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For a select few surfers, winter is the time of year they really look forward to, when the big swells arrive and they can challenge themselves against waves the size of buildings.
Up until recently they would always head for the traditional surfer’s paradise of Hawaii when looking for big surf, but lately the cold, steel-grey waters of Northern California have been attracting surfers from all over the world who want to test themselves on what has become the Mount Everest of surfing. The place in question is ‘Mavericks’, a wave that breaks at Half Moon Bay just south of San Francisco.

This is the California that the Beach Boys never even saw, let alone sung about. The sea here is as cold as Cornwall in winter and you have to wear a full wetsuit, boots, gloves and a hood to insulate you from the frigid waters and equally cold winds. The waves can be up to 60 feet high, the result of huge winter storms thousands of miles away across the Pacific Ocean, and they’re so powerful that when they break the shock registers on the Richter scales at the University College of Berkeley in San Francisco.

The world’s best big wave surfers flock here every winter to prove themselves in an ocean environment so wild that it can literally reduce men to tears. At it’s worst it can kill them. And this year Mavericks is to stage a surf contest, sponsored by the Australian surfwear manufacturer Quiksilver and to be held only when the swell exceeds 20 feet in size. A swell this big can produce wave faces of 50 feet or more as it jacks up and breaks after hitting the reef at the end of its long, uninterrupted journey across the ocean.

But why risk your life to surf icy cold waves large enough to kill when you could ride surf that’s plenty big enough in Hawaii, Fiji or Indonesia? 21-year-old Californian surfer Jay Moriarity has a reputation for going for the biggest waves at Mavericks, and in the kind of understatement that’s common to many sportsmen who push themselves to the limit he says "I’ve always liked waves that had more power to them. They seemed more exciting to me."

For some surfers even the wipeouts are something to ‘enjoy’. They may be held underwater for up to a minute by a wave which Mavericks regular Don Curry describes as feeling like "four tons of decomposed granite when it lands on top of you"; their arms and legs may go numb through lack of oxygen; yet as Evan Slater of Surfer magazine says, "When the surfer finally pops up he lets out a big howl, climbs back on his board and goes back for more. Why? …he faced death and came away unscathed." It all sounds very dramatic, very macho, and it is.

But most big wave surfers still prefer to get their kicks in warm blue waves such as those of Hawaii. English surfing champion Gabe Davies regularly spends winters in Hawaii, where one of his favourite breaks is known as Sunset. He’s ridden it at 20 feet, which may not be as big as Mavericks but is big enough to challenge all but the best, and like most big wave surfers he describes the allure as being in the challenge and "pushing your own limits." But he also says "It’s good to make it back to shore in one piece too! If you have a good surf you feel like Superman at the end of it, but if you have a bad one you feel like you have to learn all over again - so either way you’re gonna go back out for more when the next big swell comes through."

The most recent push for big wave thrills in Hawaii has seen surfers riding waves so big that the only way they can get the power to drop down the face and ‘take off’ is to be ‘towed-in’ by jet skis. The rush of water flowing up the wave face is too strong to be overcome by paddle-power alone, and at offshore reefs such as ‘Jaws’ on the island of Maui ‘tow-in’ surfing allows surfers to catch waves that even by conservative estimates are 60 feet in size.

The huge adrenalin rush of surfing titanic waves such as this is often compared with other extreme sports such as skydiving and off-piste snowboarding and skiing. The thrill of sex, too, if often compared to surfing - the big difference here being that sex won’t kill you if you fall off.

However, something else that appeals to many surfers is the sense of solitude and camaraderie that is often to be found amongst these huge swells, where you’re very much reliant on your fellow surfers if you get into trouble. But now many of these Hawaiian reefs are becoming too overcrowded for the surfers who pioneered them, and those who are able may charter a yacht with a few friends and head off to little-known offshore reefs away from the masses.

Surfers are, in fact, becoming some of the last explorers of the age. Hard core wave riders are now exploring isolated coral atolls in the South Pacific, little-known archipelagos in the Philippines and the jungle-fringed coastlines of Indonesia for big, uncrowded waves. At the other end of the planet wave riders such as Argentine-born Edwin Salem and San Franciscan Mark ‘Doc’ Renneker, both of whom surf Mavericks, have explored remote parts of Patagonia and Alaska for waves.

"Surfing in places like this helps you to explore your inner-self and have the pleasure of charting new places where you know no surfer has ever been before - in fact very few people at all will have been there," says Edwin.

And you don’t necessarily have to go to the far corners of the Earth to find challenging big waves. There are spots in Spain, Scotland and Ireland that can get as big as most surfers are likely to want, and one thing’s for certain about Scotland - it’s not likely to get overcrowded in a hurry.

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