THE BIG JUICE

Jay Moriarty was close to that rarest of things: a pure talent and a pure soul. Jay was a made guy, a stoked guy, a reverse of the Cheshire Cat. Here was a Santa Cruz guy without an attitude, a guy who had it, was glad he had it, knew what to do with it, and wouldn’t dream of letting it rust. His grace and humility were our blessing, and his smile sustained us. Successful in his teens, going full steam in his early twenties and still on his way up, Jay was always looking around the corner for the next big thing. Then the ocean took his breath away and left the rest of us gasping.

The drowning of Jay Moriarty in the Maldives on Friday, June 15, 2001, shocked the world. People who knew him and people who didn’t were stricken in ways hard to understand. Newspapers and TV news, from California to Tasmania, covered the story. But the real measure of Jay’s effect was found on Aggroville, the chat forum on MavSurfer.com.

The first post, from Bodhi, at 8:46 p.m. on June 15, was timid: Is True that jay passed away? Chat forums are notorious for malicious So-and-So Died at Teahupoo! rumors. But this one was true, and when word got out, Aggroville—typically a snide, mean-spirited dungeon—was soon awash in more than three hundred posts, all about Jay, from family, friends, bros, and strangers, all respectfully sharing their thoughts and feelings in honor of Jay. It wasn’t so much his passing as his person that restored some dignity to what one detractor called the “Jerry Springer Show of the surfing world.”

There were short and long tributes from people who knew him and from people who knew of him, from people he had taught, and from people from whom he had learned. There were posts from Santa Cruz, England, South Africa, and beyond, and if you read them all, the words that kept popping up most often were “smile,” “stoked,” “tragic,” and “why?”

In the weeks following Jay’s death there were two video benefits in Santa Cruz, a memorial paddle-out at Santa Cruz attended by several thousand, and more private memorials throughout northern California and around the world. Thousands of people paid tribute to Jay in many different ways, but you need look no farther than Aggroville for proof of the effect Jay’s life had on people.

Jay Moriarty moved to Santa Cruz as a boy and immediately fell in love with the ocean, as many have done and will continue to do. When his parents divorced, Jay and his mother moved to Santa Cruz. Jay’s father Doug was an airborne Ranger. He and Jay did some jumps together, and they surfed at Trestles when Jay went down to southern California. Jay lived near the end of 36th Avenue, but home was just down the street, at Pleasure Point.

“When I started I didn’t have a wetsuit. I just had shorts and a T-shirt,” Jay said in a 2000 interview with swell.com. “And I had a 7-foot Haut from like the ’70s. It was a little pintail, like a 3-inch-thick ’70s board. It was cool. Single fin. I was unequipped and clueless, but I didn’t give a shit. It was just so much fun. I learned to surf at Insides and then moved up to the Point.”

Felix Alfaro remembers twelve-year-old Jay as “a chubby kid who was always out at 38th Avenue and all around the Point. He was a good surfer but not a real standout, but he was just a pleasure to be in the water with. He always paddled out with a smile and kept that smile on the whole time. That is what I remember about Jay Moriarty. He was good but not exceptional. But, man, he sure got a lot better.”

Jay just wanted to get better. He was self-motivated but wasn’t afraid to soak up advice or criticism from anyone. The friendship and mentorship between Jay and Rick “Frosty” Hesson were well-covered in a piece entitled “The Apprenticeship of Jay Moriarty” by Jason Smith in Surfer’s Journal. A few days after the news of Jay reached Frosty at home, he felt like he had “lost a son.”

“He just wanted guidance,” said Hesson. “What he approached me about was becoming a better surfer. I worked with him a little bit and gave him some things to do. There was as much mental preparation and writing as there was physical, and it had as much to do with developing a human being as a surfer. It’s the same philosophy I use to raise my children, but Jay took it to an extreme. He was the only person to complete the program in its entirety, and he did one incredible job.”

Self-motivated and directed by Frosty Hesson, Richard Schmidt, and others, Jay took tentative steps at Mavericks in April of 1994, and then in one giant leap he introduced himself to the world by paddling into a bomb at mega-Mavericks on December 19, 1994. Jay’s youthful gusto overpowered his horse sense. He scratched onto the first wave that came his way on an offshore, high-tide morning, launching him into what at that time was the most spectacular wipeout in the history of surfing. The Bob Barbour photo made the cover of Surfer, and it made Jay. If he did nothing else in his surfing life, he had stroked into that Homeric wipeout and lived to laugh about it, and for that he was a sixteen-year-old legend. World champion Kelly Slater sent Jay a fax: “Keep charging.”

Jay’s plunge introduced to the surfing community a stoked guy with a goofy smile pasted onto a rock-hard melon, a young guy on a longboard who didn’t give a shit, part of the ’90s movement concerned with riding what felt right—and hang the fashion. Jay was a longboarder who also charged giant waves, took ridiculous lumps, and came up howling.

“I bounced off the bottom out there. I don’t think anyone has done that before, huh?”

Jay arrived with a bang, then settled into a quiet groove, working, going to school to study fire science, traveling, competing, but staying focused on Mavericks, surfing it whenever he could and preparing for it the rest of the time. Over the following years, there were occasional shots of Jay surfing Mavericks in magazines and videos but nothing that overcame the first impression of his historic wipeout.

Many northern California surfers watched Jay grow from a chubby grom to one of the men at Mavericks, and a lot of these surf-ers helped Jay along the way, including Mavericks pioneer Jeff Clark.

Not much happens at Mavericks that Jeff Clark doesn’t see, and Clark watched Jay go from banzai grom to Clark’s own tow partner. He has his thoughts on why Jay didn’t get the attention that others did or that he deserved.

“A lot of guys surf extreme waves, but if it looks easy it must be easy, right? Or maybe the person who makes it look easy has a different understanding of the elements. That’s where Jay was. People remember his full-charge wipeout at sixteen, but he made very few mistakes out there. He rode a lot of really big waves, steep and deep.”

During the winter of 2000–2001, Moriarty was split between paddle-in and tow-in surfing, coming into the power game a little later than others and working on his tow partnership with Clark. On December 22, Moriarty got some of the biggest bombs ever ridden at Mavs, using his size and weight to surf them with the same authority as Peter Mel. Jay was one of the stars of all the raw tow video from that historic day, but Clark says that videos and photos and magazines don’t come close to telling the whole story.

Late in the evening of the 19th, when it was almost dark and the boats and cameras were safe at home, Jeff Clark towed Jay into a giant wave behind the outside bowl, and a few witnesses watched Jay get the barrel that everyone has been hunting for a decade. “I saw it,” said Colin Brown, “and became a grudging admirer of the God Scooters. Jay got whipped in so far behind the bowl on a giant wave that I instinctively began paddling toward the impact zone to retrieve the wreckage. There was just no way. I was shocked when Jay came flying out the end, and guys in the channel said he pulled into a monster barrel. You had to be there to see and feel the power. That was an awesome wave. Jay was at the top of both paddling and towing after last winter, and he had nowhere to go but up.”

Jay Moriarty’s tragic drowning in the Maldive Islands had facets of the deep-sea diving accident that took Jose Angel, combined with the Mavericks wipeout that drowned Mark Foo. Like Angel, Jay Moriarty was free-diving and pushing himself, if not for deep-water penetration like Angel, then for maximum time underwater as part of a big wave training regimen. And like the situation at Mavericks with Foo, in the Maldives there was a breakdown in the buddy system—as important in diving as in surfing—that might have saved Jay’s life.

Friday, June 15 was Jay’s last day in the Maldives. He had been there for a week, one of around 150 surfers, photographers, judges, and models from around the world who flew all the way to South Asia to compete in the five-star WQS O’Neill Deep Blue Open event. Jay was there to surf and train and do fashion shoots but not compete. The contest ran Monday to Thursday, with Chris Ward winning the final in the last few seconds. By Friday, most of the competitors had left, leaving Jay and less than a dozen other surf-ers on Lohifushi Island. Jay would turn twenty-three on Saturday, and he was looking forward to meeting his wife Kim in England for a late party and then beginning a five-week tour of Europe as the head instructor for the O’Neill Surf Academy. Moriarty had worked for the academy for five years, teaching fifty new kids a day for five weeks, from Europe to Italy. This was his first year leading the team, taking the position from Richard Schmidt, who had taken it from Robert “Wingnut” Weaver, all big wave surfing royalty.

Friday was a lazy day. A morning boat expedition, by the dozen or so stragglers on Lohifushi, was turned back by a dropping swell and increasing winds. Muslim custom dictates a 1:30 lunch on Fridays. With a little time on his hands, Jay told Brazilian ASP judge Renato Hickel that he was going free-diving, to work on his breathing, at the end of a 150-meter pier that connects the island with the reef.

“I told him to be careful and take it easy,” Hickel said. “There had been a little drinking the night before, and a day or two earlier I had seen Jay come in from diving in convulsions and nearly throwing up, he had pushed himself so hard.”

Frosty Hesson had talked to Jay before he left for the Maldives, and Hesson knew Jay wasn’t pleased with his conditioning following an ankle injury at Mavs.

“Jay didn’t like to get out of shape, and he worked hard as soon as he got the cast off and his ankle was ready. He was riding bikes pretty hard, and I knew he was a little concerned about the Surf Academy in Europe because it would interfere with his training. Jay knew how important it was to stay in top condition for Mavericks, and he knew it was a year-around commitment. He was determined to work hard at it over the summer any way he could.”

At around 11:30, Cory Lopez went down to the pier to feed bread to the fish, another local custom. Cory saw Jay’s backpack with swimfins and some bread sticking out of the pockets, but he didn’t think much of it and went to lunch. Jay didn’t make the lunch, which was unusual, Hickel said, “because he liked to eat a lot.” Some thought Jay had gone over to Club Med on the next island. Others thought he was sleeping.

Dinner was at 7:30, and everyone was there but Jay, which led to a search of the island and Jay’s room, where he was probably sleeping. When his room appeared untouched, Lopez and Hickel began asking around. There were five Spanish surfers staying on Lohifushi. Hickel speaks fluent Spanish, and he recounted what the Spaniards told him.

“We asked the Spanish guys, ‘Have you seen Jay?’ and they said, ‘We don’t know him.’ Then they understood that Jay was the bald-headed guy they had seen free-diving at the end of the pier earlier in the day around noon. The Spanish guys were snorkeling around the end of the pier and saw a guy pulling himself down a buoy rope to the bottom in about 50 feet of water. Viktor the photographer knew about diving, and he was impressed by Jay, who was sitting on the bottom in a kind of lotus position, holding his breath. A few times they heard Jay’s watch go off under water, which meant he was timing himself. They saw Jay come up the rope, take big, deep breaths at the surface, and go back down. Viktor was the last one in the water and the last to see Jay. The other Spanish guys wanted to go to lunch and told Viktor to get out of the water. They didn’t want to disturb Jay, and as they were leaving they heard his watch again. That was the last anyone had seen of Jay Moriarty.”

The island went to red alert. A group went to the pier and found Jay’s backpack with the swimfins and bread exactly as Cory had seen it almost eight hours before. Tim Godfrey, an Australian staff diver and dive base manager at Tari Resort, was one of two divers alerted to start a search for Jay.

“After someone told me Jay had been free-diving at the end of the jetty and went missing around lunchtime, I immediately became concerned as the currents at that time would have been flowing strongly out of the atoll,” said Godfrey. “Just over a year ago a scuba diver disappeared without trace near the same location—the currents are strong and often swept divers out into the Indian Ocean, sometimes for good. I asked if Jay was wearing a weight belt and fins and got a ‘no.’

“Even though it was nighttime and Jay had been missing for ten hours by now, there was a slim chance he could still be alive, drifting outside the atoll. He could have been hyperventilating at the surface before his free dives, to prolong his bottom time, and this would have increased the risk of shallow-water blackout on ascent. If this happened, he could have possibly regained consciousness at the surface and drifted off in the current. This was our only hope.

“Someone said Jay had been free-diving near the rope on the house reef. I hurried off to the dive school, where I joined a group of divers preparing for a rescue dive. Someone was already organizing search boats. My dive buddy and I immediately descended the reef slope and followed the rope toward the flat, sandy bottom at 24 meters. In the faint beam of the underwater light, I saw Jay’s body lying on the bottom a short distance away from the reef. It was apparent he died while diving at depth and not on ascent, as his body remained near the bottom of the rope. He most probably died of hypoxia, caused by low oxygen in the blood, in his last seconds when his oxygen reserves would have been severely depleted. He may have become disoriented and unsure of which way was up or down and been overcome by the desire to breathe. More probably, he prolonged his dive so much that he blacked out instantly. The condition in which I found him seems to confirm this as his body remained rock hard and cemented in his final pose. Being at more than three atmospheres of pressure, with little body fat, his airspaces compressed and possibly with his lungs full of water, Jay’s body was negatively buoyant and very heavy, hence the reason it didn’t drift away in the strong current.

“When I first saw his shadowy outline, it was like an apparition, as if a gladiator statue had toppled over. He was lying face-down in the sand with his head tilted to one side and his mask and snorkel firmly in place. His legs were spread apart, as if balancing to do pushups, his arms bent at the elbows and tucked under his body. His fists were clenched and fingers closed tight, like he was bracing himself for an onslaught. He was wearing only his O’Neill board shorts, a watch, and a ring on his wedding finger. His back muscles rippled in the torchlight. That dying image was one of strength and determination, not confusion and panic, as one might have expected.”

Over the weekend and into the week of June 17, many people were concerned about Kim Moriarty, the twenty-three-year-old Pleasure Point surfer who was looking forward to a summer trip to Europe when she received the news that her husband had drowned. It is a tribute to the Santa Cruz surfing community that Kim didn’t have to bear the tragedy without support. Once the surfers of Santa Cruz and Mavericks had recovered from the shock, they organized a series of benefits and memorials, designed to remember their friend and provide some emotional and financial security for his wife and family. On Saturday night, Jeff and Katharine Clark had a benefit showing of Eric Nelson and Curt Myers’s Mavericks video Whipped, which they screened at the new Mavericks Surf Shop in Princeton Harbor.

“Eric and Curt put together a beautiful video memorial to Jay in just a couple of hours,” said Katharine. “I still cry when I think about it.”

On Wednesday night, June 20, Nelson and Myers showed Whipped at the Rio Theater in Santa Cruz, with all ticket sales and raffle proceeds going to Kim Moriarty. Katharine Clark was at the door, and she was overwhelmed.

“We had scheduled two shows but ended up selling those two out and adding on a third show for a couple hundred people. We sold about a thousand tickets but raised more than $9,000. People were handing me hundreds and saying, ‘Keep the change.’ ”

Whipped showed many of the highlights from the winter of 2000–2001 at Mavericks, including Jay Moriarty pulling impossibly high-lined carves on December 22. Whipped ended with a shot of Jay charging some giant bombs, as the crowd went berserk in memoriam. It was eerie coincidence that Whipped ended with a shot of Jay checking out his board on the beach and walking away, and then there was a memorial, with footage of Jay surfing, inter-cut with an interview he recorded in Tahiti in 1998.

“Jay talked about how we’re only here for a short time and be kind to everyone,” said Clark. “Embrace the positive and let the negative go through you. It was stirring, and you couldn’t help buckling from the raw emotion. I was three and a half years old when JFK died, and the emotion in the Rio was as strong for Jay as it was for the president. Everyone was feeling the loss of a magical human being.”

On Friday night, Frank Quirarte got the same response when he hosted a benefit premiere for Return of the Drag-In at the Capitola Theater. Quirarte’s benefit showing also raised thousands of dollars for Kim Moriarty. Frank held on to Kim’s shoulders as she choked out a speech and thanked everyone for remembering Jay and helping her through a hard time.

Jay’s body was returned to Santa Cruz on Friday the 22nd, and there were thousands of friends and fans there to say goodbye. At Pleasure Point on Tuesday, June 28, almost two thousand surfers and ocean-lovers paddled out into the kelp, and Jay’s ashes were released into the ocean that had given him so much life.

When Jay so famously torpedoed over the falls at Mavericks, it was my pleasure to interview what was left. Jay was a Pleasure Point guy, and it was good to see a Pleasure Point guy go beyond Sewer Peak legend and accomplish something on the world stage. Truth is, that now-famous Bob Barbour photo of Jay taking a plunge for the ages knocked another Jay image off the cover. The photo in question, taken from the water, showed a nuggety sixteen-year-old Jay dropping in steep and deep in a power stance, with the hook of the lip throwing over his head. Crouched in the middle of all that power, glaring out past the terrible shoulder, the position of his arms and the circular lip made him look like the character in a Mickey Mouse watch. That was Jay Michael Moriarty, always looking around the corner for the next big thing. And finding it, too.

DIFFICULT AND DANGEROUS MANEUVERS

As far back as the eighteenth century, some of the earliest accounts of the Polynesian pastime drew attention to the Hawaiian Islanders’ penchant for heavy water—i.e., big ass surf. Consider the following passage from The Three Voyages of Captain Cook Round the World, which could just as easily be describing a contemporary session at Waimea Bay. Seventy-five years ago, Tom Blake, surfing’s first serious historian, provided even more detail of an early epic session in his seminal book Hawaiian Surfboard, illustrating that, despite not knowing what actually causes big waves, there have always been surfers daring enough to ride them.

The surf, which breaks on the coast round the bay extends to the distance of about 150 yards from the shore, within which space the surges of the sea, accumulating from the shallowness of the water, are dashed against the beach with prodigious violence. Whenever, from stormy weather or any extraordinary swell at sea, the impetuosity of the surf is increased to its utmost height, they chose that time for this amusement, which is performed in the following manner: Twenty or thirty of the natives, each taking a long narrow board rounded at the ends, set out together from the shore. The first wave they meet they plunge under, and suffering it to roll over them, rise again beyond it and make the best of their way by swimming out into the sea. The second wave is encountered in the same manner with the first; the great difficulty consisting in seizing the proper moment of diving under it, which if missed, the person is caught by the surf and driven back again with great violence; and all his dexterity is then required to prevent himself from being dashed against the rocks. As soon as they have gained, by these repeated efforts, the smooth water beyond the surf they lay themselves at length on their board and prepare for their return. As the surf consists of a number of waves, of which the third is remarked to always be much larger than the others, and to flow higher on the shore, the rest breaking in the intermediate space, their first object is to place themselves on the summit of the largest surge, by which they are driven along with amazing rapidity toward the shore. If by mistake they should place themselves on one of the smaller waves, which breaks before they reach the land, or should not be able to keep their plank in a proper direction on the top of the swell, they are left exposed to the fury of the next and, to avoid it, are obliged again to dive and regain the place from which they set out. Those who succeed in their object of reaching the shore have still the greatest danger to encounter. The coast being guarded by a chain of rocks, with, here and there, a small opening between them, they are obliged to steer their board through one of these or, in case of failure, to quit it before they reach the rocks and plunging under the wave make the best of their way back again. This is reckoned very disgraceful and is also attended with the loss of the board, which I have often seen, with great terror, dashed to pieces at the moment the islander quitted it. The boldness and address with which we saw them perform these difficult and dangerous maneuvers was altogether astonishing and is scarcely to be credited.

—Captain James Cook, The Three Voyages of Captain Cook Round the World

SURF LIKE JAY: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF JAMES MICHAEL MORIARTY (1978–2001)