The Biggest Waves in the World, Explained
Sleep came fitfully to Rodrigo Koxa during the night of November 7, 2017. The seasoned, 38-year-old big-wave surfer from a tiny island near São Paulo, Brazil, was in the bungalow he had rented for the fall and winter at Nazaré, a fishing village on the central Portuguese coast. In the dark outside, titanic waves were crashing onshore, shaking the ground. “I was telling myself, ‘You gotta go straight down on your wave,’” he recalls, haunted by a bad memory.