In Their Own Words: Andrew Cotton — Wipeout at Nazaré | 1

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0:11From Audible Originals, I'm Cassie DePeckel, and this is Against the Odds in Their Own Words.

0:25Professional big wave surfer Andrew Cotton, affectionately known in the surf community as Cotty, was eight years old when he caught his first wave. I actually remember it really vividly the first time I went surfing. Cotty's father took him to the local beach in North Devon, on the west coast of England, where the family had just moved. He thought if his son learned to surf, it might ease the blow of having to change schools and make new friends.

0:52Andrew Cotton:There was a corrugated iron shack with a guy that rented these really heavy boards and these really bad wetsuits, which weren't warm whatsoever. And it was Easter, it was freezing cold, it was raining, and I went in the water. While Coddy plunged into the frigid ocean, his dad went back to wait in the car. And I kind of like just loving it. In the end, like he had to come down and like, oh, literally like try and get me out the water. You know, I didn't want to get out. And I think he was shocked because it was so cold and I was so cold, but I was just like, I was buzzing. I loved it. And then it was just me hassling him to take me to the beach, you know, like all the time.

1:37Cotty was already a strong swimmer. Having had severe asthma as a child, his doctor suggested swimming at the local pool as a way to help with his breathing. Surfing, though, was game-changing. Unlike doing laps back and forth in a pool, it offered him freedom. The thing I loved about surfing, in particular, was that there was no one telling me to stop or start or do another length. There was no instructions. It was just like a free reign. I can remember those first few waves and those feelings, and I often feel like it's that same feeling now. The feeling you're chasing for almost like the rest of your life.

2:18It's that moment of being so present, time standing still. There's nothing else like it. You know, like you're like floating on water and you're flying along with the energy of the ocean and it doesn't always happen every time. Sometimes it can happen once a year, once every two years, sometimes longer, but the second that you get that feeling again, that magic moment and that moment of flow. It's like, okay, right, this is why I do it. This is the special thing, you know. The search for those magic moments has taken Cotty around the world, from those first small waves at the Saunton Sands Beach Club in Devon to some of the biggest breaks in Hawaii, California, and Australia.

3:02But you don't become an elite big wave surfer without your share of setbacks and wipeouts. Cotty's worst came in 2017 in Nazare, Portugal, the famed big wave mecca featured on HBO's 100-foot wave. He'd taken off on a perfectly curling 50 - to 60-foot wave when things went sideways.

3:23Andrew Cotton:The wave hit me so hard, it crushed me, and I instantly knew I was seriously injured. I was like, oh no, like, you've actually really done it this time. Today, Andrew Cotton is here to tell the story of his quest to surf the biggest swells on the planet and how he bounced back from the injury that nearly ended his surfing dreams. This is Wipeout at Nazare.

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5:03By his mid-teens, Andrew Cotton had thrown himself completely into surfing. He'd become a fixture on the local scene in Devon and won some junior competitions. At 16, Cotty decided to forego college and instead landed an apprenticeship at a local surfboard factory called Gulfstream Surfboards. For the employees, the workday revolved around the ocean conditions.

5:29Andrew Cotton:I'd turn up at the factory, and the first thing we'd do is check the waves, check the tide. If it was good, we would work out when we'd surf. The best part of the gig was that the shop closed for a few months every winter. With a little money saved up, Cotty started taking his first surf trips. When I was 16, I went to Barbados for two months, just surfed every day. It was amazing. It was during these trips in his late teens and early 20s that Cottey first discovered big wave surfing, generally classified by waves 20 feet and above. I did a trip to Hawaii and ended up surfing some pretty big waves at Waimeo and Sunset Beach.

6:14And that's when I sort of realized that I was a good surfer, but not great. but big waves I felt like I could tune into the ocean a bit more as a bit of a more of a mind

6:26Andrew Cotton:game I could use the skills that I'd learned and my swimming ability to give me confidence and put myself in positions where actually some of my mates didn't want to put themselves you know like they were scared they were way better surfers than me but they didn't want to push it to the extremes that I was doing so that's when I sort of really discovered big waves but I never ever thought in a million years it was a career, it was a job, it was like, there was no way. Cotty had discovered his superpower within the sport of surfing. The problem was, surfing, and the little money he earned at the board factory, just wasn't paying the bills.

7:05So, in his mid-twenties, Cotty went back to school and trained as a plumber.

7:10Andrew Cotton:And I was on site from eight till five, and you can't surf, like, you're not surfing. And I did that for three or four years. And at the end of that, I was like, oh, this isn't going to work. You know, I cannot do this for the rest of my life. I hated it so much. Around the same time, Cotty got a call from an old friend from the surfboard factory named Al Menny. Al told Cotty he didn't have to fly across the world to Hawaii or Australia to surf big waves. A remote spot on the west coast of Ireland had massive waves they might be able to ride. We'd been watching these guys in Hawaii using jet skis to tow into big waves, and we just copied.

7:56Andrew Cotton:We were like, oh, let's try and do that. Up to that point, Cotty had been paddling into large waves. But the bigger the wave, the faster the water moves and the harder it is to catch. So the thought behind it is using this jet ski, you can match the speed of the wave easier. And then therefore you can ride bigger waves. By holding on to a rope attached to a jet ski and then letting go at the right moment, big wave pioneers like Laird Hamilton and Derek Dorner could get enough speed to ride waves 30 feet and above. How hard can it be? Almost immediately, Cotty and Al learned how hard it was. Just maneuvering a jet ski and surf that huge proved difficult.

8:42Andrew Cotton:Me and Al went out. Like, no radio, no safety kit, no clue what we were really doing. And the waves were big. Like, it was big. An hour into the session, having caught no waves, Cotty was driving the jet ski when it toppled off the top of a massive wave as it broke. When he surfaced, Cotty swam to the ski, but couldn't get it to start. I had this jet ski, which I was trying to swim back to shore, and there was particularly strong winds this day. Like, the winds were blowing from the land out to sea. And when I started, I was probably, like, 60 metres from shore, and within about half an hour, I was about two miles out to sea, like, in the middle of nowhere.

9:25Andrew Cotton:Someone had seen this, and they phoned the Coast Guard, and the helicopter got called and I ended up getting airlifted. The incident made the news and comments started pouring in on internet surf threads. The comments got pretty savage. These guys are clueless, they're kooks, they don't know what they're doing, leave it to the professionals, like give up. It was really, really hard to read. To hear the criticism from the surfing community stung. But instead of giving up, Al and Cotty redoubled their efforts. They took a jet ski course. Cotty got a job with the lifeguard service and trained harder than he ever had before.

10:09Andrew Cotton:The year after we went and we surfed again, and we ended up actually getting a couple waves, you know, and that was the start of it. The more waves you ride, the better you become. You figure it out more, and that was amazing. We're like, oh, using this jet ski to get towed into these waves. You're getting multiple waves in a session. You're making the most of the swirl and the conditions. So it was like Disneyland, you know, like this cold West Coast Irish Disneyland with these waves all over. And we had a lot of fun. That first winter, it felt groundbreaking. I felt like it was this new style of surfing and you're going fast and you're strapped in and it was really exciting.

10:56Over the next few seasons, Al and Cotty Surfing started getting attention from the surf media, and Cotty landed his first sponsor.

11:05Andrew Cotton:Getting these articles written about you and getting free wetsuits and some free clothes, and all these little things were happening at the same time. So it was really exciting and really motivating. Cotty still didn't imagine big wave surfing could become a full-time job. But he kept training and improving his water safety skills working as a lifeguard, while still taking plumbing gigs. And then in 2010, Al and Cotty got the email of a lifetime from a Hawaii-based big wave surfer named Garrett McNamara. Garrett was a big deal in big wave surfing. He probably was one of the very few professional full-time big wave surfers.

11:47Andrew Cotton:He had already surfed some crazy, crazy waves in Hawaii and around the world. And he'd won one of the first big wave tow competitions at Jaws with this crazy barrel and won like$50 ,000. Garrett and his team were in a small seaside town on the coast of Portugal called Nazaré. Garrett had surfed all over the world, but had never seen swells like these. He was saying that he thinks it's where the biggest waves in the world break. Do you want to come down and be part of his team to help him surf these waves in Nazare? Garrett's goal was to break the world record for the biggest wave ever surfed. He'd taken notice of Cotty and Al's success in Ireland, and needed surfers with towing experience to help with their efforts.

12:39Joining the team meant Cotty would be able to drive the jet ski and get a chance to surf some gigantic waves. Obviously it was huge for us. We were like, whoa, I can't believe he's ever heard of us. And I can remember being absolutely petrified, but at the same time, willing to just give it a go. Cotty had surfed his share of intimidating waves in Ireland, but nothing prepared him for Nazare. That first trip, we drove down to the lighthouse and we were looking at the waves. And I can remember being like,

13:16Andrew Cotton:what are we doing here? It looked horrible. It was giant. It was disorganised. These peaks were breaking everywhere. I was used to surfing big waves but the big waves in Ireland they always break in the same spot. They have big channels, safety zones. You drift into the safe zone. Whereas when we were looking at the waves the first time I just saw a mess and I'm like, what do you do? And I kind of didn't think it was possible. Garrett's team developed a system to take on Nazare's giants. They used two jet skis, one to tow the surfer in and another for rescues. They had safety spotters with walkie-talkies on the beach and cliffs.

14:05Plus, surfers wear impact suits and inflatable vests with CO2 cartridges they can deploy to bring them rapidly to the surface in the event of a pin-down. Once you inflate the vest, you come up real quick, like really quick.

14:19Andrew Cotton:If it brings you up two seconds quicker, it gives you that opportunity to get rescued one second quicker. And seconds matter. You know, they make massive difference. Soon after they arrived, Garrett took Cotty and Al out to catch their first waves at Nazare. Looking at the footage after, Cotty was blown away by just how big the swells they had surfed were. The waves looked way, way bigger than they felt. And it was like, oh my God, like, it was massive. Cotty joined Garrett's team and threw himself fully into the endeavor. And one year later, in 2011, Garrett set the record for the largest wave ever ridden at 78 feet tall, with Cotty driving the jet ski.

15:07Andrew Cotton:Being part of that project helped me get hundreds and hundreds of hours on the jet ski, hundreds of hours rescuing, hundreds of hours towing and hundreds of hours actually surfing. In Ireland, you'd maybe get an opportunity in the winter to surf big waves a handful of times. Whereas Nazare, like it was 20 feet every week. It was always massive. I saw my big wave surfing accelerate and my jet ski driving accelerate and there was no other way that I would have been able to get those hours in the sport without that. Thinking back to what those waves felt like, it was the first time on some of those biggest waves that I surfed that time slowed down.

15:59Like, you'd be going out of control fast, like so fast. But every water droplet was in slow motion. It was that feeling, that out-of-body experience, that meditation. And that was the first sort of time I felt that on a big wave.

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18:01By October of 2017, Andrew Cotton had turned big wave surfing from a passion into a career. He'd gotten sponsored by Red Bull and caught some of the biggest waves ever ridden, including one that was estimated to rival Garrett McNamara's record-setting 78-footer. By then, Nazare had become a mecca for big wave surfers. But the ocean and big wave surfing's funny. There's no timetable or schedule. And every swell, big swell, is an opportunity. And we actually hadn't had a very big swell at Nazare for probably like two years. But from the swell brewing on the morning of October 8th, 2017, it looked as if that was about to change.

18:46It was one of the bigger ones we had probably since 2014, which was when I'd got one of the biggest waves I'd ever surfed. And I knew it was going to be some serious waves. And I can remember checking the waves in the morning with Garrett, and I just felt like it was going to be one of those swells where something would happen that could change my life. You know, like that wave that would change everything. And my surfing was changing. I didn't really just want to go to the bottom of a wave and fall off. In Connie's early days of big wave surfing, the trend was for surfers to take a straight line down the wave.

19:28trying to get to the bottom as fast as they could, because that's how big waves are measured. To determine its size, you need to see the smaller surfer against the full height of the wave in a photo or video.

19:41Andrew Cotton:You just want to get to the bottom and make the wave look giant, and that image might be the world record image. The method is imprecise, and still debated in the surf community. It's also more risky, since you're positioning yourself in a spot where a 70 - or 80-foot wave could crash. But this time, Cotty didn't want to just sprint to the bottom of the wave looking for a record. He wanted to surf the wave from inside the tube. I wanted to really focus about being deep in the most critical part of the wave. And the vision was really to get barreled at Nazare. The holy grail of surfing is like being in the barrel.

20:25Andrew Cotton:whether it's two foot, four foot when you're inside the wave, you're riding inside the barrel, it's like the dream, but riding inside a 60 70 foot barrel was like okay, this is what I want and I can remember seeing these waves that morning and it was kind of windy but offshore and the SWI direction was really good and I could just see these perfect peaks and they were like they were perfect and they were barreling Garrett was still recovering from an injury he suffered at Mavericks, a famous big wave spot near San Francisco, but was on board to tow Cotty Inn on a jet ski. Hugo Vow manned the second rescue ski.

21:08We actually decided to go out early. The swell was due to peak in the afternoon, but the conditions were so good and the wind was so good,

21:17Andrew Cotton:and I could see these barrels on the first peak, and I'm like, we go now. like no one else is out we go and we just focus on trying to get barreled and Garrett's like yeah let's go so we went out and he towed me into a couple waves and they were like pretty big waves but like not the ones and then this wave came through and we just looked at each other and we know I know he knows we just look at each other and he's like okay yeah this is the one and I'm like, OK, yeah, this is the one. And it was like bending and peaky, but with quite a long line. It was a set wave. It was solid. And in my head, I'm like, this is the one.

22:02Andrew Cotton:I let go of the rope and it was smooth and dreamy and I'm going so fast. To be in the barrel is quite hard because the way you position yourself, your brain is telling you to run to safety. and you've got to really commit. You've got to be really, really behind the peak and really put everything on the line. Cotty drops into the wave. He rushes down a towering mountain of water toward the bottom of the wave. But instead of riding it all the way down, he starts positioning himself for the barrel, which will form when the giant peak curls into a tube. And I faded a little bit. Fading is a surfing manoeuvre that allows Coddy to get deeper into the pocket of the wave.

22:48Andrew Cotton:And then I'm like, oh, maybe I'm not quite deep enough. And I decided to fail it a little bit more. The idea was to come off the bottom of the wave and, like, pull into this giant barrel. And as I positioned myself, the wave just changed. It went from this perfect-looking, peaky wave, which looked like it was going to barrel, to kind of like a funny lump and I lost speed and I was positioning myself too low on the wave. The positioning was just all off. But I was so committed, I had nowhere to go. And it was like, oh, I'm in a really, really tough spot. And I just kicked my board out and jumped off.