Full Circle: A Strike Mission, Twelve Years in the Making

 

Some photographs happen in a fraction of a second. This one took twelve years.

The horizon went black. I had one foot in the strap with the board sunk underneath me, one hand on the rope, the other holding the board under the water so I could balance on it. The jet ski was off. Lance was in front of me on the ski, hyper-focused on the horizon, waiting. I was controlling my breath. Long inhales, slow exhales. Eyes locked where Lance was looking, ready to be up the second the ski turned on. I wasn't afraid. This was my dream. But the consequences were real and I wasn't about to fuck it up. He had told me, ten minutes earlier, the same sentence he had told the other guys. “You cannot fall.”

A set was coming. The boat was holding its position in the channel, three hundred yards away. Cole and Ben and Chase and James and Shane were watching from the rail. I could not see their faces but I could feel the silence of seven people inside the same held breath. The horizon stacked. A whole train of swell, lined up and marching in, the lead waves already hitting the slab of reef and bolting straight up the apex. I tightened my grip on the rope.

Then I saw the one. Bigger than the rest. Darker. Lance saw it too. The ski fired up. The rope snapped tight in both hands and pulled me up out of the water and onto foil, straight at a mountain already apexing over the reef.

I will come back to that moment in a few minutes.

To understand what I was doing holding the rope behind the ski, you have to understand the two men who put me there.

Lance Moss first set foot in Nicaragua in 1999, the day after his twenty-first birthday. He arrived from Costa Rica in an overheating Mercedes taxi that needed water in the radiator every twenty minutes. He stayed. For the last twenty-five years he and his wife Kristin have built a life on this coast. Along the way they built Foil X, the foil charter outfit that brought our Gulf Coast crew down here for the first time in 2024.

Lance won't take credit for pioneering any of the waves we ride. He'll tell you waves are funny things, that a lot of them are hiding in plain sight, that he just spent enough hours on the water to notice them. But you sit on the beach with him at sunrise and you understand something else. He is one of those rare people who has chosen, deliberately and over decades, to build his life around the ocean. He pioneered this wave. Anyone who has been here long enough knows it. He just won't be the one to tell you.

James Jenkins is the other half of the operation. Pro foiler, ski driver, the guy who studies the wave before anyone else gets in the water. He's the one who will hop on a wave first to make sure something is rideable before he asks anyone else to put their body into it. He has a phrase for what he and Lance do down here.

"We call us the Stoke Brokers. There is a feeling of stoke that you get from getting someone else a wave that is equal if not more to getting one yourself. After getting a couple good waves for yourself, it's like, I'm good, man. I'd rather get on the ski and do what I love and get someone else that wave. Seeing Jonah's face light up after he just got like eight freaking bombs in a row gets me as fired up, if not more fired up, than a couple waves I got myself. That's the ethos that Lance and Kristin have created down here, and all of us that have stood on their shoulders have just absorbed it."

If you have ever wondered what it feels like to be on the receiving end of two grown men who have decided their job in this life is to put other people on the best waves they will ever ride, you should come to Nicaragua.

Our crew is Ben Bricken, Chase Sasser, and me. Three Gulf Coast guys, three years deep into showing up here every year, learning a different ocean from the people who learned it first. The Gulf of Mexico is a flat, waveless lake for long stretches of time, with only rare hurricanes and winter storms creating waves of significant size. We spent years finding what most people miss. We explored nearly every stretch of coast, every pass, every shoal at home, and we found world-class foiling hiding in a sea most people had written off. In the first year I owned my jet ski, I put over two hundred hours on it. Coming to Nicaragua with Lance and James isn't about learning to foil. It's about learning what foiling looks like when the ocean cooperates and people like Lance have been studying it for a quarter century. Lance has a way of talking about it that I have not been able to shake. "I think as Gulf Coasters, when we go out into the world of waves, we probably got a chip on our shoulder a little bit. You want to prove that you're good. At a certain age in life you just want to prove yourself. In our grandfather's era, if you wanted to prove yourself, you had to go to battle. We're fortunate enough to live in a time where we get to do this instead." A lot of what happened in May comes back to that idea.

There is a wave at an outer reef in southern Nicaragua that has lived in my head since I was twenty years old.

 

I had grown up in Atlanta, landlocked, taking photographs since I was a kid and surfing for a handful of summers in the Gulf. In summer of 2014, I went to Nicaragua alone for two months. I slept in a hammock. I volunteered at a kids' club hostel up north for the first month, then I came down to the southern coast for the next one. I didn't know a soul. I was the first one in the water in the morning and the last one out at night. If I wasn't surfing I was shooting, eating, or sleeping. There were no other categories.

 

There was a wave at an outer reef that I kept watching from the beach on the bigger days. In early July 2014,  the largest swell of the season began filling in. That morning, I worked up the courage to paddle out into the channel with a surfboard and a small underwater camera in my mouth. I sat in the channel a long way from the peak and watched men I had never met get towed into barrels the size of trucks. I was far from the apex and I was still petrified. I duck-dove a few sets with the camera leash between my teeth. I stayed out there for over an hour alone, shivering in the channel like a dog with its tail between its legs, shooting whatever I could line up between sets. Eventually I paddled in. Until that morning, big wave surfing and tow surfing had only ever existed for me on a screen. Documentaries. The surf-camp screening room in sixth grade. Now I had seen it in person, photographed it, and more than anything, felt the energy of the water moving under me from a hundred yards away. The ocean reorganizing itself around a shallow reef. That was the part the documentaries couldn't give you.

 

I went home to Georgia and put the photographs on a hard drive and didn't touch them for almost a decade. Then, in early 2024, I sat down at the beginning of the year and wrote six goals on a piece of paper. One of them was: I want to get towed into a 25-foot wave. I made a vision board. For the image, I went back into the old hard drive and pulled out a photograph I had taken in Nicaragua eleven years before. A stranger, towed into a wave at an outer reef. I had been looking at that image since I was twenty. I pinned it to the board. It would stay there for two more years.

 

That same summer, Ben and Chase and I flew down to Nicaragua for the first time together, on the first Foil X charter our crew had ever done. I had crossed paths with Lance and James once before, in the Gulf, the year I started foiling. We had ended up towing the same wave on the same day. Friendly, not friends. Nicaragua is where that changed, on a boat at sunrise with no service, pumping waves, and a lot of jokes. We surfed the right side of that outer reef. We towed Hurricane Helene together later that year in the Gulf. I never thought to show Lance the old photograph I shot from 2014.

A year went by. In 2025 we came back to Nicaragua for the second Foil X charter. One night at Rancho Santana, I was sitting with Kristin at the bar before dinner, scrolling through old work, and the photograph from 2014 came up on my phone. She stopped me.

Holy shit. That's Lance.

I had been looking at that image for over a decade.

The wave in the photograph is the left at the outer reef. The right is the one our crew had been riding for two seasons. The left is something else entirely. Professional surfers have surfed it and walked away with a different kind of respect for it. The reef is shallow, and sucks dry at low tide. The remoteness is real. Lance, who has more time on it than anyone alive, says it plainly.

"It's a very heavy wave. A lot of world-class surfers have surfed it and had a ton of respect for it. Very shallow. Good possibility of hitting the bottom. And then just the remoteness. We're in a third world country. When the shit hits the fan and you've got to take somebody and get them put back together, it's nice knowing that you have help. That's something we just take for granted in the US."

I had been staring at that photograph for over a decade before Kristin put a name to the rider. We showed Lance the photo that same night. He learned, twelve years after the fact, that the wave he had ridden in 2014 had grown into a vision board in a gallery in Florida. I had been carrying him on my wall for three years without knowing. Now he knew too.

In mid-May 2026 we flew down to Nicaragua for our third year of the Foil X charter. The swell was small. We scored a few overhead waves and a lot of laughter and the trip was good but not legendary like the years prior. Lance had been watching the long-range forecast and floated a quiet idea about a strike mission a couple of weeks later. I planted the seed and forgot about it. By the time I was back home in Florida, my head was already buried in the gallery, the inventory, the shipping, the missed messages, and the daily operations of a working artist running his own space. The wave on my vision board went back to being just a picture on the wall.

Then on a Friday morning the texts started landing from Lance and James. Strike mission is on.

Twelve hours before the flight. Ben had been home from our May trip for five days. He's married. He has a daughter. He said yes anyway.

"It is 1 PM on a Friday. I just had lunch at work and all of a sudden I'm brought into this thread of trying to literally be on the next flight out to Nicaragua in the morning. I've got to clear that at work. I've got to talk to my wife, who I had just gotten back five days ago from Nicaragua."

I had to clear my own version of the same hurdle. By that evening, four flights were booked. A cinematographer named Shane Reynolds, who I had worked with before, dropped what he was doing and was on a plane by the next morning with twelve hours notice. At 12pm the next day we were back on a runway in Central America, watching the sun over the same coast we had said goodbye to less than a week before.

Which is how I ended up, on day one, holding onto a tow rope attached to the back of Lance's ski, watching the horizon go black.

The morning had begun at a different outer reef. The waves were beautiful but slow, thirty minutes between sets, the period stretched too long for what we needed. Lance and James called it. We pulled the skis and boat around to the wave that had been on my vision board for the last three years.

When we got there, the left was absolutely firing. Ben said what most of us were thinking.

"We get to the outer reef and it's doing its thing, but it's also kind of scary, sketchy looking. We've always gone on the right. The left has always just had that danger sketch factor. I mean, it's a proper double black diamond. James wants to give it a go and we're all for it. Let's see James show us how it's done."

James suited up alone and went first. Lance towed him into a few waves. He faded deeper on each one, made it look easier than it had any right to be, kicked out clean. Everyone on the boat was hooting. He's a pro. He made it look like a wave he had ridden a thousand times. Later, on the boat, he told us what it was actually like. The foil was redlining the whole way down the line. You couldn't really turn. You couldn't really set up. You just pointed and held on.

When James came in, there was just silence for a while. I had been waiting for this moment for three years, not knowing if I’d ever get the chance at the left. Finally, after a few minutes, I spoke up and asked Lance if I could get one. Lance has a way of considering questions like that. He looks at the wave, looks at you, lets the silence answer half of it before he says anything. Later, he described what he was thinking in his own words. "[Jonah] was very excited, and after you spend enough time foiling and towing people in, you have this level of confidence in their ability to ride. After seeing James do it, I was confident he would be able to execute. There was definitely a little bit of fear, but there was a huge weight on my shoulders of picking the waves, because one in ten or fifteen waves were good. Any of the other ones, if I made a mistake and whipped someone into the wrong wave, it would end really, really badly." 

He said yes. Then he told me to put on his impact fullsuit. James had just been wearing it. It was wet. I took my impact vest off, I pulled the fullsuit on, swam over to the ski, and grabbed the rope. The foil under my feet was a Lift 72 LCX, built for bigger waves like this one, that I had been carrying with me since a trip to Hawaii the year before. Lance towed me out to the peak and cut the ski. We sat.

The horizon went black.

Then it was on. The ski fired up. The rope went tight in both hands and the foil pulled me up and forward. I was moving fast. We were towing at the wave, not away from it. Coming in from the right shoulder, closing the gap, watching the wave load up into a perfect A-frame in front of me. A wall of water getting bigger every second.

I remember backdooring it, the peak rising up in front of me, the wave hitting the slab of reef and stacking as an apex. I let go of the rope. I locked in. I set my line. You can't see the barrel behind you. You can't see how big the wave is. You just trust the position you have been given and partially chosen. I went down the line aiming at the boat in the channel, seeing the whole crew there, knowing what was about to happen for me because they all already knew.

When I kicked out, the body let go before the mind did. I had a release of goosebumps that started in my neck and went out through my hands. I had just lived something I had been carrying for twelve years, and pinning to a wall for the last three. And the very first thing my body said back was: do it again.

Lance came back over on the ski. I put my hands together in front of my face.

Thank you, Lance. Thank you so much.

After me, Ben got on the rope. He had told me before the trip he had no interest in surfing the left. Too consequential. Then he watched James, saw me jump in the water, and something shifted. "I had always told Jonah I have no interest in the left. Just too sketch. Then when I saw James do it and Jonah hop in the water, I realized you only get these chances maybe once in a lifetime. I would always look back and be bummed on myself for not giving it a go and just that lingering what if. So I had to send it. Sending it was one of the best decisions I've made in a long time." Lance whipped him into a bomb on the wider end of the reef. Ben rode the first section, which is its own slab, then somehow kept going into the second. The second section is where the wave stops getting bigger and starts getting thicker. A Mullaghmore kind of lip. "I'm at the second section, which is the gnarly hollow barrel section that's basically a slab and there's dry reef just off to the right and I'm like, oh my gosh, I should not be here right now. That section totally throws a barrel and I had a split second moment of, do I lock in and try to get a legit foil barrel? And the answer was no. I ejected and basically penciled dove into the wave and thankfully through the bottom and out the back of the wave. My board, I was like, rest in peace, it's gone."

The board and foil were not gone. It came up on the inside, washed in, banged up on the reef, salvageable. Ben came up too, on the sled behind the ski, telling everyone he loved them. “One of the best moments of my life”, he kept saying. He has a wife and a daughter at home. He meant it anyway. I promised not to tell his wife.

Chase went after Ben. He flew planes in the Air Force in a previous life, and now flies paramotors in his off hours. He has spent a career operating with full clarity in moments where most of us would short-circuit. The rope was just another version of that. Lance gave him one wave. Then a second. Then a third, because the third wasn't framed quite right. Then, somehow, a fourth and a fifth. I was on the boat with a camera in my hands, and I was about to lose it. Among the six of us, there was a rule we never wrote down: one wave each until the swell decides otherwise. Chase was running over the rule. Chase came up from each one wider-eyed than the last. 

"To hear that drum beat of the wave coming closer and closer to me, just bop bop bom bom, and then knowing I could hear people screaming from the boat and from the jet ski, and knowing I'm going to do this, I'm making it, I'm making it. Just having that one incredible moment last and everybody got to share it with me was one of the best parts."

By the time we pulled the plug, a surfer had paddled out, and by the unspoken rule of the lineup we yielded the wave. We stowed the gear and went back to camp. The swell was supposed to peak the next morning.

Day two we launched the skis in the dark. Lance gave us a real briefing on the beach before we left.

"I told these guys in the morning, there's a zero sum game. You cannot fall. If you fall, I can't get you. It's like those videos of people train surfing. You mess up, you're dead. And maybe it wasn't that gnarly, but that consequence was completely there."

The wave looked different than it had on day one. The peak was harder to read. We watched for thirty minutes before anyone moved. Then it was on. The first hour belonged to me. Ben said it later as plainly as anyone says anything. "Day two was going to be Jonah's day. Jonah also flew in a videographer, so we all kind of made way for Jonah. We were all working for Jonah."

The crew had made that decision somewhere between days. It wasn't only generosity. There were practical reasons too. The wave on my vision board had pulled the whole trip into existence. The cinematographer was on the boat to document it. The documentary I was making, ‘Gulf of Dreams’, was what had convinced Lance the strike mission was worth doing in the first place. Day two had a shared assignment, and we worked it. Wave after wave I pushed the line a little deeper. After a while, my cup was full. I could have gone all day, but I called it. We were a team, and I got my long turn. 

Then, I picked up the camera.

James drove me on the second ski, named Tami. I stood on the back of the ski with a long lens. Cole, a member of the Foil X crew, was up next. Cole is James's friend from college, a guy James taught to surf years ago, who had never foiled this wave before and had only watched it from the boat. Lance towed him into a bomb and James lined the ski up right in front of the peak. I fired the shutter relentlessly. I was living through the viewfinder. Zoomed in tight, watching a giant wave unfold inside an inch rectangle of glass. The lip stacking right behind Cole's head as it threw. Somewhere in the middle of the burst, before I could even look at the back of the camera, I knew. This was the best photograph of someone riding a wave I would ever take.

After Cole’s wave, as I was on the back of the ski, James was the proudest guy I have ever seen. “I taught him to surf. He had never surfed until I met him in college. Now he's foiling this wave.” My full circle wasn't the only one happening that day.

Ben got on the rope after Cole. He ended up hitting a boil that threw him off the axis, resulting in Ben’s second wipeout. The foil went over the falls into shallow water and I was watching through the viewfinder thinking the board and foil were one hundred percent gone. Chase went after Ben and fell too. Both came up. Both boards survived. Two falls on a wave none of us were supposed to fall on, and somehow the ocean gave them back.

After those two close calls, Lance decided to end it at the left for that session. We then sampled a left-hand point none of us had ever been to. A right at an A-frame reef we had also never ridden. A bunch of spots that until that morning had only been names on a map. Then we came back to the outer reef in the afternoon. The offshore wind had stiffened. The wave was looking as sketchy as anyone had seen it. We had already been on the water for 8 hours at this point. Most of the crew was done. I wasn't. So again, after a few minutes of silence, I asked Lance if I could go again. 

He said yes.

I got another handful of waves. I pushed the line deeper than I had all trip. By the time I came in, my cup was full in a way that I almost never get to say. I grew up landlocked. I have spent most of my life waiting for waves that almost never come. To use that phrase, my cup is full, and mean it, is something that rarely happens.

The wave on my vision board has been there for three years. I will keep that image up because it reminds me what is possible. But what I will remember twelve years from now is not the drop or the barrel or the photograph.

Lance, after he had put someone on the wave of their life, driving the ski back with one hand on the throttle and one hand up in the air. James's face after Cole's wave, the proudest guy I had ever seen. Ben coming up on the sled telling everyone that his first wave at the left was the best moment of his life. Shane on the back of the boat, exhausted, getting the shots. All of us on the porch of the beach house at the end of the day, looking through the photos and the footage together, in disbelief that we were watching ourselves ride those waves. 

When I asked Ben back at the beach house why he does trips like this, he answered without hesitation.

"I'm married with a daughter, and I keep saying yes to this because I want to be the best husband and father to my daughter I can be. Me having experiences like this, the beauty of these waves, it makes me a better person, more fully alive, that I can then give more life to them. There's a quote that goes, the tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he still lives. Trips like this are the antidote to that."

And Lance, when Shane asked him later what twenty-five years of choosing this coast has given him in return:

"It goes back to that whole surf trip thing. You go on a surf trip with your friends and you have that epic session and everybody's so stoked out. We've been lucky enough to carve out a humble living down here where we get to hang out with really awesome humans, spend really quality time with them, and put a huge smile on their face. At the end of the day, when you get to come hang out at this porch with people, watch the epic sunset, everyone is sunburnt and so happy. It feels like you're doing something good for the world."

That is the actual thing.

To get a wave like this takes a team. Two skis, a boat, a captain who is also the pioneer of the wave, a Stoke Broker, a cinematographer who flew in with twelve hours notice, Ben's wife at home keeping the rest of his life running, Kristin at Foil X holding the whole operation together. None of it gets made alone. None of it is worth making alone.

Twelve years ago I sat in a channel with a camera in my mouth and watched a stranger get towed into a wave I would one day ride.

The stranger wasn't a stranger.

He was the friend I had not met yet.

 

"Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
— Rainer Maria Rilke