Sometime in the next 10 days, Matt Formston will stand on the fortified headland at Nazare in Portugal, next to the iconic red lighthouse, and hear the roar of what is widely regarded as the largest wave on the planet.
“It’s big at the moment,” the 44-year-old says. “Very big. Day in day out, it’s about 30-to-80 foot. I’m unlikely to be going out in surf over 50 foot. But I’m going with an open mind. Everything’s on the table.”
Blind surfer to surf 50-foot waves at Nazare
Almost every surfer who has stood on that headland has looked at the monstrous swell and made a life-changing decision: should I tame this watery beast that spits and froths from its top lip as it grows bigger, and bigger, and bigger, making a surfboard look as tiny as a toothpick – or stay right here, on the headland, alive and well?
Formston, who is blind, doesn’t have that luxury.
“A surfer turns up at a headland and says, ‘Nah, that’s not for me. I can’t do that’,” he says. “I’m relying on my team to say we’re good to go because I can’t tell how big the wave is until I get to the bottom of it.”
Formston and his team flew out of Sydney on Friday in search of his final frontier. For the past year, he’s been chasing big waves in Indonesia, Fiji, Hawaii and the US west coast for a documentary, The Blind Sea, that will air early next year.
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Source: The Guardian
