, but that's no reason to stop running the numbers: "There's nothing worse than sitting here, looking at all the data, going, 'Where's my friggin' swell?'" he says. "That's my nightmare." Our nightmare? Riding a 12-metre wave.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
