The swell two days before Christmas that gave Santa Cruz surfer Alo Slebir the ride of his life on a towering wave at Mavericks off the coast of Half Moon Bay was officially the biggest wave ridden over the most recent season of surfing, the sport’s authorities announced late Saturday.
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Santa Cruz surfer seeks world record for epic Mavericks wave ride
But it didn’t set a new world record for the largest wave ever ridden. And the elusive quest to ride a 100-foot wave is still on.
Despite the hype since Slebir’s epic ride Dec. 23 — with preliminary estimates putting it as tall as 108 feet — his wave officially was measured by the World Surf League at 76 feet.
It not only fell short of the yet-to-be-reached 100-foot “Holy Grail” of surfing, it also was 10 feet shy of the existing world record set in 2020 by a German surfer at Nazare, Portugal at 86 feet.
The news came during the Big Wave Challenge awards ceremony Saturday night in Newport Beach that drew surfers from around the globe.
“What they came up with kind of shocked the crowd,” Bay Area surfing photographer Frank Quirarte, who was in the ocean taking photographs and video that day, said Sunday after attending the Saturday ceremony.
Even so, the 76-foot wave earned Slebir the “Men’s Biggest Wave Winner” of the 2024-2025 season. Quirarte’s photo of Slebir’s ride earned him the “Biggest Wave Photo” of the night.
Slebir’s ride during one of the biggest swells ever recorded in the Pacific Ocean drew national attention. The same storm two days before Christmas destroyed the Santa Cruz Wharf. But Slebir, 24, who works in construction during the off-season, had downplayed the anticipated feat from the start.
“If it happens, it happens, and if not,” Slebir said before the announcement, “I got to ride the tallest wave of my life and I’ll never forget it.”
Although the crest of a wave is usually simple to gauge, determining the trough is trickier, surf experts have said. It’s possible that initial estimates of the 108-foot height, which stacked images of Slebir crouching on his surfboard up the face of the wave, may have started at a lower point than what the World Surf League measured. Photos of six angles of Slebir’s ride were used to assess the height of the wave, said Bill Sharp of the Big Wave Challenge.
Despite Quirarte’s disappointment that Slebir’s wave fell short of the record, he said, people surf for the love of the sport, not the accolades.
“Last night will be long forgotten and the big wave season will start up again in about another month,” Quirarte said. “We’ll do it all over again.”
