Surfer Tom Dosland experienced the power and devastation of Mother Nature firsthand Wednesday, when he tried to ride a massive wave at Jaws in Maui, Hawaii, but ended up free-falling into the ocean instead.
“Once I started to drop in and could open both my eyes, I instantly realized that this wasn’t going to end well for me,” Dosland told SurferMag.com’s Jeff Mull. “So I sort of hit the eject button hoping to make the best of it and penetrate. I was free-falling for a while. It felt like I jumped off a cliff. That’s when my leash stretched out all the way and flipped me over head-first.
“From there, I hit the face and it was just a brutal beating, like I was in a car crash. It was so intense that I basically froze and forgot to pull my vest. Toward the end of it, I realized I hadn’t pulled the cord, so I finally did and popped to the top of the water. But yeah, it was rough, man.”
That was terrifying to watch. We can only imagine what it was like to live through it.
Luckily, Dosland escaped with just a stiff neck and a broken surfboard. And in an amazing show of dedication, he was right back in the water the following day.
According to Dosland’s Instragram account, he never felt more alive than when he was plummeting from the top of the wave and into the ocean.
