Big wave surf champion Mark Visser has provided an amazing insight on what it feels like to ride the biggest waves in the world.
Visser, a professional surfer from the Sunshine Coast, has won several big wave events that are genuinely unimaginable for someone who doesn’t have that ambition to be face to face with a 50+ft waves.
Driven to chase the world’s biggest waves, Visser admits he is genuinely fearful when he’s preparing to drop in on a monster wave, but instead of letting that fear get the better of him, Visser uses it as a driving force.
“It’s probably one of those sayings, only a surfer knows the feeling,” he said on SEN Breakfast.
“It’s something that I’ve always aspired to do, to do it at the level where you’re literally at the point of putting your life on the line but you’re wanting to just prove to yourself saying ‘is it possible and can I do it’, that’s probably the driving force.
“I use fear to my advantage, I’ve done a lot of training in this space, to the point where the techniques that I’ve developed over time have been useful for top level military groups, sporting organisations and other professional athletes.
“You absolutely have fear and you’re experiencing that at a higher level, but it’s learning how to go through that process and still function one step at a time versus it consuming you and taking you out of position that you're trying to focus in.”
Visser’s relationship with fear has a scary back story. The former Victorian fell into a sheep trough at the age of two and was saved from drowning by his brother.
When his family moved to the Sunshine Coast, his inherent fear of water meant that he didn’t even attempt surfing until his teenager years.
“I was brought up in Country Victoria at a town called Wangaratta and I fell into a sheeps trough and nearly lost my life,” he said.
“I grew up really afraid of the water, but subconsciously I guess I wasn’t really aware of that being the driving factor but when I competed on the small waves tour, I always had better results when the waves were bigger.
“There was that inner voice that I could be confident with bigger waves, and I think those insecurities were driving me to prove that point.”
Known as the 'Night Rider' for tackling 30-40ft waves at Jaws after dark, Visser leans on that event as a two-year-old as a way of proving to himself that he isn’t afraid.
“It stems back to what we were talking about before, at the time I probably wasn’t really aware of it as I was so determined to prove to myself without a shadow of doubt that I’d ridden all the big wave places in the world, but I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t afraid, that I could do something that would blow my own mind,” he explained.
“That was a goal that I set and I wanted to just prove that I wasn’t that little kid that was afraid anymore, to me, that particular project at jaws is up there with Nazare as one of the biggest waves in the world.
“I thought by doing something like that would prove to myself that I could let that go and actually accept myself.
“I remember pulling up on the jet ski at night and looking out to this break and you could see the stars and I’m thinking ‘I can’t tell how big it is’ obviously because it’s dark and then the stars disappeared when the wave stood up and came towards us.
“I’ll never forget that feeling of my heart pounding so hard where I’m pretty sure my eyeballs were pulsing with it.”
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Image thanks to: https://magicseaweed.com/news/mark-visser-jumped-off-the-back-of-a-ski-just-to-get-pounded-at-jaws/11147/