Recklessness and repercussions at Punta de Lobos and across generations.
Illustration by Thomas Lynch
By Biddle Duke — The Surfer’s Journal August 2025
The group of Chileno surfers looks me over and inspects my board, a 7’6″ pintail shaped by a friend on Long Island. They’re suited up for the brisk central Chile fall ocean and carrying much bigger tools. We discuss the state of the surf. Big, we all agree. Tricky.
It’s midafternoon, and I look out of place on the windswept bluff in my travel-day button-down and leather shoes. The group is reserved but friendly. They probe, looking for any hint of fear or doubt. I keep my uncertainty close because, after a minute or so of conversation, the assessment seemingly over, they allow a little encouragement. Suit up. Let’s go.
It is mid-March, 1996. I’ve driven the dirt road south along the coast from Pichilemu with my family—my wife, Idoline, our 3-year-old daughter, and our son, who was born six months ago, in Argentina—through stands of pine, eucalyptus, and cactus. Idoline and I need a break from city life in Buenos Aires, and I need a break from my job as the editor of the English-language newspaper there, the Herald.
***
“You’re either going to take this seriously, or you’re going to lose this job,” said Peter Boody, the editor of the Long Island newspaper where I started out a decade prior, early in my time working for him. Peter knew why I had skipped the mandatory staff and news meeting that morning. The surfboard was visible inside the car, and my salty hair had that unmistakable look about it, matted and sticking up. And there was that gleam in my eye.
Peter was a good, smart editor. He was also generous. That wasn’t my first offense. Any other editor would have fired me. Instead, he sat me down and told me I had promise as a reporter, and if I wanted to meet that promise, I needed to get my shit together. If I didn’t, I should leave.
I stayed. I loved being a reporter. As a 23-year-old, I felt ridiculously and undeservedly important. I was documenting the rapacious development that was gobbling up thousands of acres of my hometown, which had been farmed for potatoes and corn for generations. We didn’t see it clearly then—at least I didn’t—but we were witnessing the beginning of the end of a unique coastal culture and community, to be replaced by a tsunami of huge houses and developments named after what was destroyed in the process of building them. I was writing about colorful local characters and big shots, many of whom I had known from a distance for years. Only in my new job, I was get- ting up close, warming to them, asking difficult questions. It was the best education.
At Peter’s command, I knuckled down. There would be months away from the ocean. But, like most journeymen surfers, I would get in when I could. I married a surfer. Together, we’d find waves.
***
Eventually, the road south of Pichilemu runs out onto a windswept, breathtaking headland jutting into the Pacific, Punta de Lobos, named for the lobos marinos, the sea lions, common along the coast. The ocean greets us in a perfect rage: giant, cobalt-blue walls of water advancing toward shore against a steady wind before exploding in a fury of roiling foam.
We pull up and lower our windows. The moist roar of the Pacific sweeps into the car. Out in front of us, Los Morros—the two towering, guano-covered rocks that mark the tip of the point—are being lashed by the sea. Other than the little group waiting for me to make up my mind, the place is deserted. No one in the water.
The decision to paddle out is quick. I am out of shape—work, kids, life—but I reckon I can muscle through anything. Although I grew up in the surf and, at 32, have spent decades riding waves all over the world, I’ve never met an ocean that could keep me out. I credit my father for that.
A strong, calm waterman, he made daily swims and bodysurfs a family obligation, in any conditions—the rougher, the better. An unspoken test of skills. Being the youngest of six in a competitive brood of half- and step-siblings, I was sometimes ordered to remain on the sand when it was “too much.” I was left to observe. Watch and learn.
The nod came from Dad on one of those days: “You can handle this.” I was probably about 12. What I recall most vividly was getting way outside, beyond the danger zone, bobbing there alongside him. It took exactly what he demonstrated: timing, persistence, breath, calm, respect, humility.
There’s no beating the ocean, but I discovered I could meet its challenge—I could find its trapdoors. I reveled in that conceit. I remember feeling alone and vulnerable, and how good that was, to be on my own and in control in that wild and limitless place.
On the distant beach, people without fathers like mine watched and worried, even as I thrilled in the arrogance of my fun. Dad must have had one eye on me, but he left me to sort it out by myself. I’d joined his invincible ranks. Afterward, there was no acknowledgement. Just the pleasure of it.
“That was exciting,” he offered, toweling off.
***
At its best, Punta de Lobos is one of the most impressive waves on earth. When it’s on, it’s not to be trifled with—raw power smashing up against a jagged shoreline, and a fierce, relentless south-to-north current. Standing on the bluff, I can see that the place is showing its teeth, but I feel a sort of unwarranted endorsement from the little group of Lobos locals, who nudge me to join them. I’d surfed the place at a decent size the year before. I can do this, I reason.
“Are you sure about this?” Idoline asks, taking care not to sound too doubtful, lest she wound my pride. “It looks really big.”
Our son is asleep in the car, and our daughter is crouched beside us, scratching in the dirt with a stick.“Will you be okay with the kids for an hour?” I ask.
“Sure.”
“I won’t be long.”
She offers a familiar “yeah, right” look.
I follow the local crew down the cliff.
The Morros essentially compose a tiny island separated from the shore by a channel of whitewater. You have to cross it and then clamber up the other side onto the island and the shelter of the big rocks before timing your final jump onto a foamball for the paddle out. In front of us, the whitewater is sweeping up and over the rocks, and the channel is a churning menace. To avoid getting dragged off takes footwork and timing I haven’t used in months.
I closely follow the lead of the five or six others, and we scramble up out of the channel and huddle in the protected lee of the Morros, waiting for a lull. It is then, peering around those rocks, right into the jaws of the wave, that I realize I am in way over my head. The waves are much bigger than I had judged. Ego and arrogance, wanting to measure up to the locals I’ve just met, have delivered me to an immensely dangerous threshold.
For a second, I consider turning back. But then, with a sign from the ocean that I miss, the group leaps up, runs toward the edge of the rocks, and, waiting for a surge, hurls themselves up and onto the froth as it pulls them away.
Timing is everything. I wait one or two heartbeats too long and lunge in behind them.
***
The moment I begin paddling into the pit at Punta de Lobos, I know I am doomed. The first wave of a much larger set is yawning up out of the Pacific and about to explode in front of me. The others ahead are scratching hard, but they are being lifted by the rising shoulder. They will narrowly slip over into safety.
Whether I keep paddling makes little difference. I am staring into the gaping mouth of a killer. More set waves, I know, are lining up behind it. Fear courses through my body as if I have grabbed hold of a live wire. Here, now, I can die, says the voice in my head. Do everything to live, another voice counters. When the first wave breaks, I am at the bottom of the trough, directly under the lip. I ditch my board and dive as deep as I can, but there is no escaping, no trapdoor. A force harder and meaner than anything I have ever known strikes me like a school bus and drives me to the bottom with stunning fury. Something smashes into the base of my back. Is it the bottom? My board? I can’t tell. I just know I can’t waste a second. I flail for the surface. What surface? Where is it? There is no up, no down.
Everything is suddenly a blur. Sharp ringing breaks out in my ears, in my head. The ocean keeps coming, pounding me down again and again, then spinning me in the foam.
The first four or five waves keep me where they want me, in the impact zone, as if the ocean is trying to teach me something. We say the ocean is angry, we say it’s calm, we say it’s insistent, we say it’s alive, but the truth is that the ocean just is. It is not alive and yet it is alive. It is not asking me anything now, not telling me to summon courage and strength, or to think about my life. It is simply being, and I am at its mercy.
I am in a deadly no-man’s-land, between ceaseless cliffs of water and a jagged shoreline. If I stop paddling, diving, and stroking for the outside, I will get smashed on the rocks. My only option is to do everything I can to muster the strength to paddle northward, where the shore turns to sand—the only possible safe exit. I keep diving, swimming, and paddling, only to get hit, again and again.
I am desperate now, and furious—at myself. Fury drives my determination. The thought that this isn’t me drowning out here at Punta de Lobos pounds in my head. That was some other asshole who, in a sense, is now raging and apologizing to the me who pays attention and knows what he is capable of. To the me who stays on the bluff with his irrationally devoted wife, and carries his baby boy on his back down the cliff to explore the tide pools on the beach with his daughter. To that me, I am screaming: Hello, are you there? You forgot me!
Then a huge lip hits me again, and everything goes blank.
There is a wash of color, an unfamiliar calm, a gap in my thoughts. Eventually, vaguely, I see the beach stretching north of the point. I have both forced myself and been carried out into deeper water. The waves along this section of the coast collapse in one long, 20-foot-high thun- derous wall. There is no way to safely ride one.
My arms are lead weights, and catching these monsters on my 7’6″ is nearly impossible. I have no choice. I throw myself down the face of one, sliding way out onto the flats before the whitewater grabs me and beats me down.
Who knows how long I rag-doll in the whitewater, then how long I lie there on the black sand. I am a mile or so north of the point. I can feel the burning sting of a gash on my back where my wetsuit has been ripped open. My head is still ringing, and my sinuses are packed with water. But, miraculously, I am okay.
When I crest the edge of the headland, the sun has dropped below the horizon, and it is getting dark. Idoline is standing by the rental car with a look of panic, searching the sea, our son in a carrier on her back, little Ellie holding her hand.
“We lost sight of you,” she says, choking back tears.
I’ve been gone for almost two hours. The other surfers have already left. I mumble an apology. I am shaking, visibly battered.
Don’t ever do that again. She doesn’t say it; it just passes between us wordlessly. We drive in silence back to town, the streetlights twinkling, a few restaurants filling up.
***
At night, in our little shared room with one light- bulb, I write in my journal to my father. He was killed in an accident almost exactly a year earlier, in April 1995. Rollerblading near his home on Long Island, he was hit from behind by a car. The driver cut it too close, a misjudgment on her part. Perhaps the sun had been in her eyes, or perhaps Dad skated out into her path at the last minute. He had always lived as if he were invincible. He was 79, no helmet, wearing headphones, weights around his ankles to toughen the exercise.
Some of his friends would remark to me afterward that the manner of his death was in character, almost fitting, for a man who lived as if he were ageless, as if death would never come. Although they meant it as a compliment, I didn’t understand them at the time. Death, in character? Fitting?
Dad had called me in Buenos Aires the morning he was killed, to critique an unflattering article I had written about the president of Argentina. I was a guest in that country, he cautioned me somewhat sternly. What he meant, but didn’t say, was that I risked being forcibly deported, or worse. Instead of listening to him, I pushed back, and we argued. He was probably right. I was glib, but I didn’t give in.
“Don’t be reckless,” he concluded.
That afternoon, my brother called: “Your dad is gone.”
“Gone?” I remember asking.
My mother asked me to speak at the funeral. I was too stunned and too confused to think clearly. A huge crowd filled the church. All I could do was stammer through tears about the lessons of swimming in the ocean with him.
Now, in Chile a year later, I write to tell him he was with me out there—that I heard his voice admonishing me for being a fool and forgetting a key lesson, humility, but urging me to stay calm and keep going, that I could do it, and how, when I landed on the beach, I heard his voice again.
“Well, that was exciting.”
***
It is an early-spring afternoon, and my parents skate together through the streets of their home- town on Long Island before my mom decides the light is fading and she’s had enough. She urges him to quit too. But he wants more. He tells her to head home.
“Just one more loop,” he says. “I won’t be long.”