Night Rider
Wednesday 26 January 2011 In a dwindling geographic space, new barriers are broken using technology, Out here at Jaws, on the perimeter, it is dark, very dark, but not with a chopper packing hallucinogen lights, fat flashlights, LED digital technology and hyper trained jetski teams. Mark Visser cracks a new frontier. What, Captain Haddock?
{youtube}XdkcsaYj1_A{/youtube}
PRESS RELEASE
Maui On the morning of 20th January 2011 at 2:00am local Hawaii time, 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.
A true world first - 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.”