San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Young surfer readies for the biggest waves
He felt like a rookie in his first big-league game. For years he had dreamed about the big waves of Mavericks, and now it was real, the startling notion of surfing alongside his heroes off the coast of Half Moon Bay.
This was no ordinary rookie, however. Luca Padua was 13 years old.
“Hey, kid, tell your dad to get you a real board,” joked John Raymond, an old-guard Mavericks surfer, noting Padua’s beat-up equipment. But as the days and years went on, Raymond noticed something else about the kid. “He got real good, very fast,” Raymond said this month. “Now he’s right up there with the best of ’em.”
To his classmates at Half Moon Bay High School, Luca always seemed very much a man. He’s now a junior, with a 3.5 grade-point average that reflects genuine dedication to his classwork. But on the larger scale, he’s a legitimate player in the big-wave universe, combining the crucial elements of courage, humility and respect. Every top surfer in the Mavericks hierarchy knows his name.
“I turn 42 in January, and Luca’s 16. Makes me feel super old,” said Hawaii’s Jamie Mitchell, one of the most decorated big-wave riders in the world. (Padua turned 17 on Dec. 17.) “Imagine him in six years. He’s already just an animal out there. But when he grows into his body, the mental aspect, and all that …” Mitchell drifted off, shaking his head and smiling.
Another standout in giant surf, Hawaii’s Aaron Gold, called Padua “an amazing upand-coming kid. I can’t wait to see him grow up, because he’s gonna be one of the top surfers at Mavericks. I mean, he already is.”
When the biggest swells arrive, Padua doesn’t flinch. He’s either surfing or driving a Jet Ski on rescue missions, a crucial aspect of the Mavericks scene. When a 60-foot swell arrived in January, one of Mavericks’ biggest in recent years, Padua couldn’t surf because of a lacerated hand and sprained knee. But when water-safety expert Frank Quirarte experienced the ultimate nightmare — his Jet Ski stalled, leaving him helpless in the path of a massive, onrushing set — Padua drove straight to the maelstrom and sped Quirarte to safety.
When Mavericks pumped out big surf for days on end this month, Padua didn’t miss a session, routinely taking off on the biggest waves with remarkable success.
To think that he’s already a seasoned surfer is difficult to grasp. No one has ever ventured into Mavericks so young. Jay Moriarity, the beloved Santa Cruz surfer who died in a free-diving accident off the Maldives islands (Indian Ocean) in June 2001, was 15 when he first went out there.
“Thirteen is really young,” said Matt Warshaw, the sport’s leading historian, calling up comparisons to Hawaii’s Jeff Hakman and Mark Healey. “Russell Bierke (Australia) has been charging really hard since he was 13. That may be about it.”
Padua didn’t tell his parents he was heading to Mavericks that first day. He was afraid they would turn him down, and he was right. Only two years prior, Padua was so scared of substantial surf, “even a 5-foot wave freaked me out,” he recalled.
So what happened?
“I really don’t know. Something switched.”
He had an able mentor in Tim West, a coastside oceansports mainstay who surfed in the biggest-ever Mavericks contest (2010) and is now mostly focused on water-safety rescues. He knew Padua from the Junior Lifeguards program, and he could see him developing a thirst for bigger waves. They surfed together at Montara, Ocean Beach and points north, always seeking out a challenge of one’s stamina and willpower.
When the day of reckoning arrived, Padua had turned 13 just a week before. He got a call from West, who told him, “Mavericks looks really good right now, and there are only five guys out.”
“Hope you get some good ones,” said Luca. “Have an awesome time out there.”
“No, I think you should come.”
“You mean, to watch from the cliff ?”
“No, to surf. I think you should grab your wetsuit and come down to my house right now.”
It wasn’t a giant day, with sets coming in around 18 feet, but that’s plenty big enough. Gathering his thoughts on the bench, “I was so nervous, I thought I was gonna puke,” Padua said. “But when I started paddling out, I lost the butterflies. I felt totally relaxed.”
Luca’s older brother, Dom, recalled, “He immediately got this light feeling in his head, like, ‘All right, this is Mavericks, it’s go time.’ I get the chills thinking about it.”
Only a fool charges out to Mavericks without studying the place, and Padua spent two hours in the channel that day, taking mental notes. Respectfully easing into the takeoff zone, he heard one of the older surfers tell him, “It’s your turn.”
Padua wasn’t sure he was ready. “I sort of pretended to go, a half-ass paddle,” he recalled. “But Tim was paddling back out, we locked eyes for a second, and he goes, ‘Turn and burn!’ So I went. Going down that face, how steep it is, it really isn’t like surfing any other spot. But I rode that wave all the way to the inside, kicked out — and I was hooked. After that, I was just ... on it.”
To his great relief, he got enthusiastic support from home. “No matter what my gut instinct wants as a parent, he is clearly driven to do this,” said his mother, Wendy. “I don’t want to stop him. It would be pointless. He went out and made it happen for himself.”
Padua’s family is a testament to talent and enterprise. Wendy, of English-Irish descent,
modestly describes herself as “an adrenaline seeker,” finding thrills in parachuting and extreme whitewater rafting. Daughter Sophia, 20, is a junior at Oregon after spending the summer studying in Berlin. Dom, just a year out of high school, where he was a twoway player on the Half Moon Bay football team that reached last year’s Division 3-A state championship game, is an accomplished videographer with a professional body of work, much of it documenting Luca’s career.
Then there’s the father, Gino, known to many coastsiders as the drummer for the Califuegos, a tasteful four-man band. He’s also a lifelong sailor and an executive in the software business. He explains his heritage as “Spanish, Filipino, Mexican and a whole bunch of other mixture.”
As alarmed as he was about Luca’s first Mavericks adventure, Gino had faith in his son’s instincts. “He came out of the womb like a little yoda,” Gino said. “The wisdom kid. He’s an astute learner. He studies. You know, I still think he’s a better baseball player than a surfer. He could hit, he could pitch, and he was a catcher, where you have to know what everybody else is doing. It’s a tough position, physically and mentally. And what I liked about him, he’d have this great game, but never talked about it. It was always about how well the other guys did. Surfing is his main thing now, but he’s always been about as mature a kid as you could find.”
Gino has always stressed education above all else, and he was gratified to know that Luca worked out an arrangement with his high school officials, allowing him to skip school on the really special surfing days as long as he keeps up his grades. Needless to say, it’s not a privilege commonly granted.
“We try to support students following their passion and their dreams,” said Half Moon Bay High Principal John Nazar. “We all know that Luca is a special athlete, pursuing a sport at the highest level. We know that when the waves come, he’s got to get organized and go. He’s a very strong student, and a great young man. I place a very high value on how he treats all his classmates with respect and kindness. All of these things made it a very easy decision for us.”
His coach on the high school surf team, Mike Wallace, said, “Luca’s in the sweet spot. He’s picked up some sponsors (notably Quiksilver and Zola, which makes energy drinks). He gets first-rate boards (from noted San Diego shaper Stu Kenson). He’s got a built-in PR system with his brother’s documentation. He’s earned the respect of the Mavericks surfers, some of them like 30 years older. He got out in front of his academics, allowing him to surf the best days. And he’s training like a madman.”
Inside the Raul Castillo Martial Arts gym in Half Moon Bay, Luca has become a student of Matt Aragoni, an MMA fighter. They train together three hours a day on average, sometimes as much as six hours. “Matt’s a beast, an absolute beast,” said Padua, solidly built at 5-foot-9 and 160 pounds. “He put me on this path, and it changes your mind-set. When you’re in peak physical shape, you feel like nothing can stop you. When I’m 20 feet underwater getting smoked by a wave at Mavericks, I know that I trained for this exact situation. I got myself into it — now I’m gonna get myself right back out.”
Padua has become so well known in the international big-wave community, a number of out-of-town surfers stash their equipment at the Padua home in El Granada, some even staying there during big swells. Meanwhile, he isn’t content to make his name at Mavericks. He traveled this year to Nazare, Portugal, to surf after the World Surf League contest was held there, and to the Pico Alto International contest in Peru, where he became a last-minute entry and reached the semifinals.
“As soon as we got down to Peru, we came across guys from South America, Mexico and Hawaii getting ready for the event,” said Gino. “They’d never met Luca, but through social media, they knew about him. They were all like, ‘Oh, you’re that guy .’”
In the wake of Moriarity’s death, there was no sign of a new Mavericks generation. Many years passed before the old guard sensed any presence of up-and-coming locals. But the times have changed in Half Moon Bay. Padua is a proud member of the “Mavs Mafia,” as they call themselves, including Hunter Murison, Peter and Thomas Lundgard, Michael Joshua, Thomas Agramonte and Dom Padua, shooting video from the water.
When the 24-man contest list was announced for this year, Padua was chosen only as an alternate. “Mostly because he’s so young,” said Grant Washburn, part of a committee that determines six spots reserved for local surfers. “A lot of guys are charging hard out there, having put in a lot more years. Luca’s time will definitely come.”
Murison, a 20-year-old Half Moon Bay lifeguard, did make the list. “I’m so excited about that,” Luca said. “I’ll be out there by his side, caddying, waxing his boards for him, giving him that last pat on the back before his heat. I realize I’ve got a lot of time. I know my age had a lot to do with it. But in my head, I figure I haven’t done enough. I’ll just train a thousand times harder.”
“I think it’s actually a good thing he’s not in it,” Wendy said. “It’s a good life lesson. Getting that gratification from the get-go almost doesn’t seem right. It’s super-cool that you’re as dedicated as you are, doing all the right things, but you should have to work your ass off for a while before you get that kind of call.”
There’s a person missing in the Mavs Mafia team photo. Malcolm Feix died in a surfing accident at Pomponio State Beach in July at the age of 20. It seemed the entire coastside turned out for a memorial paddle-out at the Princeton Harbor jetty because Feix touched so many lives as a lifeguard, water polo coach, 4-H Club counselor, high school leadership standout and electrical engineering student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
It was only recently that Luca could talk about Feix without breaking into tears.
“He was my big brother, you know? He was family. He’s the one who convinced me to learn how to surf. He taught me how to make a peanut butter-andjelly sandwich,” he said with a laugh. “‘Show up and be kind’ was one of his favorite slogans, and he lived it. Since the day he died, we’re all just ... make him proud. Do it for Malcolm. He was, and always will be, my hero.”