Mavericks.

About

Mavericks is a deep-water reef bowl off Pillar Point, just north of Half Moon Bay and roughly thirty kilometres south of San Francisco. A long, sloping ramp on the seabed concentrates incoming north-westerly energy into a peak that jacks vertical at the takeoff and produces wave faces past fifteen metres on the biggest days. WSL ran the Mavericks Invitational here from 1999 to 2016, when the wave was forecast to break.

Wave wants west-north-west swell with periods of 14 seconds and up. The reef wakes up from about 2.5 m on the buoy and the landmark sessions come on 5 m+ swell. Wind from the east is offshore. Lower tides clean up the inside. Swell window is narrow: north-west wraps in fine, anything south of west-south-west misses the ramp and the reef sits flat. Outside the criteria, climatology shows the wave breaks only a handful of days per winter.

Tight crew when it’s on, mostly invite-only via tow-skis off the channel boat. Water sits below 13 °C; white sharks are documented through the area; the inside section, the Boneyard, is a graveyard of rocks. Mark Foo died here in 1994, Sion Milosky in 2011. Watch from the bluff above Pillar Point with binoculars on the next big west- north-west pulse. That’s the local approach unless you’ve earned the lineup.