Nazare, Portugal Erupts For A Terrifying Big-Wave Session

It's been a busy month for big waves. Jaws and most of Hawaii's North Shore has been going off as it tends to in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and the annual  Triple Crown contest series got through its first two events and the final, the Billabong Pipe Masters at the Banzai Pipeline, is currently on standby.

But the Atlantic has also been producing, particularly at the new big wave mecca of Nazaré, Portugal–a fishing and resort town in the middle of the country's Atlantic coast with a 140-mile, 15,000-foot deep  underwater canyon–the biggest in Europe–that funnels ocean swells straight at the point of Nazaré. The canyon has produced waves of a size that surfers previously thought the smaller fetch of the Atlantic didn't have the energy to create. The behemoth has broken world records for the biggest wave ever surfed, with a 78-foot wave being followed by what may have been a 100-foot face surfed by Hawaiian Garrett McNamara. 

A week ago, McNamara, Andrew Cotton, Sebastian Stuednter, Huge Vao, Tom Butler,  Benjamin Sanchis, Eric Rebiere, and Ross Clarke-Jones awoke to perfect offshore winds and a swell coming in from the north that was producing buoy readings of an absurd 40 feet at 21 seconds–not numbers you ever expect to hear coming out of the Atlantic. The session that followed (in the video above) produced some heavy rides, including one by Garrett that showed him trying to turn up and down the face like it was any other day back home in Hawaii. Ridiculous.