Rather than drive to the parking lot, which was probably full of tourists’ cars anyway, Sharkey unstrapped his board from his roof rack and carried it along the road to the path beside the guardrail that led to Waimea Beach. His toe ached from the cut he gotten on the rock, but he mocked himself—a sore toe!—and was soon distracted by the boom of the breaking surf before he saw the great sliding rollers swallowing the surfers, who looked tiny in the blue slopes of the waves.

Flattened on his board, sledding down the steepness of the wave-washed sand, he entered the water paddling, using the riptide at the right-hand side of the bay to help him into the huge incoming swell and the density of foam. He ducked under three large waves and, still paddling, got himself beyond the break, where five other surfers in the lineup were riding their boards.

Perhaps one of them spoke to him, but if so Sharkey didn’t hear it. The waves collapsing on the inside rocks at Pinballs drowned out all other sounds, and anyway the other surfers were too anxious and watchful to take their eyes away from the blue bulge of the swell and the sets, now rising to what was known in Waimea as epic, or nearly so, dangerous to anyone except the most experienced big-wave surfer. But even experts drowned here, toppled and pinned to the bottom by a succession of crashing waves. If this swell kept rising they’d certainly hold the Eddie contest—when the faces of the sets had to be sustained at thirty feet and above, and even better if they were forty.

Those young surfers he had met at the party last night—were any of them in the lineup now? He scanned the faces of the surfers near him, and as he did two of them pushed off and were engulfed, tumbled, fighting to balance. Another wave in the set rose behind him, and beyond it, as he adjusted, a likelier wave. A surfer ahead of him slipped sideways, out of sight, like a naked man tumbling from a building, and Sharkey propelled himself into the wave lifting his board, and when the nose of his board protruded into its lip, he jumped and squared his feet for balance and crouched and rode it, skidding slantwise on the curling face, into the moving trough.