Surfers Ross Clarke-Jones and Andrew Cotton ride biggest of big waves at Nazaré, Portugal

In the famous 1966 surf movie The Endless Summer, Mike Hynson and Robert August follow the sun from hemisphere to hemisphere to catch warm-water waves. Big-wave surfers generally take a different tact, tracking winter storms that produce the world’s biggest swells — with none bigger than the one found at Nazaré, Portugal.

Nazaré is one of the best places in the world for big-wave surfing and it attracts Australia’s best, like Ross Clarke-Jones and Andrew Cotton.

Powered by the underwater Nazaré Canyon, the waves can grow to heights in excess of 100 feet (30 meters). Too big to paddle into, surfers rely on a jet-skiing partner to pull them into the wave and extract them from the ocean after a wipe out.

The previous Guinness World Record for the Largest Wave Surfed — the 78-foot monster ridden by Garrett McNamara (USA) on November 1, 2011 (shown in the above video) — was surpassed in May of 2018 by Rodrigo Koxa when he rode a 80-foot wave at Nazaré.