Garrett McNamara

Garrett McNamara, known as GMAC, is an American professional big wave surfer, born on August 10, 1967 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He grew up partly in Berkeley and, from 1978, on the North Shore of Oahu, where he began surfing at eleven and entered the Triple Crown of Surfing at seventeen. He was an early adopter of tow surfing in the early 2000s, winning the Tow Surfing World Cup at Jaws on Maui in 2002 with Rodrigo Resende, and in 2003 he rode a Jaws barrel that onlookers thought had crushed him. In 2007 he and Keali'i Mamala surfed waves formed by calving glaciers in Alaska, and he once held the record for the largest wave ever surfed, shown in the HBO series 100 Foot Wave.