Spirit Animal

“I was struggling,” recalled Dane Gudauskas of his mental state in the lineup at Cloudbreak on May 25, 2016. “Crazy thoughts were going through my head.”

Ten days before, the worldwide big-wave community had taken notice of a monster southern-hemisphere storm that was poised to slide between the west coast of New Zealand and the east coast of Australia. This trajectory set a direct line for Fiji, a weather phenomenon that hadn’t occurred on this scale since 2011. Early on, however, forecasters suspected that the May swell would be met by “questionable” wind conditions. The size of the waves promised to push world-class surfers to peak performances, but devil winds could easily make a session impossible. According to photographer Todd Glaser, a core of big-wave surfers including Greg Long, Mark Healey, Aaron Gold, Mike Pietsch, and Gudauskas felt it better to travel to Fiji and risk meeting bad winds at Thunder Cloud reef than chance the prospect of remaining at home while perfectly formed, barreling lefts spooled down the line at 30 feet tall. “Even if they had to sit in the channel and watch,” Glaser said, “they wanted to see what swell like this looked like.”

Before the sun popped over the horizon on the morning of the 25th, Gudauskas departed Tavarua Island on one of two packed boats. His goal for the trip was to find a wave shaped like the perfect “4-footer” he knew the reef could produce, but, perversely, he wanted to find that wave at five times the size.

Approaching Cloudbreak, the passengers sensed a “chunky morning sickness” to the surf. The wind blew slightly side-shore. The sets were big and growing. Some of the waves had potential; many just snowballed. Seated in the boats, the surfers assessed conditions. It was going to be a long day, but things could change for the better.

Gudauskas was the first Tavarua guest to slide over the rail and into the water. Meanwhile, a smaller crew of surfers that came from the mainland—including Hawaiian Aaron Gold—had just positioned themselves in the lineup. Gold opted to paddle for the session opener, which was not a big wave by the recent XXL winner’s standard. Gold took off from the lip, popped to his feet, but then fell. And as the wave moved over the reef, he failed to surface.

Gudauskas believes at least six waves steamrolled through the lineup. Gold’s board could be seen tombstoning in the impact zone, but the surfer was somewhere underneath. A Jet Ski manned by a WSL media team was too far out of position to help. According to Glaser, Gudauskas paddled feverishly for Gold’s flailing board, but water rushing off the reef kept him nearly in place. Another ski was manned by Uri Kurop. He swept into the impact zone and dove for Gold’s body. Kurop brought Gold to the surface alive, but unconscious. At the Tavarua boats, Greg Long took leadership of the resuscitation. The surfers built a “flatback” or makeshift gurney with surfboards. Long began compressions on Gold’s chest. Healey started Gold’s breathing. Others hollered words of encouragement to Gold and massaged his extremities to keep his blood moving and brain active. Gold was stabilized, but “it was that close,” said Gudauskas.

The water was cleared and everyone returned to Tavarua to hold vigil for Gold.

“Maybe,” Gudauskas thought, “I don’t want this wave.”

San Clemente’s Gudauskas brothers are often—maybe too often—called “frothy.” Good vibes, generosity of spirit, stoke—whatever you want to call it—the 30-year-old twins Dane and Patrick, as well as 28-year-old brother Tanner, broadcast an openness and fervor for life that rates higher on the human spectrum than that of an average happy camper. Of the three, Dane just might be the most enthused. Some think this quality is extreme; some think it’s fake.

Basque surf explorer Kepa Acero hailed from a triad of competitive brothers as well. He’d logged some years on the World Qualifying Series (WQS) when the Gudauskas brothers arrived for their first comp in Newcastle, England. The sky spat rain sideways. Wind-battered 2-foot surf sloughed to shore. “The waves were a disaster,” said Acero. “It was a terrible contest. Everybody was grumpy.” Then Acero heard what he thought was the chittering of grommets. He noticed Dane and Patrick. “They were super excited, saying ‘This place is sick.’ Everything was ‘sick.’” Acero turned to his older brother: “These kids are making me really grumpy.” Later that day, the veteran was matched against Dane in a heat. Acero won. Dane was still stoked. “I learned he is exactly like that, every time,” Acero said.

I’d come to suspect that the truth of Dane’s interior, the basis of his surf life, was to be found in his running conversation. It is a question and answer, a call and response. For Dane, it’s a dialogue with himself about being afraid at times, but going and “doing it anyways” or asking “What the f–k?” and most of the time answering “Yes.”

In 2008, I joined a caravan to deep Baja that happened to include Dane and Patrick. We made camp on a remote point and shared an evening surf. But before I could get to know either of them, an overnight windstorm grew into a gale-force event that snapped our tent poles, destroyed the camp kitchen, spoiled provisions, and blew Patrick’s quiver over a cliff. On the 700-mile journey home that followed, at every gas and taco stop, I could hear the brothers’ barking and laughter. Already, they had claimed it “the best two-day trip ever.”

“I thought they were messing with me,” Glaser admitted of similar interactions.

“You guys are phony,” thought Reef McIntosh, who shared a spot with the brothers on the Vans team. “And one of these days, I’m going to catch you,” he threatened. What he most wanted to catch them at was “being eggy.”

I may have wondered how much of their relentless positivity could be chalked up to showmanship as well.

A few years after the Baja fiasco, I joined Dane on a trip to the central African nation of Gabon. Due to our own folly, we’d arrived during national holidays. Banks were closed for the week, and our American currency was useless. We spent the next two weeks camping on a beach not far from the Congo River. We ate the odd pumpkin and drank from coconuts. We got skinny. As Dane described it, each of us was a breath away from “a full-body cramp.” In my notes, on an afternoon that I experienced as introspective and sallow, I jotted down a missive I’d overheard Dane proclaim, almost to no one:

“Sometimes you have to ask yourself, ‘What the f–k?’” he said, before spreading his hands and looking above the tree line. “And then…you’re like…‘YES!’”

Because I had yet to see Dane translate this sentiment into action, I thought he was losing his mind. Next to the quote, I wrote, “Dane’s excitement eludes language.”

“His wording is subtle,” said Nathan Fletcher, who’s traveled with Dane enough to understand the nuance of his running conversation. “You’ll notice a certain change. When something is ‘classic,’ that’s really bad. Classic is terrible, but it’s a laugh-at-it kind of pissed. I’d hate to see him really mad.”

Over the span of a year, I met up with Dane on several occasions, poking at the nature of his elevated attitude the way you might kick the tires on a used car. I’d come to suspect that the truth of Dane’s interior, the basis of his surf life, was to be found in his running conversation. It is a question and answer, a call and response. For Dane, it’s a dialogue with himself about being afraid at times, but going and “doing it anyways” or asking “What the f–k?” and most of the time answering “Yes.”

“I’m not putting it on at all,” he said. “I’m just too stoked for my own good.”

The WQS of the early aughts was a traveling beast. While the Dream Tour was enjoyed almost exclusively by well-paid surfers from just three nations (Australia, Brazil, and the USA), the ’QS was scrappy, working-class, and international—contended by 700 surfers from Morocco to Tahiti. The venues hosted no frills: no catering, no lockers, no guarantee of a place to sleep. Due to concrete scheduling, there often weren’t waves, either. One leg of the tour spanned three corners of the globe (Australia to South Africa to Scotland). Boards arrived broken and, often, too late. Entrants shared sticks and wetsuits. They weren’t contenders so much as characters—mostly broke, clawing their way not into the Top 44, but simply to the next contest. One ubiquitous entrant was a middle-aged American named Shiva Wayne Glascock, who’d learned to surf in his 20s and hadn’t improved much. He made it out of the first round just once, because of a no-show. Johnny Abegg was known as “Johnny on Credit” because he was financing his tour at credit-card rates. There were blue-collar Aussies traveling in ownerless vans. There were prodigies on the rise and fallen champions on the comeback. “You surfed against men,” said Dane. “Nothing was given to you. You started in Round One and surfed Monday through Sunday. If you did well, you packed up for the next event.” The travel, pace, and conditions caused meltdowns and havoc. Patrick remembered a contest in Fernando de Noronha, Brazil, in which a heat loser climbed the scaffolding of the judges’ tower to attack a judge.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to be,” Dane said. “I just knew what I wanted to be exposed to.” This idea was comprised of cold places, extreme conditions, critical waves, and “rogue characters on a completely different curve of expression.”

Although Patrick took the NSSA Open Men’s Championship in 2003 and Dane followed by taking the same title in 2004, a career in professional surfing was not an “obvious deal” for the brothers. Brighter stars like Travis Mellem and Dane Reynolds took much of the limelight. In fact, following their amateur success, Dane and Patrick enrolled at Saddleback Community College in Mission Viejo, California. “We were just trying to figure out what we wanted to do,” Dane said. They built seeds by competing in national WQS events, but brought the books along. A few semesters into their collegiate careers, the brothers found themselves studying for a psychology exam between heats at Pipeline. Dane turned to Patrick and asked, “What do you say we skip the books and make a go at pro surfing?”

That decision was made together. The grind of the WQS was shared as well. Tanner joined up straight out of high school, and soon the Gudauskas gang was a three-pack. During a second comp at Newcastle, all three contracted food poisoning. They walked two miles to the venue, in the rain, retching along the way. They missed a flight to the next event in France. When the brothers finally arrived, they learned that their hotel reservation had been given up. Every room in the region was booked. During the Anglet event, they slept on or in their car. Dylan Graves linked up with them for the Lacanau comp, and they had some luck in renting a closet with a bed wedged inside. The four of them slept like sardines in a tin. “Surfing and raging—I was fired up,” remembered Dane.

About five seasons in, Patrick was poised to qualify for the World Championship Tour. Tanner was on his way as well, but Dane continued to struggle getting through the early rounds. “He was surfing his heart out, ripping, and just enduring a string of close losses,” Patrick said.

Tanner said, “His creative style just didn’t fit the criteria of the WQS.”

Dane acknowledged that he never surfed to his potential in heats. And though others seemed to hold a cartoonish image of his upbeat personality, these were dark times. “It’s easy to see yourself in your results,” he said. “I was viewing myself in a really negative way.”

The week that Patrick won a six-star event in South Africa, putting himself on the threshold of the World Tour, Dane and Tanner entered a contest in Pantin, Spain. It was quite literally the end of the road: you can’t travel farther west in continental Europe. Dane lost in the first round. “That was it,” he said. “I had to change my way.” He grabbed Tanner and had a heart to heart in the parking lot. Admittedly, it was a difficult point for Tanner as well; he’d been relying on his older brother and feeding on his outward optimism. But Dane noticed that he wasn’t using the pronoun “we” so much as “I,” and he figured that was because he was evolving.

“There’s no blueprint for stepping away from competition,” Dane said. “I didn’t know what I wanted to be; I just knew what I wanted to be exposed to.” This idea was comprised of cold places, extreme conditions, critical waves, and “rogue characters on a completely different curve of expression.”

Two of Dane’s guides into this realm were McIntosh and Fletcher. Together, they surfed outer reefs and big barrels—what McIntosh described as the “exciting wave” zone. And not long after Dane left the WQS, the monumental Cloudbreak swell of 2011 arrived, maybe just in time. Dane found himself in the lineup, wearing a tie-dye T-shirt with a heart in the center, surrounded by his “gnarly” heroes. He saw fire in their eyes. “These guys weren’t going to let anyone’s perceptions of them throw them off,” he said.

That swell, that environment, “lit me up like a Christmas tree,” Dane said. With the WQS in the rearview, he felt as if he’d been putting the wrong gas in his car that entire time. Patrick saw a surfer who was getting better, moving onto a different plane. But that didn’t mean this freesurf route was without its challenges.

In December 2012, the North Atlantic compressed a good portion of its energy into a single swell. Sitting on the North Shore of Oahu, Fletcher watched it develop on his computer. He could see that the brunt of the low pressure was aimed at a reef called Belharra in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France. To his knowledge, the giant left had never been paddle-surfed before. “Nathan already had it in his mind that I was going to go with him,” Dane said. “But I was not there yet.”

Both brothers from famous families, Dane and Fletcher shared a camaraderie that may have been rooted in a desire to see themselves as individuals. Unlike other brothers, however, this pair met those issues in extreme environments, surfing at the highest levels. “Nathan was earning respect in a really organic way,” Dane said. “I struggled with that when I was younger. Growing up in a group, you’re always searching for your identity.” At the Honolulu airport, waiting to take off for France with their 10-foot surfboards, Fletcher turned to Dane and, in his dry manner, said, “Call everyone you love and tell them you love them. We might not be coming back.”

Patrick had delivered Dane and Fletcher to the airport. Driving away, he thought, “Did I just nail Dane in a coffin?”

At Belharra, the ocean seemed bigger than it had ever been. Dane said he was “scared shitless,” working hard not to get picked off by moving mountains. His sense of scale slipped out of whack. So much water moved underneath him, his 10-foot gun seemed tiny. “It felt like doomsday; there wasn’t a lot of optimism in my head,” he said. But as the session progressed, and the swell peaked and the mountains broke and passed into foam, something changed. Dane felt “filled with electricity.”

Gold stepped out of the boat and onto Tavarua Island under his own strength. He’d been lucky in a number of ways: he had been extraordinarily fit, his leash didn’t snap, Kurop had been in a position to make the rescue and didn’t hesitate, and the big-wave crew was trained in resuscitation. Still, as Gold waited to be transported to a mainland hospital, the rest of the surfers needed time to recuperate themselves. Finally, sometime after breakfast, Pietsch said, “We gotta go back out and ride some waves for Aaron.”

The tide had been dropping, the swell and wind increasing. “Guys were getting annihilated,” said Dane. He was thinking about the risk vs. reward in even catching a wave. He’d only seen Cloudbreak under perfect conditions; May 25 was huge and anything but. Dane figured the safest line was a lateral one, which meant pulling into the barrel. Yet there were very few barrels. Lips cascaded and chandeliered. In many instances, straightening out was the safest line. But that presented its own risks, and after Gold’s wipeout, everyone knew what was at stake. Dane spent his second session wheeling and dodging, looking for his wave, his line. In the end, he didn’t catch a single ride and paddled back to the boat.

“Surfing Cloudbreak is like a conversation,” he said. “It’s give and take, and you have no idea what’s coming down the line.”

Cloudbreak had been special to Dane; he saw riding it as inching closer to becoming the surfer he wanted to be, and he had devoted himself to learning its intricacies. It’s possible that this is why he noticed the slightest shift as the devil winds turned east for a moment. He paddled out for a third time, thinking he just needed to get a wave to shake the nerves off. The first one was a smaller runner. The winds held east, however, and Dane took a chance on a bigger one, just a drop with no barrel. The first two waves seemed to set a rhythm, and back in the lineup, Dane saw what he recognized as that perfect, amplified “4-footer” and spun for it. Even in real time, the drop lasted an especially long duration. The nose of his 7’4” plowed through a wake that threatened to undo him. Dane bottom turned and took his lateral line into a huge barrel. The big board felt like riding a toboggan. The inside of the wave was radiant. “It was glowing blue; everything was blue,” Dane said. “I came out a blue person.”

Dane had always been a unique individual; he’d always been world class. But sometimes it takes a culmination of factors one can’t manufacture to prove these traits to ourselves.

[This feature originally appeared in “Fever Dream,” our December 2016 Issue, on newsstands and available for download now]