Nightsurfing at Jaws

After a career spent chasing enormous surf, freediving, and generally getting into ridiculously heavy aquatic situations, Mark Visser is the kind of guy who could surf Jaws with his eyes closed. Which is handy, when you’re surfing in pitch dark…





At 2am local Hawaii time this morning, professional big wave surfer Mark Visser made history by achieving a night ride on waves measuring 30-40 foot faces off the shores of Maui with specially engineered LED lights built into a buoyancy vest and modified into the surfboard. The lighting technologies were created especially for the project by Solus Corporation using ground breaking NASA submarine lighting to ensure the wave and board were lit in the right places, at the right time and illuminated the wave without hindering the vision of Visser, the jet ski drivers and the helicopter pilots.



No one has attempted to ride and capture big waves at Jaws, Maui before in total darkness quite like this. With the help of his team overhead in a helicopter, Visser was towed in by jet-ski as he entered the infamous big wave break just prior to the peak of the swell, completely illuminated.



“It wasn’t until I saw the pictures I realized how big it was. This project has been two years in the planning and it was the scariest, but most exciting thing I have ever done,” says Visser. “Riding in complete darkness meant I had to go off feeling. I had to zone out from

how you normally ride and just be part of the wave. I am so pumped to achieve something that no one thought possible and that I was told was couldn’t be done.”



Coined “The Night Rider,” this feat is set to be the first of a series for Visser. These “world first” extreme adventures will form a documentary collective called “9 Lives” that will be distributed internationally in late 2011, early 2012.





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