The ultimate surfing experience is Big Wave Surfing, where surfers challenge waves that are some 20 feet high. The surf boards used to ride these giant waves are just as extreme, with names like "Guns" and "Rhino Chasers". For surfing junkies, Big Wave Surfing is the ultimate high, and there is an incredible desire to ride a "big one" irregardless of the inherent dangers. What motivates surfers to take such extreme risks?, we may ask. Is it the personal exhilaration or the feeling of conquering the death defying wave? We may never know the answer, but we may get some cues by looking at the history of Big Wave Surfing.

The history of Big Wave Surfing, reveal many stories of surfers cheating death, or not, to experience the thrill of the fifty foot wave. Some lived to tell their stories; others succumbed to the vast beyond happily I imagine. Take Greg Noll who defied tradition to challenge ferocious waves in 1957. At the young age of twenty, he became the first surfer to successfully challenge a big wave off Waimea Bay in Hawaii. His victory, however, would just be the beginning. He was to face his biggest challenge yet during a vicious winter storm in the 1969. This time it was off the Makaha beach in Hawaii where he rode a thirty five foot monster, as people sought refuge from the storm. It was a record that survived unbroken for twenty years. Noll retired after that experience saying that after standing on the edge of a big black pit, there was nothing more he could do.

But if Noll had enough, there were others who were willing to further push the limits of surfing to the extreme. Take Ken Bradshaw, A native of Texas, he not only broke Noll's record by riding a forty foot wave, he decimated it in 1998 by challenging the wrath of nature. During an El Nino storm on January 28th of that year, he was towed into a wave measuring, from trough to crest, eighty feet. Those who watched the spectacle would tell of the frighteningly incredible sight of Bradshaw, riding down this monster swell, at speeds of forty five miles an hour. Did he have a death wish? If he did it would not come true on that memorable day, a day that came to be known as "Biggest Wednesday", and he lived to challenge another day.

Big Wave surfing continued to forge its way into the history books with new challenges and new challengers. The Teahupoo wave was beckoning to other surfing gladiators when Laird Hamilton answered the call. Translated in English to mean "broken skulls",

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