I called Natxo up, immediately. And while I was unable to glean any insights as to where this fabulous fickle freak of a wave might spin, the story felt eerily similar to one Mick Fanning had told me just a year earlier. Wildly complicated travel efforts, about 72-hours from most developed nations, requiring a positively massive swell, breaking once, twice a year at most, etc. But they are definitely different waves. Although the fact that the two biggest virgin scores of the last decade resemble one another so closely seems unfathomable.

"I went looking for similar waves from Morocco through Western Sahara before, which I think is where Kepa found that famous wave, the one everyone thought was Mick Fanning's," Natxo says. "I don’t know if that wave’s Fanning’s wave, but The Snake I think is more perfect than mine, but slower. The wave we found is faster, heavier. The first day we arrived it wasn’t happening. Swell was small, it was kind of closing out, and I was honestly really sad.

But we got a couple beers that night, and we were talking, and I said, 'Man, the worse part of this trip is going to be that it's a closeout. We've had worse trips.'

The next day, when we got there it was still small, but we saw the lineup. We saw these crazy roll-ins. And during the day it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Turns out, I was really lucky. It was a massive swell. Actually, I was asking the fisherman and the local people, and they told me they hadn’t seen it like that in five years. But they are fishermen, they are not surfers. They didn’t know what a surfboard was. It was so crazy.

Fanning’s wave is more perfect; it's slower. My wave is faster, heavier. It's one of the heaviest waves I've ever surfed. Really fast, really long. It's 8km long. Twice as long as Namibia. It’s crazy. You can’t see the beginning of the wave or the end. We were counting the seconds, as a wave started at the top of the point, and it was a minute and a half to get to us, and then however long after it passed us. We couldn't see the end.