Sometime in the next 10 days, Matt Formston will stand on the fortified headland at Nazare in Portugal, next to the iconic red lighthouse, and hear the roar of what is widely regarded as the largest wave on the planet.
“It’s big at the moment,” the 44-year-old says. “Very big. Day in day out, it’s about 30-to-80 foot. I’m unlikely to be going out in surf over 50 foot. But I’m going with an open mind. Everything’s on the table.”
Almost every surfer who has stood on that headland has looked at the monstrous swell and made a life-changing decision: should I tame this watery beast that spits and froths from its top lip as it grows bigger, and bigger, and bigger, making a surfboard look as tiny as a toothpick – or stay right here, on the headland, alive and well?
Formston, who is blind, doesn’t have that luxury.
“A surfer turns up at a headland and says, ‘Nah, that’s not for me. I can’t do that’,” he says. “I’m relying on my team to say we’re good to go because I can’t tell how big the wave is until I get to the bottom of it.”
Formston and his team flew out of Sydney on Friday in search of his final frontier. For the past year, he’s been chasing big waves in Indonesia, Fiji, Hawaii and the US west coast for a documentary, The Blind Sea, that will air early next year.
Matt Formston is a triple world surfing champion.Credit:Danielle Smith
If he can stick a wave at Nazare, it will be the “pinnacle” of a sporting career that’s seen him win three world titles in surfing and one in para-cycling.
But this is different. Nazare isn’t something you win, it’s something you conquer. “People say, ‘That’s not possible; a blind person surfing a wave that big’. I want to show the world that it is,” Formston says.
Germany’s Sebastian Steudtner holds the Guinness World Record for the biggest wave surfed at Nazare: an 86-foot monster in 2020. There have been reports of surfers riding 100-foot waves but they haven’t been verified.
Records aside, it can be a lethal experience. “In Nazare, the ocean is known as a place of death, not of riding waves,” American surfer Garrett McNamara, who set the world record in 2012 after catching a 78-foot wave, has said.
Formston heads down the front of a wave more than twice his size.Credit:Danielle Smith
Formston grew up in Narrabeen, lived at Wamberal and then moved to Lennox Head two years ago with his family: wife Rebecca and children Max, 8, Elsie, 6, and Jake, 4. None of them want him to surf Nazare.
“Max said, ‘Dad you can’t, you’ll die’,” he recalls. “So after this, I’m done. I don’t want to do anything that could risk my children not having a father.”
Which prompts the question: why are you doing it at all? “Because I don’t think I’ll die.”
Formston has displayed that unflinching confidence since he was five years old when macular dystrophy, a congenital disorder, robbed him of his sight within a year. He has peripheral vision in three per cent of his right eye and one per cent in his left.
American surfer Garrett McNamara rides a wave at Nazare.Credit:AP
“I’m blind,” he says. “Visual impairment is such a vague statement. People think, ‘Oh, he just needs glasses’. It says ‘blind’ on my pension card.”
If he can’t see what he’s riding, how does it feel surfing a wave without any vision?
“Most surfers, when it’s pumping, stay out after dark,” Formston explains. “It’s like that. There’s a feeling of ‘lift’. I’ve recently surfed with [former world champions] Layne Beachley and Joel Parkinson and gave them goggles that simulate my vision. They talk about this ‘lift’. It’s like flying basically.”
Big-wave surfing is another proposition, but Formston has never baulked at a challenge. He reckons he’s surfed every big swell that’s hit the NSW east coast in the past six years.
“Walking through a carpark for me has more risks than surfing,” he says. “Can’t see gutters, can’t see tow-balls, can’t see poles. I’m forever rolling my ankle and smashing my shins into things. Getting hit in the balls by railings at shopping centres. On a wave, if I make a mistake I fall into water. It’s freedom. Absolute freedom.”
One of the few attributes of Nazare in the surfer’s favour is the lack of reef or rock below, just deep water. When filming in Indonesia, Formston needed the surfers in his support team to tell him which waves to catch.
“I can’t see the reef, or the rocks, coming out of the face,” he said, “They told me more once, ‘You can’t fall today. If you fall, it’s going to end badly’.”
He’s confident that won’t happen in Nazare, despite the risks and his family’s concern.
Firmly in his corner is Dylan Longbottom, a big-wave legend in his own right. It was Longbottom who raised the idea of surfing the legendary wave and one of the key people who will decide if Formston takes the water.
Two years ago, Formston attempted to surf a 30-foot wave at Boulder Beach at Lennox Head. The conditions were so big he was the only one out.
“I didn’t make it,” he says. “I got rolled. I was underwater for a good while. There were 30 or so people on the headland and nobody could spot me. But there was no flotation in my wetsuit that day. In Nazare, I’ll be wearing my Billabong inflation suit, which has CO2 canisters in it that can bring you to the surface. That changes the game significantly.”
Formston isn’t the first blind surfer to take on Nazare. Brazilian Derek Rabelo has caught a reported 50-foot wave there before.
For Formston, Nazare isn’t a competition: “I feel a responsibility in some way. A lot of people have a disability and go, ‘No, too hard’, whereas I’ve proven a lot of times if you have a crack, you’ll find a way. Apart from the fact my eyes don’t work, the rest of me is ready for it.”
For more information on The Blind Sea go to: www.theblindsea.com.au.
