Where is mavericks

Teahupoo Tahiti, French Polynesia. Shipstern Bluff Tasmania, Australia. Mavericks Half Moon Bay, California. Mullaghmore Head Donegal Bay, Ireland.

Hawaii still is the most dangerous region in the world when it comes to dying while surfing. The good news is that today, life-saving standards are higher, and the precautions numerous. During the transition from high to low tide, wave energy roiling the ocean reaches the seafloor. The crests at Pillar Point, by contrast, can get so big that they register on seismographs miles away.

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Ian Walsh rides a bomb at Mavericks this week. The best swell window for Mavericks. It's probably one of the most frequestly asked questions any resident of Half Moon Bay and surrounding communities hear day after day.

Knowing that Mavericks is a destination for travelers worldwide is often a sense of pride, although the traffic in this small town can be downright maddening. Come winter and when the swells are big, the area around Pillar Point Harbor can become as crowded as the lineups at Mavericks. The trek out to the closest beach Pillar Point Beach to the big wave spot is not an easy one.

You cannot see the waves from the highway, and one would never know that some of the biggest waves in the world are just west of Highway 1 just by sight. The famous Mavericks surf competition has been cancelled indefinitely. Northern California surf spots are firing like crazy this winter, with beaches and reefs serving up a seemingly endless supply of pristine waves, from Big Sur to Santa Cruz, and along the Sonoma Coast and beyond. Anyone in Northern California who has been near the Pacific Ocean in the last month knows that the surf is pumping from swell-after-swell-after-swell.

At Mavericks, the waves rise as tall as apartment buildings and break so violently they can snap a surfboard like a toothpick. The break is only surfable under the right conditions; some years the right combination of swell, wind, and weather never materialize. This year it did. Bianca Valenti, a San Francisco-based big wave surfer, says she paddled out to Mavericks nearly a dozen times in December and almost every single day of to date.

This is the best winter that I can remember, ever. The conditions were so good at Mavericks on Dec. Valenti says the waves have been huge and perfect and the conditions drew dozens of surfers and a gallery of photographers.