At an awards ceremony Saturday night, 24-year-old Santa Cruz surfer Alessandro “Alo” Slebir will finally find out if he set a new world record while riding the towering wave at Mavericks last winter — and whether he captured the Holy Grail of surfdom: a 100-foot wave.
The record to break is an 86-foot wave ridden by a German surfer at Nazare, Portugal, in 2020. Early, unofficial estimates put Slebir’s at 108 feet.
Making big wave history would be “awesome,” Slebir said. “If not, I got to ride the tallest wave of my life and I’ll never forget it.”
That swell at Mavericks, a half mile off the coast of Half Moon Bay, hit two days before Christmas, on the same day and amid the same storm that destroyed the Santa Cruz Wharf.
The waves were so big they created their own wind and blew out the