Texas Tanker Surfing

We surfers see waves where other people see sidewalks, bushes, and cake icing. We look at boat wakes that peel at four inches along lakeshores and dream about being shrunken to the appropriate size to get barreled. It’s this amazing ability to interpret that leads some of us to find waves in places where there are none.
The Texas Gulf Coast’s infrequent wave action has led some of its surfers away from the ocean to find something to ride. At Galveston Bay begins the Houston Ship Channel, a freeway for massive ocean going oil tankers en route between Houston and the gulf. When the ships are full and hauling serious tonnage, they produce some significant wakes. When the wakes hit sand shoals in the channel, they break, and produce waves that can reel for up to four miles. A few die-hard tanker surfers have been riding these wakes for eight years and probably wouldn’t give you much of a “Yee-Ha” if they saw you and your buddies surfing their local bank. It has taken them a long time to acquire the knowledge necessary to surf the tanker wakes so don’t expect much out of the Galveston locals in terms of where to go. They will tell you, though, that the practicalities are serious and complex and the longest waves in the world break there everyday. But then they’d tell you they’re just joking. No such thing exists…or does it?

Why: Because you want to ride a wave for 11 minutes.

Needed knowledge: Mucho. You have to know where the shoals are, when the tankers come, how much oil they have in them, where the partially submerged shipwrecks are, someone with a boat.

X-Factors: Sunken ships, locals, wind, scattered pilings, Homeland Security, oncoming boats, river-born flesh eating viruses.

Necessities: A boat, a good burger-wave board, someone who knows the routine.