Why Jay? In memory of Moriarity
Bruce Jenkins, Special to SF Gate
Wednesday, December 5, 2001

Author’s note: The following tribute to Jay Moriarity kicks off The Surf Column for the 2001-02 season (a shorter version will appear in an upcoming issue of The Surfer’s Journal). Fittingly, with the Quiksilver contest beginning its waiting period at Maverick’s, the Jay Moriarity Award has been established for all future winners.

There weren’t many smiles when the big day came.I remember Jay Moriarity’s best of all. On a day of wounded egos, shattered nerves and pure frustration, it was a 19-year-old kid who symbolized the true spirit of surfing — then and forever.

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Courtesy of Shellen.com

I woke up Sunday morning to some really bad news. Jay Moriarity had died. My heart sunk. I was about to spend the day in Santa Cruz, his hometown and I couldn’t stop thinking of him all day. Before I left Santa Cruz tonight I stopped by one of the many quickly put together memorials to Jay along the ocean and wondered how he could already be gone. Jay is one of my heroes. It sounds strange to say it. After all Jay is five years younger than I am but if you had ever seen the man surf you would understand.
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Surfer remembered at Pleasure Point paddle-out

Surfers and well-wishers gathered Tuesday to pay their last respects for surfer Jay Moriarity. Sentinel photo by Dan Coyro

By DAN WHITE
Sentinel staff writer
SANTA CRUZ — Pleasure Point is a noisy place, full of barking dogs and old vans with bad mufflers.

Surfers, skateboarders, bicyclists and walkers crowd the place every summer day. At 9 a.m. Tuesday, the point was as packed as ever, but the street was quiet, as if the whole block was attending church.

That’s because the crowd was made up of 2,000 mourners, including 500 surfers in the water. All had turned out to honor pro surfer Jay Moriarity, who died June 15 while free diving alone in the Maldives, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean. It was the day before his 23rd birthday.

Moriarity was a waterman, specializing in big-wave surfing. But he was also a favorite son of the Santa Cruz surfing community because of his lack of big-time surfer attitude. He was friends with pros and beginners, and avoided territorial spats.

Friends said he was an antidote to the bad vibes that come between some long- and shortboarders.

“If you surfed with him, you knew him,” said Paradise surf shop owner Kristina Marquez.

When he was featured in surfing magazines, Moriarity often asked for all the copies at Paradise so he could give them to relatives. But he never wanted freebies, insisting he pay full price, Marquez said.

Moriarity was supposed to arrive in Europe June 17 to take part in an O’Neill Inc.-sponsored surf academy for kids in England, Belgium and Italy.

Instead, his ashes were scattered off Pleasure Point.

In the water, surfers formed an enormous circle with two smaller ones inside. From shore, the formation looked like a giant ship’s shadow.

Jay’s widow, Kim, led a procession of close friends and family, most wearing wetsuits and leis, up East Cliff Drive, which was lined five deep with people from 30th to 36th Avenue. She stopped near her home, held her husband’s longboard, looked up at the sky and closed her eyes.

Kim was one of the last to walk down the wooden stairway and paddle out. She scattered a portion of Jay’s ashes in the water, just a block from their home.

She didn’t scatter them all.

Kim held some in reserve to scatter at Maverick’s, the break near Half Moon Bay where Jay had his infamous wipeout on a 40-foot wave. He escaped without injury and paddled back out to surf some more. A photograph of the free fall landed him on the cover of Surfer magazine.

Terry Caretto, one of Jay’s uncles, watched the human circle from shore. He’d taken a Greyhound from Eugene, Ore., and said he hadn’t seen his nephew in years.

“My good crying’s already pretty much out,” he said as he wandered through Pleasure Point.

Ted Ackley, a member of Moriarity’s free-diving club, spoke of how dangerous free-diving — deep diving without scuba gear — can be in clear water, in places like the Maldives, “when it gets deceptive how deep you’ve gone down there, when the water is alluring. You just want to stay down there forever.”

Anticipating a big crowd, sheriff’s deputies blocked off the point, turning East Cliff Drive into a walking mall.

Mourners crowded the middle of the street if they couldn’t find a spot on the cliffs. They stopped to look at the birds of paradise, roses, sunflowers and notes attached to a white fence that serves as a shrine to Moriarity.

Some stood under tiki torches and swapped Jay stories.

Neighbor Christine Helm remembered a time in 1996 “when my son said, ‘Mom, I surfed Sewer Peak.’ I said, ‘Oh my God, that must have been 15-feet waves.’ My son said, ‘Yeah, and I snapped my board. But I was with Jay.’”

Helm was so relieved her son was with Jay, she didn’t mind much that her son had snapped a $500 surfboard the very first time he took it out.

Her son, now 18, was not among the mourners. “He had such a deep loss that he couldn’t even come here today.”

Helm has planted a garden in Jay’s memory, including two blue flowers that remind her of his eyes.

In the circle, Kim poured Jay’s ashes, and the surfers let out a yell. Later, they raised their arms to the sky.

Just after the yell, four brown pelicans flew above the circle.

They passed over the crowd and headed along the cliffs toward Santa Cruz.

Contact Dan White at dwhite@santa-cruz.com.

The Prince of Maverick’s
Jay Moriarity, one of the greats of big-wave surfing, is killed in the Maldives
Courtesy of Outside Magazine

It’s UNFORTUNATE that the 1995 surf-magazine cover shot by which many will remember Jay Moriarity—wiping out from atop a 20-footer at Maverick’s, the legendary break 50 miles north of his hometown of Santa Cruz, California—will serve as a visual epitaph for one of the world’s most adept big-wave riders. Moriarity, a gregarious waterman who helped pioneer the high-stakes sport of using jet-ski tow-ins to catch immense West Coast faces, perished while diving on June 15 in the Maldives.

Moriarity had traveled to the Maldives to train and participate in a photo shoot with wetsuit maker O’Neill, one of his sponsors. He had been breath-hold diving along a tethered dive line off the Lohifushi Island resort. After noticing he was missing, colleagues organized a search party, and they discovered his body that evening, 50 feet down on the ocean floor. According to O’Neill sponsorship manager Bernhard Ritzer, divers found the 22-year-old in a sitting position, still holding the line.

Back in Santa Cruz, friends knew Moriarity as an easygoing presence in the high-stakes world of big-wave surfing. “It was never about telling people he got the biggest wave,” recalled tow-in partner Jeff Clark. “It was always about pure enjoyment. Jay was a surfer with no ego. Whether he was helping somebody who had never been on a surfboard or was surfing with the best in the world, he never had a bad word to say. He was one in a billion.”

June 17, 2001

Kim Moriarity, widow of surfer Jay Moriarity, leaves a tribute at an impromptu memorial in the Pleasure Point area Saturday. Sentinel photo by Janine Collins
Grief, shock follow famed young surfer’s death

By DAN BOLLWINKEL
SENTINEL CORRESPONDENT
SANTA CRUZ — Confusion and grief hung over Pleasure Point on Saturday, a day after the news of local surfer Jay Moriarity’s death reached the Santa Cruz area.

Throughout the day, friends and other mourners stood dumbfounded along the seaside bluffs. A memorial was erected at the corner of 36th Avenue and East Cliff Drive, several doors down from where Moriarity and his wife, Kim, lived. Hundreds of well-wishers left flowers and wrote their goodbyes on the white railing over the cliff. Flowers and a note were left atop the stairs at Steamer Lane, the fabled Westside surf break.

Moriarity’s family and friends were planning a bonfire to celebrate his 23rd birthday, which would have been Saturday.

Details of Moriarity’s free-diving accident off the Maldives Islands Friday were scarce Saturday. No more was known besides the initial report from O’Neill Inc., the local company that sponsored Moriarity and the Deep Blue Open surfing contest last week in the Maldives, a small group of islands in the Indian Ocean.

Free diving involves descending to extreme depths without air tanks or other diving equipment. It is a common practice among big-wave riders as an exercise to increase the chance of survival in the event they are pinned under water by a succession of large waves.

Moriarity was no stranger to ocean survival, a fact that added to the shock his family, friends and fans felt. He was one of a handful of surfers in the world known as a “waterman,” someone who tackles dangerous wave conditions and swims great distances in either competitive or rescue situations.

Moriarity once paddled from Santa Cruz to Monterey on a longboard with several friends and fellow watermen.

His surfing career began in Santa Cruz as a youngster competing in National Scholastic Surfing Association events as well as local club contests. His prowess on a surfboard attracted the attention of his eventual sponsors, and his professional career began at age 12. But hanging ten on a longboard soon took a back seat to big-wave riding.

His search for the world’s biggest waves began at 13, when he asked his mentor and fellow waterman Frosty Hesson to train him to ride the monster surf at Maverick’s, an offshore break near Half Moon Bay where waves can reach 30 feet and higher.

Hesson took the young Moriarity under his wing, and at the age of 16, Moriarity paddled out to the break alongside Hesson for the first time.

That day, Dec. 19, 1994, would put Moriarity on the big-wave map. On his first wave he free fell nearly 40 feet down the face of a wave in one of the worst and most widely photographed wipeouts in the history of the sport. The image was featured on the cover of Surfer magazine in May 1995.

Moriarity got back on the board and, in the next six years, would rise to the top ranks of global big-wave riding, appearing in Surfer and Longboard magazines with consistent bar-raising rides.

Despite global surfing success, Moriarity remained a Pleasure Point resident, never leaving the neighborhood where he grew up.

Hesson, who lives two doors down from the Moriaritys with his wife Zeuf and their children Lake and Roque, learned of his death on Saturday morning.

“He touched people’s lives,” said a visibly devastated Hesson. “Inwardly and outwardly he was a person who loved life, and he touched so many people. I know some hard-core guys, and he touched them all. They really respected him. He was a son to me.”

Moriarity’s father-in-law, Russ Ward-Williams, was out at the Point to comfort his daughter. He recalled Moriarity’s affection for her.

“I met him years ago when my daughter took him to the prom,” said Ward-Williams. “I remember when they went to Lake Tahoe to elope, they tried to find the same chapel my wife and I went to. They missed it by a block but the result was the same. Those two are soul mates. I can’t believe he’s gone. It just doesn’t seem fair.”

Mark Nelson, father of local pro surfer CJ Nelson, watched Moriarity grow up alongside his son.

“What makes this so hard is that Jay was part of everybody’s family, we all raised him,” says Nelson. “CJ and Jay have been friends since they were little kids.

“He stayed here, he didn’t take off like so many others. This was his home. He’s had so many adventures and so many laughs with all the kids in this town.

“Jay never turned his back on anybody, you could always count on him. You just can’t say enough good things about him. He was a great waterman and an even better person.”

Local surfing legend and board shaper Bob Pearson had a special relationship with Moriarity. Pearson was Moriarity’s first and only board shaper, as well as a lifelong friend.

“I can talk about Jay for hours and hours,” said Pearson. “But words will never do him justice. Humanity, let alone the surfing world, has suffered a tremendous loss.

“Guaranteed, he was one of the best surfers in the world. He loved the water, and he was a great waterman. I’ve known the best watermen in the world and he was equal to all of them. Whatever happened down there, it was a freak accident that could have happened to anybody because he was an accomplished diver.

“I don’t care who you were, Jay wanted to be your friend. If you hung with him, you became a better person. I dropped him off after an international contest that we went to not long ago in Southern California, and I thanked him and told him how lucky I felt to be his friend.

“Jay would want us to put a smile on our faces and be happy now. He would want us to take care of his wife and each other. Jay Moriarity is deep in our hearts and in our minds and it feels good.”

An anonymous message in bold black letters amid the tributes and farewells on the rail at 36th Avenue reads simply: “Jay would go.”

June 15, 2001: The Surfing World Mournes the Loss of Jay Moriarity
By Christy Davis

Why is it that God always takes the finest? Jay was not only one of the best big wave surfers at Mavericks, he was one of the nicest guys around. His surfing was a class act, poised, confident, artistic in his approach. His judgement had become fine tuned, his timing near perfect. Out of the water he was uplifting to be around. Always positive, I never heard him say anything negative about anyone. He was an important player in modern surfing history.
I considered Jay to be my friend. I’ll always miss that big smile and friendly demeanor he spread to everyone the minute he pulled up in the parking lot. I’ll miss his positive vibration in the lineup. I can’t even imagine how much his wife and family will miss him.

Jay, we’ll miss you terribly around here, old buddy. You were and always will be special.

Go with God.

Christy

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