The ocean has been with Christy Davis since he first summered in East Hampton, at the age of 7, with his parents, who lived in Washington, D.C.
Perhaps it was so even before that, for the legendary 69-year-old Mavericks surfer said by telephone this week from his home in Half Moon Bay, Calif., that his mother “was an avid ocean person — she’d swim way beyond the buoys at the club . . . she was diving with me in utero.”
Starting out as “a raft rat,” he was drawn at first to “the sand-sucking bowls of the Georgica jetties, which used to have great waves. . . . I bought my first surfboard from you, a 10-foot Harbour. . . . I’m pretty sure it was you . . . or at least it was someone who looked like you,” he said when this writer, never a surfer, demurred. “I had it for many years, until someone stole it.”
Not a fan of D.C., Davis soon came to call East Hampton home. After high school, he became a painting contractor, put himself through Southampton College, graduating in 1985, after which, with Lee Dion, Dave Buckhout, and Sal Tocci as mentors, he taught chemistry and general science at East Hampton High School before moving with his wife, Fiona, a Londoner, to California in 1988. “She was an insurance executive, and there was nothing for her in East Hampton,” he said by way of explanation.
A friend of his, John Raymond, recommended Half Moon Bay, 25 miles south of San Francisco, as a good place to live, a beachside town that lies three miles from Mavericks, where some of the heaviest-breaking waves in the world can be found, but which was then, until he, Raymond, and some other friends began surfing there, unknown.
“January 29, 1992, was the first time I surfed there, and I’ve been hopelessly addicted ever since. . . . The biggest waves I surf have had faces 40 to 45 feet high, but there are people who surf waves half again as big, 60 to 70 feet. I’m a little more conservative . . . I back out of a lot of waves. I generally surf ones with 20 to 30-foot faces.”
It can be fairly said that Davis is the oldest person to surf Mavericks with such frequency (1,000 sessions, 5,000 waves in 31 years), “and in all conditions, not just on beautiful, clean days.”
He is the subject of a documentary film, tentatively titled “Christy Davis: A Man and the Sea,” that also recounts the heart attack he suffered at the notorious break on March 11, 2019, and his collision almost a year earlier with an underwater rock that resulted in a broken neck bone and two broken upper spinal vertebrae.
The waves were “small, head-high” when Davis catapulted off his board and hit his head on a rock “in an isolated cove around the corner from Mavericks, on May 2, 2018. I broke my C [cervical] 1 and T [thoracic] 4 and 6. I could have wound up a paraplegic, but, fortunately, there was no nerve damage.”
Likewise, no nerve damage resulted from the heart attack he suffered during “a good session” at Mavericks 10 months later, leading him to believe, he said, that he was “extraordinarily blessed.”
As for the heart attack — apparently the only one a surfer has experienced while in Mavericks’ lineup — Davis said he refused tows, preferring to paddle the eight-tenths of a mile in, head down. A friend, after they’d walked a half-mile to his truck, drove him home. Once there, he told his wife that he had really bad heartburn, and, as she rushed for antacid, Davis called 911. Within an hour and a half of the attack, a stent had reopened the left anterior descending artery, which had been 100-percent blocked.
That he was in great shape had obviously helped see him through, as did his decision, Davis is convinced, to paddle in. Even though the pain was great, his paddling had stimulated the flow of capillary blood around the blockage, and had thus saved his life. “If I’d waited half an hour for a boat, I would have been dead.”
It was a good thing that he was a powerful paddler, the interviewee said, strong enough to win over many surfers younger than he the two-mile longboard Jay Moriarity Memorial Paddleboard Race in Santa Cruz at the ages of 59 and 62.
When this writer said it was “quite a tale,” Davis, who “surfed Mavericks for six hours a few weeks ago,” and was to have gone again Sunday, said he didn’t push it too much these days, given that it takes longer at his age to recover.
As he says in the trailer for the documentary, which he hopes may be shown here this summer, thus giving him an excuse to return to East Hampton, “I thank God that I’m still here, that it’s a great day, that the sky is blue, and that I can wiggle my toes.”