I feel bad writing this, but when my thoughts turn to Jay Moriarity, I always, incorrectly, think he died during that horrible “Iron-Coss” wipeout he took at Mavs, 19 years ago today. Take a minute and click on 

 when that happened. Imagine your mental state if you somehow paddled out to Mavericks as a teenager and just sat in the channel. Now imagine talking yourself into moving over a bit to maybe, 

 try and poach a shoulder. You know what you’d be doing? You’d be soiling your 5/4. I won’t even ask you to imagine nutting up to a point where you'd sprint-paddle into a 30-foot monster, only to get held up by a stiff offshore wind, blown off your board, and fall backward with a pitching lip. I won’t ask because if you thought hard enough about it, you might never surf a wave over eight feet again.

But Jay? He was fine. Surfaced. Took a few minutes to himself. Paddled back out with a smile. I feel like an impostor for calling myself a surfer.

What’s truly amazing is not that Jay survived, but that two decades later his wipeout is still one of the heaviest falls anybody has ever taken. Jay’s Mavericks adventure came at the dawn of the tow-surfing age, and the search for super-big surf. A few years later Ken Bradshaw got whipped into a 50-, or 60-, or hell, maybe 70-foot wave on Oahu. Then Laird got his Millennium Wave at Teahupoo. Big, giant surf at Cortes Bank was tackled in 2001. By the mid-2000s, the paddle-in brigade were throwing themselves over the ledge at Jaws, and in 2012, the jetskis remained idle while paddling hellmen attacked huge freaky-perfect surf at Cloudbreak during a lay day at the Fiji Pro. There have been more than enough horrifying moments—Niagara-like trips over the falls, mid-slab spinouts, imploding black-hole tuberides—but none have equaled Jay's Irons Cross for sheer drama. Partly because, in 1994, we didn’t know you could survive a fall like that. That was worst-case-scenario bad right there, it happened to a 16-year-old kid, and he surfaced and paddled right back out. So what happened? Grizzled big-wave vets saw that wipeout, saw Jay shrug it off, and pushed themselves a little deeper. And the risk factor didn't seem to go up all that much. So we go pop-eyed as Nathan Fletcher gets atomized on a massive wave at Teahupoo, but no longer spend much time pondering how it's possible that he's still among the living. Guys (and girls) suffer incredible wipeouts all the time, and a week later they're on Surfline chatting about it.

Jay went on to have a fine big-wave surfing career, then drowned in a free-diving accident while vacationing in the Maldives. And maybe it isn’t fair to remember him this way, but to me, he’ll always be a teenager free-falling into oblivion, and giving the big-wave surf community a glimpse into a future that was more nightmarish than anybody could imagine—and at the same, weirdly, safer than they could imagine.

[Jay's 1994 Mavs wipeout landed him a SURFER cover shot, a detail of which is seen above. Photo: Bob Barbour]

JAY MORIARITY'S TERRIFYING MOMENT IN THE SUN

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