Laird Hamilton is an American big-wave surfer and co-inventor of tow-in surfing. He is married to Gabrielle Reece, celebrity women’s’ professional sports competitor and fashion model. Hamilton grew up in a location that is known as one of the greatest surfing regions in the world, the north coast of Oahu and helped along by the surfing greats of the modern surfing era who were his father’s friends and customers.
By the age of 20, Hamilton had already become an accomplished surfer but competitive contests never appealed to him. In late 1992, Hamilton with two of his close friends, big wave riders Darrick Doerner and Buzzy Kerbox, started using inflatable boats to tow one another into waves which were too big to catch under paddle power alone. The technique, which would later be modified to use jet skis, was a revolutionary innovation. Tow-in surfing, as it soon became known, pushed the confinements and possibilities of big wave surfing to a whole new level.
Using tow-in surfing methods, Hamilton quickly learned how to survive 70-foot waves and carving arcs across walls of water. It was Hamilton’s death-defying drop into Tahiti’s Teahupo’o break on the morning of August 17, 2000 which became the measure of his surfing career to date, and firmly established his reputation as the greatest and bravest big wave surfer in the recorded history of surfing. Hamilton dropped into what is widely considered to be the most dangerous wave ever ridden, due to the sea “sucking down” into a huge well and forming an enormous mass of moving water.
