- Surfer Alo Slebir, 24, rode a gargantuan wave estimated to be 108 feet high
- “It’s the fastest I’ve ever traveled on a surfboard,” Slebir tells PEOPLE. “I’ve never experienced a sensation like that before”
- The wave — which thundered into Northern California’s Mavericks surf break on Dec. 23 — could potentially be the largest ever ridden
Alo Slebir had just arrived on Maui’s north shore late last year and was looking forward to tackling the monstrous waves on the Hawaiian island’s celebrated surf break known as Jaws when friends back home in Santa Cruz, Calif., began texting him.
Like any self-respecting big wave surfer, the 24-year-old Slebir and his pals constantly watched the data captured by buoys hundreds of miles out in the Pacific Ocean that could predict wave heights days before they slammed into the West Coast.
When Slebir looked at the numbers, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“I remember looking at the buoy readings and seeing numbers I’d never really seen before,” he says. “We didn’t know if it was going to be rideable, but I knew I had to fly back.”
By Dec. 22, Slebir had returned to California, grabbed a few hours of sleep and was up at 4 o’clock the next morning hoping, at first light, to get out into the mid-50-degree water of the hallowed Northern California big wave surf break known as Mavericks.
But because the swells were still relatively small, he and Luca Padua, whose job as jet ski driver and tow partner is to bring him into oncoming waves, decided to wait a few hours in order to save their energy for the long day ahead.
By 11 a.m., Slebir had caught five or six rides on a series of 15- to 20-foot waves. “They weren’t big yet,” he says, “probably just an eighth of the size of came later in the afternoon.”
But then it happened.
In the blink of an eye, the monsters predicted days earlier by the ocean buoys had finally arrived.
“It was suddenly a different world,” Slebir says. “The water color had this ugly, murky look to it due to the fact that the [energy from the waves] was stirring up stuff from the bottom that probably hadn’t been turned over in years. It was something that I had never seen before out there.”
Legendary surfer Jeff Clark — who has spent 50 years tackling the waves at Mavericks and was once named one of the world’s best big-wave riders by Surfer magazine — was out on the water that day and was gobsmacked by what he witnessed.
For the next few hours, one wave after another reached heights of between 60 and 70 feet.
“Everything,” Clark, 68, says, “just came together in this perfect synergy of energy when it hit the reef.”
Slebir isn’t exactly sure exactly when the big one finally arrived. Those who were there that day told him it happened at 1:30 p.m., others said it occurred two hours later. But everyone who witnessed it forming was instantly transfixed by what they were seeing.
“The wave was just … it was different,” says Clark, who had decided against trying to ride one of the beasts that afternoon. “It just stood up so much taller than anything we’d seen that day.”
Slebir, exhausted but still pumped full of energy after catching nearly 30 massive waves, remembers the “giant wall of water” gathering shape as he held onto to the tow rope while Padua hit the throttle of his jet ski.
“He just yelled, ‘Up!’ and then we went. There was no time for questioning anything. I remember thinking, ‘OK, we’re gonna do this,’ ” he says.
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A split second later, a wave growing to the size of a 10-story office building — and traveling faster than any swell he’d ever ridden — rose up behind him, and Slebir found himself rocketing down its nearly vertical face, traveling faster than he ever had in his life.
“Luca was on the side of the wave with his jet ski at full throttle, probably going 50 mph and couldn’t catch up with the wave,” he says. “There was so much water being drawn off the reef, being pulled up the wave, that it almost felt like I was moving backwards. It was a crazy sensation.”
Even crazier were the deafening explosions erupting behind him as the 10- to 15-foot-thick lip of the wave broke off, sending thousands of tons of water crashing down behind him.
“It’s like nothing you’ve ever heard before, like thunder times 10,” Slebir says. “It made this slapping, growling sound that almost made it seem like the wave wanted to eat you.”
Slebir, who has been surfing Mavericks since he was 14, lives for this sort of experience.
“You’re so locked in that your adrenaline and years of preparation just takes over,” he says. “Every wave has a different face to it and none of them are identical, so if you have any bit of hesitation, your body will gravitate toward it and just tense up.”
And tensing up definitely wasn’t something Slebir wanted to happen during his high-stakes ride. He once slammed down 40 feet onto the rocky ocean floor by one of Mavericks gargantuan swells and popped back up to the surface coughing up blood after the water pressure burst the capillaries in his lungs.
“You prepare for the worse, then try to do your best,” he says. “I’ve been lucky not to have many bad injuries, but there’s a million things that can happen. The possibilities, including death, are endless — and none of them are fun.”
Slebir’s epic ride lasted between 10 and 15 seconds.
When it was over, he had a hunch that he’d probably just pulled off something special but didn’t dwell on it. Instead, he headed back out to catch his next wave. Clark, who witnessed Slebir’s feat, knew he’d seen a once-in-a-lifetime ride.
“I think I can probably say that it’s the biggest wave I’ve ever seen ridden out there,” he says.
bigwavechallenge/Youtube
That evening, when friends began texting an exhausted and drained Slebir photos of his ride, he was initially convinced that the images had been altered.
The next morning he awoke to find around 1,800 text messages on his phone from people around the world who had seen the photos on social media. Along the way, surf pundits began calculating the wave height from the video footage and pictures.
They concluded that Slebir’s ride was potentially 108 feet tall — meaning that he had just ridden a wave taller than any other surfer in history. The current record, 93.73 feet, was set last year by Sebastian Steudtner, and the December wave has not yet been confirmed.
“I’ve been trying to not pay too much attention,” says the low-key Slebir, who graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 2023 and has been on surf boards since he was 3 . “All I know is that it’s the biggest wave I’ve ever seen at Mavericks and lot of people who have surfed there a long time are saying the same thing,” he adds. “So it’s pretty cool to have been there when it happened.”
Even more importantly, notoriety from the feat could provide the one-time construction worker and sales rep for various surf brands with a few additional career opportunities.
“I’ve been taking a little gap before I have to get a big boy job,” he says. “But this just might allow me to keep the dream alive for a bit longer.”
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