Wanted: surfers to conquer previously impossible waves. Essential: weather app, surfboard, 4×4 and unshakeable ability to stare death in the face.

Along a 15km stretch of the Kamehameha Highway, on the North Shore of Oahu in Hawaii, you can find and understand the history of big-wave surfing. If you tell a Hawaiian you’re going to this place, they’ll say, “So you like big waves, right?” Here is where you’ll find the big-wave surf break called Waimea, and about 80km south-west, on the island of Maui, there is the Pe’ahi break, known as Jaws, which in the last 20 years has become a place where surfers can ride waves 60ft high.

Surfers like Carlos Burle, from Brazil, and Grant ‘Twiggy’ Baker, from South Africa, visit the Hawaiian Islands every December and January, ready to tackle the giant breaks. Burle, 46, is the former big-wave world record holder. In 2001, he rode a 68-footer on the surf break known as Mavericks, off the North Californian coast. His record was broken in 2008, then in 2012, the American Garrett McNamara set the current high watermark: a 78ft wave surfed at a recently discovered break at Praia do Norte, in Portugal. (In February this year, English surfer Andrew Cotton surfed a huge wave in the Portuguese break; at the time of writing, officials were deciding if Cotton would be the new world-record holder.)

Burle, McNamara and Cotton surfed these monster walls of water using tow-in, a surfing technique first seen in 1992 in which a jet-ski – usually ridden by a fellow big-waver; McNamara was towing Cotton in February – pulls the surfer into the ocean so he can more easily catch fast-moving waves. Tow surfing changed the big-wave scene. “It’s the only option when the waves are too big to paddle,” says Burle. “Plus, the crowds want to see carnage, big drops, big wipeouts, ultimate rescues.”

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