Brad Gerlach

In 1992 Brad Gerlach abruptly quit the pro surfing tour announcing that he was more interested in “the artistic side of surfing.” Thirteen years later - during the winter of 2005/2006 - Gerlach got artfully whipped by Mike Parsons into an outrageous moose of a big wave at Todos Santos. A contender for the Billabong XXL Award, Gerlach showed up at the April 2006 awards’ ceremony wearing a hopeful grin under an army helmet symbolizing who knows what, but he wore it onto the stage when he was awarded $68,000 for the largest ridden wave of the winter.

Gerlach was born in 1966, two years after Laird Hamilton and he represents a growing crew of, how to say it, “mature” surfers who are finding ways to stay viable well into their Golden Years.

They say forty is the new twenty and Gerlach is living proof. He is as fit as he has ever been, going back to 1989 when the Australian Sports Fitness Institute proclaimed his 5’ 11”, 165 pounds as carrying the lowest muscle to body fat ratio on record. Some of that is genes, some of that is clean living and a lot of ocean time. Gerlach’s father Joe was an Olympic diver who bolted from Communist Hungary in the 60s. Gerlach learned to surf in Encinitas in 1976, then moved to Huntington Beach with his father from 1982 to 1984, where he became the top-rated Junior in the National Scholastic Surfing Association. He turned pro in 1984 and had his moments, including beating Tom Carroll in the final of the 1985 Stubbies Pro. Gerlach is one of those great surfers who didn’t shine brightest within contest heats, but outside of that he gained a reputation as one of the best surfers in the world, who was also one of the funniest human beings on earth. He was and is a world- class mimic and so when you travel with Gerlach you travel with everyone he has ever known.

In 1991 Gerlach got very close to winning a World Title, taking two events in South Africa and Australia, but faltered at the end and finished runner up to Damien Hardman. Something about that killed his competitive spirit and he quit the next year and never looked back.

Gerlach quit pro surfing the same year that Laird Hamilton, Buzzy Kerbox and Darrick Doerner began screwing around with boats and then PWC to ride giant waves at Backyards, then Jaws. The rest of the surfing world didn’t know what to make of this heresy, using infernal combustion engines in the ocean to catch giant waves, but by the end of the 90s, more and more surfers were getting on board – so to speak.

As tow surfing spread across the Pacific from Jaws to Mavericks, surfers in southern California began eying a place called the Cortes Bank, a reef that broke in 20 feet of water, a hundred miles out to sea. In 2001Gerlach was among the first crew of surfers to motor all the way out to the Cortes Bank, and challenge waves breaking on a reef that had almost sunk the USS Enterprise. On that session, Gerlach whipped Mike Parsons into a wave measured at 61 feet that won Parsons the XXL first prize for that year.

As all of this money for riding big waves was evolving, one of the protocols emerged that tow teams split the money 50/50. Five years later, Parsons returned the favor and whipped Gerlach into that moose at Todos, and this time the money flowed to him, not from him.

Gerlach was a member of the Old School of surfers that Kelly Slater sang goodbye to in the early 90s, but now Gerlach is one of the leading members of a New School of 40-something surfers who are proving they are still viable in this Wave New World of using PWC to tow into giant waves. The horizon is the limit, and every year surfers get a little closer to that illusive 100-foot wave.