“I had an amazing dream the night before.”
That’s Rodrigo Koxa’s explanation for how he claimed the new world record for biggest wave ever surfed, an 80-foot-tall, disaster-movie-level swell in Nazaré, Portugal.
Do yourself a favor and take a deep breath before you watch the video above.
The death-defying ride, which the Brazilian surfer logged back in November 2017, was officially recognized as the new benchmark on Saturday at the World Surf League’s 2018 Big Wave Awards. It beat out the previous record — held by Garrett McNamara, also at Nazaré — by two feet.
As for the role nighttime visions play into this, Surfline caught the explanation in Koxa’s acceptance speech:
“[In the dream] I was talking to myself, ‘You gotta go straight down. You gotta go straight down.’ I didn’t really know what it meant. But I figured somebody was talking to me. When I got my wave, I let go of the rope, I started to use my rail to angle towards the shoulder, but then realized, if I used my rail, I’d never get deep. And then I remembered: ‘go straight down.’ When I said it, I remembered my dream. I turned and I almost fell, but then I got my feet again and went super fast. I’ve never had a big wave like that where I didn’t use the rail at all. Just went straight down.”
Anyone who says dreams are meaningless has never been pulled by a jet ski into an eight-story wall of water, apparently.
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