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Surf & Destroy (Cont.) REPLOGLE AND COLLINS are California-based big-wave specialists, and they're among the 20 or so surfers who have been recruited to join the Billabong Odyssey, a three-year, $3 million mission to seek out and ride, with the help of motorized watercraft, the biggest waves the planet has to offer. It's natural to feel jealous of guys with a job like that. And judging by the mixed reviews the Odyssey has gotten in the surfing world since its 2001 launch, it's also natural to find the whole concept, and its nonstop barrage of self-promotion, a little annoying. Once upon a time, surf exploration was a minimalist pursuit. You needed only a board, a passport, a few bucks, and a hand-drawn map of doubtful reliability. But the Odyssey represents something new: a massively funded attempt to apply expedition tactics to the business of finding huge new surf. Because the Odyssey owes its existence to the marketing gods—it was paid for by Billabong, the $450-million-a-year Australia-based surfwear manufacturer—some observers have dismissed it as more pseudo-adventure than the real thing. Grousing about the Odyssey peaked earlier this year in the aftermath of a one-day invasion of the Cortes Bank, a seamount about 100 miles west of San Diego. Cortes was tow-in surfed for the first time on January 19, 2001, a day that saw historic 60-foot-plus waves. (Calibrating wave size is an inexact science, done after the fact by examining photographs.) On January 12, 2004, word went out on the Web- and cell-phone-powered surfer hotline that a major North Pacific storm would again produce monster waves at the site. Tow-in surfers, most with no connection to the Odyssey, swarmed the break—a mass assault that spoke volumes about the booming popularity of big-wave hunting. All told, roughly 100 people showed up that day, including 20 tow-in teams. The Odyssey entourage added to the mess with four surfers, two boats, four cameramen, two lifeguards, an emergency-room doctor, and a plane equipped with a gyro-stabilized Betacam. The Odyssey's surfers—big-water icons Mike Parsons, Brad Gerlach, Shane Dorian, and Noah Johnson-flew out in an A-Star helicopter and jumped into the water from on high, like Navy SEALs. As it turned out, the waves were only half as big as predicted, but they were still hefty—with a few faces in the 35-foot range. After the session, the Odyssey team pissed off a lot of surfers by issuing a snooty press release that called the scene a "circus" and identified two types of surfers who showed up: "the class acts who knew what they were doing...and the people who had no clue."
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