Bittersweet Infamy - #129 - A Shipwreck Away from Abalonia

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

Josie tells Taylor about the 1966 near-founding of the micronation of Abalonia on a sunken island 100 miles off the California coast, and how the would-be country's future was washed away with the tides. Plus: enter the mystical and dangerous world of catch fétiche, a.k.a. Congolese voodoo wrestling.

Welcome to Bittersweetin. I'm Taylor Basso. And I'm Joe C. Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on on and infamy the strange and the familiar the tragic and the comic the bitter and the sweet welcome to another bright beautiful episode of bittersweet infamy Josie how you doing I am doing bright I am doing beautiful I am I am coming to you not live but at this moment in the present time I am live I'm coming to you from San Diego I'm in San Diego Okay, good. Go pause. Go pause. She landed the plane. She landed the plane and she landed it at, where did the Padres play? What stadium to the Padres play at? Petco Park, where the pets go. She landed it right in the middle of Petco Park and all the little dogs came up and lapped at her ankles as she got off the plane. It was delightful. Highly recommend that approach to San Diego. It's great. It's a nice vacation spot, having attended a wedding there in the past two years or so. I found myself very relaxed, even with all the hustle.

and bustle of things and events and activities going on around me. It's a nice backdrop for any kind of relaxation at all. We got to get you back down here. We got to do a go-pods tour. I would get off the plane and they would shoot me in the head. I've unfortunately said mean things about Donald Trump on the internet. Let's go to Tijuana. Yeah, maybe Tijuana. Let's meet T.J. I've never, I've only ever said nice things about shine bomb so far. So I'm, I'm in the clear there. Yeah. That would actually be pretty fun. I could come and like do a little family San Diego time and then just head south of the border and we

can do like a little bittersweet south of the border God knows we've tried a few times now. Fun fact, y'all behind the scenes there's been a lot of attempts to do content in Mexico, the two of us

that have not panned out. That we have gone to Mexico together. We did go to Mexico City. Predated the podcast. Mitchell had a good vacation, so did B-Man, B-Man, a grandma's house. and now they're back in Houston, which is further afield from the area of Texas that experienced those really bad July 4th floods. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I saw that there were like over 100 people had passed away in this. Yeah, and there are even more than that who are still missing. Oh, God, that's awful. I know. And this was central Texas kind of hill country. So smack in the middle of the state. Whereas Houston is sort of southern coastal? Yes, yeah.

Okay. So we're in the path of hurricanes and flooding caused by coastal flooding and by hurricane flooding. But this specifically was flash flood, Guadalupe River flooding that is just really rough. In this area of Texas, too, there's a lot of summer camps and it's a very big summer hangout, especially in the heat of Texas, you want to be along the cool, green Guadalupe River. but not the morning of July 4th. Oh, what a shame. That seems like it would be such a nice morning to do that most of the time.

Yeah, I know. It's really, it's wild to see something like that happen so close to where you're from, but you're not there. You know, you understand, like, where that is and what it looks like and the people who might be there. You know, you have, like, access to the details, but you are looking at it through the same media lens that everybody else is. and it's a strange, strange occurrence.

An all-girls camp that just got knocked so hard, so, so sad. And are your friends, family communities all well? Yes, yes. I have an aunt and uncle who have like a vacation spot along the Guadalupe River, and they were there, but they did evacuate. My understanding has been that Trump didn't even come down to chuck paper towels. Is that correct? He's on his way now.

I think he's arriving. As we speak, he's in. in the air? Or he has landed. Yeah, yeah. He's, the plan is that he arrives a week after the disaster. The municipal and the state level response and of course federal is gross, but state level, I mean, you know how I feel about Greg Abbott. Yeah, oh yeah, episode number 27, I want to say dethroned. It's the Vanessa Williams' Miss America episode is the main story, the mainfamous, but the minfamous is Josie. I'm just railing on Greg Abbott.

Really saying some impolite things about a man in a wheelchair. That's me. Shame on you. Greg Abbott was at a press conference and said, you know, it's just a loser mentality to think about or to ask, you know, who's responsible for this? Who's at fault? And it's like, that's not, no, that's taking responsibility. That's not a loser mentality.

It's just the rhetoric and all of it. Politicians who take responsibility for bad things are very unpopular. That's very true, yeah. Good things, now we're talking about it. I love taking credit for good things. Bad things never matter. No. Never even seen her before.

No, uh-uh. It's just so sad because there was federal funding in Kerr County available for a warning system, but they did not implement it because the federal money was during the Biden administration, and they didn't agree with Biden administration. policies. And so they said, no. I believe they did take the money, but they weren't going to use it for what it was suggested for, which was a flood warning system. So they didn't build a flood warning system out of spite. Yeah. Well, welcome to American politics. Fireworks, fireworks, fireworks. Yeah, it's rough. Gosh, what a shame. And I saw too also, there were a lot of, and this is an odd one,

AI-generated images of prominent country music stars coming down and helping. So you would see like an AI image of Carrie Underwood and Jelly Roll and Chase Rice. You know what I mean? Whoa. In like FEMA gear. Oh my goodness. In like a boat in a river in a street. Dude, we live in the weirdest timeline.

I can't. I can't. That is rough. That is rough. It's a real trip. It's a real trip. Well, glad you're okay. Yeah, thank you.

I appreciate that. And thank you for anybody who's been asking and reaching out. It's weird, too. I feel like in a lot of ways, this podcast has been a document of a lot of things politically, you know, in terms of our own personal lives, in terms of our own personal developments. Josie, you've gotten engaged and married on the podcast kind of thing. Not literally on the podcast, although that would have been cool. I did it for the podcast, though. Yeah, she did this a bit for the show.

It's all about the gamic. The other thing that this podcast has sort of been an unwitting, unwilling document of is like climate disaster in our respective towns and states and provinces. Yeah. Certainly a lot of like, I've discussed a lot of wildfire, I think, mainly. We got a little earthquake in there too, but mainly like wildfire type stuff. Yeah. This sort of becomes important because the village of Lytton in one of our early shows had just

burned. It recorded the hottest temperatures in BC history and then it burned to the ground. Oh, yes. Just recently, another, like, right around the four-year anniversary of that fire, another huge wildfire near Lytton, the remains of. And this time it was set off by a spark from an RCMP cruiser. So, like, a cop car made a spark. And now they're struggling to contain this, like, 18 hectare forest fire. Oh. Oh, oh, oh, oh my goodness. Don't I hear that. don't want to hear it because we've got a road trip coming up too. This is true. We are headed into the BC Wilds. The interior. See, and this is where it does distinguish from our BC road trip last time. Two years ago, Josie and I did a series of episodes called Bittersweet 604. Half of them

were taped in Vancouver. Half of them were taped in a place called Jordan River on Vancouver Islands, took a little road trip out to the island. We taped one episode in the back of a Volkswagen VW bug, the other one we taped like out in the forest with the beautiful trees swaying above. The episode's 76 to 79, I believe. Go and check them out. Some of my favorite stuff we've ever done truly. It's pretty cute. You wore a squid hat. I did wear a squid hat. I've still got that squid hat. I know. I've seen it recently. You had it at our last recording. We're not here to talk about the squid hat, Josie. We're here to talk about. We're here to talk about our new and latest and upcoming special series of episodes

where we're going to be meeting up in person in BC again and we're going to be going around BC again and we're going to be telling BC infamous stories again. BCI. Tell them, tell them. I'm telling you. I'm telling you we're doing the big Skookum BC road trip. We're making a big circle.

Fuck, yeah. A big-ass circle. Is it a circle? Is it an oval? Is it kind of shaped like Austria? Who can say? But we're fucking doing it. It's going to be Taylor and myself, friends of the podcast, Rui and Lucia. Yep. Both folks you might remember from previous episodes, Rui popped in as like a background guest in episode number 119 in the Garden of the Emperor earlier this season. So, like, clocking in a multiple vacation episodes this season, basically a real-house wife. Yeah. Where my audiences remember Lucia from? Lucia was a guest storyteller, a guest host, on our episode number... You try it.

Oh, I don't know. Take a shot. Episode number 112. Episode number 68, the cult of the clitoris. I knew it was cult of the clitoris. You were only about, like, 57 episodes. off. Not good with numbers. We know that. But Luke, she's a fantastic poet and a fantastic storyteller. It's a really great episode. You should go. Take a peek at it.

Lucia appeared in one of our last BC road trip episodes. Yes. Sort of popped up in some of the ambient audio that Josie recorded in episode number 77, the right side of the tracks. So it's going to be a really fun time. We are going to be road tripping and stopping at weird little spots and using dirty bathrooms. and being like, these sunglasses are ridiculous. I'm buying them. I don't care. I'm on vacation.

Where did I put my sunglasses? I think I left my sunglasses in Lillooette at the gas station. We're going to dip into some hat springs. We're going to be staying almost entirely exclusively if everything goes to plan at BC provincial parks and Canadian national parks, which are affordable and lovely resources that anyone and everyone should access. And then I'm so excited to share with some friends. Yeah. It's going to be really fun. I'm really excited. We're going to have a great time. We're going to take a few recordings on the road. We're going to tell some BC-inspired stories. We're in a, you know, road trip 2025, big Skookum BC road trip. I'm so stoked.

So look forward this August to at least three, let's say. Who knows? Maybe we'll generate 20 episodes worth of content. But for now, we'll say at least three episodes of BC-based stories. And in fact, starting next episode, you're going to be. going to be hearing from us at the 604 Podcast Network Studios in Vancouver. We're going to be recording the main stories. At least me and Josie are going to be recording our main stories in studio. So that's going to be a lot of fun. We'll meet Alex, our editor for the first time. Hey, Alex. That's what we'll say in person. We'll say, hey, Alex. And we hope you all enjoy it. We really do care a lot about and put a lot of love into our BC Canada-based content. I'm from here originally, Josie spent a good chunk of her life here and a good chunk of our friendship here. We both kind of love the space to death and we get a lot of good feedback on

our BC stuff because I think that love comes through and I hope that it does again and I hope that we have a lot of fun on this trip. BC is for best friends. BC is for best Crens. That's what it stands for. We have some other goodies this summer. Film Club is still in the works. We have been so busy with trying to get everything together for the Big Skookum B.C. Road trip that the film club episode, Battle of the Sexes, is coming. It is coming in July. It is coming this month. We're edging you, really. Yeah. Let us know how it's going. That film club episode will be ready for you shortly. And how do they get access to that film club episode, Josie? Taylor, I'm going to tell you right now, you head over, you open your Google, you type in coffee.com. slash bittersweet infamy, and that's K-O-F-I.com slash bittersweet infamy. They spell it funny.

That's true. You get in there. You become a monthly subscriber, and then you get access to the Bittersweet Film Club, along with some other goodies. There's some other stuff there. And I know it's not in the normal, downloadable lineup of your iTunes or your Spotify or whatever it is. But, you know, if you're bored at work, you need something to distract you.

It's the little boutique shop around the corner. We have to put up our little sign that says, there's more good things around the corner, you know. Get off the main drag, take a little step onto Fourth Ave. I have told you multiple times we need a bubble machine. I think that it'll really bring the people in. I have mostly been hoping for live polka. That's the cops because I didn't get permit for my live polka band. I was hoping the umpah would really bring folks in, but it's, I'm willing to know.

I'm open to bubbles. We're open to use our subscriber over at coffee.com slash bittersweet infamy, become a member of the film club. And you can suggest film picks for us. For example, when we pick back up in August at the suggestion of our mysterious subscriber, Wobble, who's actually a friend of the podcast, Rui, who's coming on the trip with us. Wobbles in BC. We're going to be doing Waterworld in August.

That'll be fun. The Kevin Costner hit. Nice. Yes. Yes. I watched it with my mom. I tried to watch it with my mom. We all fell asleep at different points in the evening.

Taylor, do you have an infamous to tell me? I do have a small, infamous story to tell you, although for a mini infamous story, it takes place in a very large metropolitan area. Oh. Welcome to Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For its relatively low profile in the world stage, the DRC located in Central Africa, is actually the second largest country in Africa by area, and the 11th largest in the entire world. You know, when you see those boys with the sleeper build and they got their pump cover on to go to the gym,

and then once they flexed a bit, they take it off. That's Democratic Republic of the Congo, very big under that baggy t-shirt. Okay. That took me on a journey, that visual, but I get it, yeah. Kinshasa itself is one of the world's fastest growing megacities by population, with a total of 17.8 million inhabitants. Whoa. In a city of that size, we naturally come across a wide cast of diverse and colorful characters.

And in that spirit, let me introduce you to a woman named Shakira. Shakira, Shakira. Do you mean Shakira? Of Shakita, Shakita? Now, before you even say it, you might want to hold off on that. Hips, don't lie, joke,

because this Shakira is a different Shakira. Okay. I was ready. I was ready for that. Why you didn't know? Yeah, I wrote a response to your being ready for it into the script. It's kind of, there's only one real way to go with that one, but okay. Tusha. This Shakira is known as La Raine Shakira, aka Queen Shakira in English.

And I should say this is a city of more French speakers than Paris, France. Whoa. This is a predominantly French speaking culture. I am learning all types of things already. This is great. I don't go into the particular history of the DRC's colonization too very much in this story, but you see its impacts all over the culture within this story. Everyone's speaking French.

Also, for example, because La Rine Shakira, Queen Shakira, is a queen of dark magic. Love it. Now, an overwhelming number of Congolese folks are Christian to the tune of 95% of the population. Okay. All right. However, traces of magic, as they will, still linger in the air from a pre-colonial era. Meda, Christianity, have you, like, been to a church? Like, come on.

Eating the body of Christ? Drinking the blood of Christ? Like, there's just a lot of, you know. And there's also the mix that we've talked about a lot. The time that it jumps out to me as we discussed it during the Krampus and his kin Christmas episode, back in episode 33. but that sort of mingling of whatever the indigenous and or pagan and or tribal and or whatever it is, spirituality, customs, beliefs, rituals are of any given region, it's not like they vanish entirely. Many of them with great effort are snuffed out and extinguished, but the traces linger on

because like we remain connected to what came before and we remain connected to these own compelling and interesting icons and ideas and spiritualities and so on, right? Totally. These are things with their own pull and draw too. However, because the vast majority of the Congolese are Christian, there's a lot of stigma and fear and misunderstanding around magic of any kind, witchcraft, voodoo, dark arts, etc. Gotcha. And I'm sorry to say, but there is much to fear from Queen Shakira, especially.

Especially if you happen to be one of her persecutors, she deals with her foes swiftly and violently. Don't get on her bad side, sounds like. Don't get on her bad side. She has her supernatural tools like hexes and enchantments, you know, those kind of classic magic tools of the trade. Typical toolbox stuff. There you go. But she also has tools of a more everyday variety like knives made out of, you know, metal and very sharp. These are weapons she uses in combination with each other

when she has to physically defend herself from an attacker, which is very regularly. You can see videos on YouTube of some of her encounters with her enemies, basically. And in one, a man is coming at her when she seemingly makes him freeze with her mind or some sort of incantation. Okay, freeze tag, if you will. While the man is frozen, she takes her blade and stabs him in the stomach. She reaches into his tummy

and starts pulling out his entrails feasting on the gore in a sort of cannibalistic frenzy. Okay. Maybe some... Okay. What do you... We all need to...

Yeah. Do you need that liver, right? That liver and onions. Hungry. Hungry and healthy, you know? The gathered audience of Kinshasa locals screams as Queen Shakira, seemingly in a trance,

staggers toward them. And, of course, to reach this crowd of shrieking kids and enthralled adults, she must step through the ropes of the wrestling ring that has been set up in this urban town square. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Okay. You were edging long enough?

Yeah. Josie, welcome back, yet again, to the flamboyant world of professional wrestling and welcome to the world of catch fetish, also known as witch wrestling or Congolese voodoo wrestling. Sweet, baby Jay. Oh, I love it. We're back in the ring.

Taylor, you're bringing me back in the ring. Back in the ring. Yet again, quick explanation of professional wrestling in cases your first time listening to the podcast and get one of the wrestling stories. I realized I do them once a season at least, so this is my season five entry. I'm going to keep the streak alive.

Ooh, okay, okay. Professional wrestling is a term for a performance art that is effectively a mixture of live stunt work, soap opera storytelling and what else would you put in there simulated athletic event yeah dance ballet an intensely physical ballet

ballet ballet of the people yeah these larger than life characters acting out these very intense feuds with one another that are taking place in a guise that is called k-fabe this is an important term to understand

when we're talking about pro wrestling because pro wrestling is a pre-scripted series of performances where the events of the match are more or less predetermined depending on the particular performers. Some like to improvise more than others. Others like to script to the nth. But in any event, we know already who's going to win. It's more about the spectacle of what we can put on for the audience, right?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And within this world, there are, these very vivid soap opera style storylines where sometimes it says banalas you have a title that I want and sometimes it's as extreme as like you know the undertaker kidnaps Vince McMahon's daughter and tries to sacrifice her to a satanic god on an altar and stone cold Steve Austin needs to come out and save her before the crucifixion takes place yeah beautiful beautiful stuff and everything in between and beyond right and it's sort of one of those media where you're encouraged toward melodrama. You're encouraged toward pantomime in the kind of British performance sense where you're

playing things to the audience for cheers if you're a good guy or a baby face, booze if you're a healer, a bad guy. What I just described is sort of wrestling in a nutshell. And K-Fabe is basically the fake reality of wrestling. So in real life, these two performers are friends. In K-Fabe, they hate each other because you're trying to sacrifice my daughter on your blood altar. Yeah, it's method acting. K-fab. Yes. And so the reason that I say this is that K-Fabes. Fabe is evidently very much alive and well in the Congo. In American U.S. kind of North American context, we broadly know by now, by 2025, that this isn't a real competition, that these are performers, and especially the most outlandish parts of it, aren't really happening, that they're

happening through special effects, stunt work, certainly any supernatural thing that we see in like WWE or something, because they do have supernatural characters, isn't really a supernatural event. Unless you're quite young. When you're a little kid, you might think, okay, Kane can shoot fireballs. Sure, that makes sense. Right. And the Tooth Fairy and, you know, Santee Claus, yeah, yeah. Yeah, in fact, it was The Rock as the Tooth Fairy, right?

So there's your proof right there, both real. Bam. Sh bam. In the Congo broadly, wrestling is real. Okay. It is predetermined performance. She didn't really stab that guy and cut out his entrails. But we as an audience see that and perceive it and believe.

it perhaps to be real, both because we do have this like respect for slash fear for slash disdain of magic and voodoo, which we take to be real and frightening in a Christian, quite like a conservative Christian context. Yeah. And also wrestling is real because wrestling's fucking awesome. Yeah. I mean, it's real as much as like somebody in there is tumbling and yelling and has a character, you know, like.

My understanding as not a wrestling fan from the Congo is that the average wrestling fan in the Congo buys into it as a real depiction rather than a performance. Okay, okay. But I don't know, to what, probably less in the internet, I don't know, but that was the vibe that I got. Now, I must give the Democratic Republic of the Congo a piece of very high praise. Professional wrestling is apparently huge here. It's on TV seven days a week and very widely consumed. You know how there will sometimes be like a big screen out in public or something that you might put an advertisement on or it's just a public TV for everyone to kind of watch?

Very often you'll see like a Randy Orton versus Roman Raines WWE match on there or something. Love to see it. Friday night put on Smackdown, you know what I mean? Yeah. Friday night lights are the lights over the over the ring. Gotcha. And much of this will be like import from America as opposed to like locally made product. but there seems to be something really special and kind of cool how these Congolese indie wrestling events, independent wrestling events of the type that I told you earlier where Queen Shakira's gutting a guy in the town square go on.

So presumably you start when your promoter sets up the event. As with any independent wrestling scene, there's a lot of regular performers who come up being trained by other people at wrestling schools. This is a place, Kinshasa, where the average person is. surviving on less than a dollar US a day. Pretty limited resources for people in general broadly. So you can see a lot of folks just really setting up like ad hoc gyms to do this. Nice.

I'm a former catch fatich wrestler. I've got the only place in town that has like a rowing machine and a bench press. Yeah. And mirrors you can see yourself when you're, you know. Yeah. Oh, I love it. Love it. So you got lots of people who come and train.

often you'll see like kids training there and there are schools where kids little kids can kind of train for free to keep them out of trouble adorable that's so sweet yeah very cute the performances themselves will typically happen at an outdoor kind of just like some patch of land that's big enough to set up the ring within the city proper or the town proper usually this is when we talk about kinshasa being big you kind of like a big sprawling situation where there are different little like enclaves and excerpts, and it's just a spill of houses out at a certain point, too. Yeah. And what they do that I really like that seems to be quite local to this way of presenting

product is the wrestlers kind of make their way to the rings. You know how in WWE, there's probably, you know, two minutes of entrance where like Aska comes to the ring and she takes off her mask and she plays to the crowd and then she just waits for the next person to come down the ramp to kind of come out and face her. Yeah. Yeah. Or drop from the ceiling on a harness. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Exactly. You got to make an entrance. First, first impression, you know? The way they do it in Congolese wrestling is the performer just kind of starts making their way through the streets of the town. I love that. And as they do, whoever is like kind of

interested in coming to see this fight just kind of like gloms on to them and becomes part of their like entourage slash party as they like walk through the streets together. Make shift parade. For you, I wrote an American reference, Forrest Gump style crowd. For me, I wrote a Canadian reference. I said Terry Fox style crowd. Yes. Okay.

I gave you both options so no one would have to pay tariffs, right? Thank you. Yes. Just select the one that is, yeah, tax free. And they just kind of pick up excitement and energy and enthusiasm and music and chanting and whatever. until they meet at the place that they fight. Gosh.

In the DRC, professional wrestling broadly is called catch. This word catch comes from an English term for wrestling, which is catch as can wrestling, like English as in UK English. Okay. And basically the idea is like catch wrestling, if you're talking about in like a British wrestling context, is like really hold intensive wrestling

where you're like kind of like moving from hold to hold from headlock, oh, I flip over you and flip over you and do, do, do, do I got you in a hold now. Oh, you got me in a hole. Catch me if you can. That's why it's called catch. Yeah. Okay. And the person that I saw credited most often with bringing catch to the Congo and developing its distinctive style, including witchcraft in the mid-20th century. I think this might be like a kind of 70s play. Is a guy named Edinguay. He was highly influenced by the work of American wrestling slash union busting legend, Hulk Hogan, most recently seen on WWB television getting booed out of the building while hawking non-woke beer at the premiere of Raw on Netflix. Wow. Adding to the canon.

There you go. The beer canon. There are two types of catch in the DRC in general. There's catch technique or technical wrestling, which is your regular, degular American-style pro wrestling with holds and suplexes and whatnot. Okay. And catch fetish. This is what I want.

This is what I'm interested in. Yes. Voodoo wrestling, which incorporates magic spells, in-ring rituals, etc. this could mean anything from mind control to simulated murder to non-simulated live chickens being set on fire sorry mom i'm imagining like exorcism kind of vibes to possession maybe yeah lots of possessions i saw that this one lady turned her opponent into a goat i love the way that you know we talk about like k fabe yeah and how the suspension of belief or like a twist of reality or, you know, however you want to come to it and get your mind square with

it. But this way of seeing the world and seeing the way people interact and the way that that extends to an understanding of magic and how it's really quite similar, that if you're like, okay, this is K-Fabe in the ring and there's Hulk Hogan with two woke beer and he's the heel and whatever, that is analogous to voodoo wrestling to this idea of like, oh my gosh, there's, you know, somebody removing my entrails from my guts. I just, that's great. That's lovely. Like all art, the wrestling expresses and is a conduit for the conflicts that are already

occurring in our society and the anxieties that are already on our minds. We talked about the fighting Cholidas back in episode number 106, one of my favorite episodes, an omnibus episode where Josie did birthday stories for my birthday. Very cute. In that episode, I'm infamous on the fighting chilitas who are these indigenous women with these big cool skirts and these bowler hats who fight in Bolivia, in Alato Bolivia. And much in that way, and much like Hulk Hogan coming out with the non-woke beer, and much like this sort of tension that seemingly exists around magic in a Congolese context where we dread and are frightened of and persecute it to some degree, but also are fascinated enough by it to attend these wrestling

shows in large quantity. Wrestling as a performance art, this is one of the things that I really love about it. It's one of the things that, like, if you ever get the chance to watch the vice series The Wrestlers, they have a Cholita's episode. Yeah, I remember you mentioning it in that episode, yeah. They have a catch-fatish episode that was a big source that I used for this one. And it really is sort of interested in that same thing that I'm interested in when I bring you these wrestling from around the world's stories is like, how does this thing that we take that's kind of silly on the face of it? These people coming out in like spandex tights and glittery masks and none of them can climb a ladder fast enough to get the title belt. They always seem to get like a shin cramp halfway up the ladder. And if you throw them into the ropes, they just bounce back and forth forever until you do a move to them, right?

It seems like it should be silly. And yet I've had some of the best times of my life at wrestling shows. I've connected with my brother more through wrestling. I've connected with you more through wrestling. Yeah. And I'm endlessly fascinated by how it is globally popular in Japan, in Mexico, in the Congo, in Bolivia. And yet they all have just this, like, in some ways, subtly quite different versions. And then in other ways, in American wrestling, you don't typically see someone get like gored and their intestines eat, nor see them get turned into a goat.

Shame. Because magic exists and has currency and is in everyday reality in a Congolese context, it allows us to portray it in this kind of larger-than-life way in a pro-wrestling context. It's really, really cool. Every country has a different, a different flavor potato chip. Yeah. It's like that. Your country has Zorps.

Mine has like Ghibos, but they're both just like cheese dust on a corn snack. But one of them you might buy from like a convenience mart after the, bullet train closes at 12 a.m. And the other you might buy, you know, from a bodega, you know, while you hear like, you know, this particular cumbia beat playing in the background, because that's where that happens. Like, they have different meanings, right? Yeah. Yeah. All the different contexts create different meaning, even though it's a very similar initial element. So perhaps responsive to what you were just saying there where you're like, yeah, yeah, catch technique, whatever. Give me the catch fatigue.

Catch Fatish, for as stigmatized as magic is, is much more popular locally, I gather, than Catch Technique, which is the more like straight down the line American style, let me put you in a chin lock thing. Yeah. Not only because it's more entertaining and outrageous and tinged with local culture, but also because the K-Fave must hold. Put yourself into the mind of a person who believes that this is real. If you ask that fan, do you prefer Catch Fatish or Catch Technique?

they will just very matter-of-factually say like, oh, catch-fatish, if you just do catch technique, you can't win because the other person has magic. Yeah, exactly. Seems like you're kind of leaving a win on the table if you don't use magic. You do catch fatish. They can do more stuff. The moves are better. So when and how does magic or fetish, which is called in this context, and it's also

called, so in the context of catch-fatish, it's often referred to as fatish, you also hear it called ba-coco a lot. So ba-coco seems to be, and this is my limited white boy from Canada. understanding who has introduced to this concept via this story. My understanding of Bacoco is it's sort of like the entirety of one's magical practice. You're Bacoco. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. The collective magic that you do. I like that, yeah. So Bacoco comes into the world of catch with a conversation that Edingway, who's this very popular wrestler who brought Catch to the Congo, he's having a conversation with Mobutu

Sese Seco, better known as President Mobutu, who was for 26 years from 1971 to 1997, the, I guess, corrupt dictator of what was then called Zaire. When we talk about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, if you're like a 90s kid, you heard fucking Yako singing about Zaire, this was called Zaire under President Mobutu. Okay. When Mobutu came in, part of his big thing was that he sort of wanted to deal. decolonize, go back to the old ways, go back to the spirituality of the land. That seems kind of cool in and of itself.

It eventually becomes what has been described as a kleptocracy, and he gets forced out of office after a 1997 civil war, dies of cancer and exiles shortly thereafter. But Mobutu, who is quite popular in his day, I'm sure, says to Edinguay, you need to incorporate like our culture more into this, like our ritual, our magic. This is cool, but it's like, it's you doing your best Hulk. Yeah, yeah. Let's make this ours. Can put your own stamp on it. Now again, there's this tension. Practitioners of Bakoko are legitimately labeled as sorcerers, cannibals, and so on. And there's a lot of tension between them and the majority Christian Congleese population in a way that you can sometimes even see bleed into the stories of catch-fatish. For example, the episode of the wrestlers about this, season one, episode nine, covers a guy named Jaribu, who is a former catch-fatish champion who has converted to Christianity and disavowed his use of black magic in the ring. Whoa.

And specifically, he has become in league. He was, like, healed of his magic, claims he can no longer do magic because he was purified of his ability to do magic by this guy named Claude Cabundi Wallacea, who's a televised faith healer of a very, a very Hulk Hogan, American-ish, evangelical faith healer with a big tent revival show kind of cast. amazing. Jari Boo, like, got pulled out of the crowd and he didn't know me and then he healed. I'm doing big air quotes around all of that. You can't see this. It's a podcast. But there's the implication that this guy is kind of almost like he realized there wasn't much money in this

doing K-fave for pro wrestling. So now he's doing it for faith healing. We know there is a lot of money in that. So. And similar tactics and similar techniques of watch this hand so you don't look at what this hand is doing. Exactly. Watch this hand cross myself as this hand takes your wallet. Yeah. Reaches into your pocket. You got it. We see on this episode of The Wrestler sort of this story where Jaribu, who says he now only does Catch Technique also has to acknowledge that there's no money in Catch Technique because nobody cares. Everyone wants Catch Fatiche. So now he's doing these sort of, we see him with this guy named Yalala who still does catch Fetish. And it's sort of

this like, Jaribu has the power of Jesus, and he's like rebuking Yalala's attacks. And in the end, Jari Bu ends up winning, we see that Yalala, in sort of a veiled way that doesn't break K-Fabe, alludes that he's kind of quite hurt that Jari-Boo has sort of turned his back opportunistically on catch-fatish. Implicitly, because there's already so many holy rollers that judge us, so it kind of hurts that our former world champion is kind of now doing the same. and that I now need to do the job to you in this context. I need to lie down so you can pin me and prove that Jesus is better than Fetiche.

That kind of sucks. I thought this was a safe space kind of idea. Yeah, that makes sense. I thought we were all fucking doing dark ritual together here, bro. What happened? Shame, shame. My read is that the people who do catch Fetiche are a mixture of people who legitimately practice witchcraft and ceremony as part of their lives

and others who are just putting it on as part of their characters in these wrestling contexts. Yeah. Yelel is not the only one who feels the sting of judgment from a wider community. Our girl, Queen Shakira, her kids get a lot of bullying because of who their mom is. She's no longer in contact with much of her family due to her choice to pursue catch fatich as her life. They don't agree with her lifestyle, right? And you know, that speaks to the like hard K-fabe too. It's like when you commit, you commit.

And it's you're deep in it. Yeah. You're deep in it. But it's both the wrestling and the witchcraft, which this woman legitimately practices, I believe, not in, like, a catch-fatish way, but in a, like, this is my, my faith way. And a spiritual, religious way. So you see that. She's got that component as well.

And then her family, who are presumably these quite conservative Christian folks, have to watch her not only, like, doing this witchcraft in public, but also, like, doing it in public as, like, the evil queen Shakira, who's sort of this, like, real, huge, helish embodiment of exactly what this community's anxieties are around this spirituality that these people are cannibals who will turn you into a goat and there to be frightened of and avoided, you know? Those goat pupils are freaky. Let's be real.

They are scary. But her wrestling is necessary for her as an outlet. We talked in the Cholita's episode in 106 about the stories that these women have around abuse in male-dominated cultures. Shakira the same. She's straight-up said. Very bluntly, she said, like, I was sexually abused by men. I hate men, and I can get in the ring and beat the shit out of men.

And I look forward to it. Yeah. You know what I mean? And it makes total sense. Yeah. Because now I'm fucking Queen Shakira, and everyone is scared of me. Men run and scream from me in the streets, right? Yeah. There's something powerful in that.

Little boys are scared of me. I give little boys nightmares, parentheses, a lot of them probably kind of religious, sexy nightmares. Subtext. Catch fetech, right? Fetish, right? Fetish wrestling. Yeah, yeah, it's in there. It's in the name. It centers her in community.

It makes her powerful and iconic, even if as a villainous voodoo queen. As a person who legitimately practices magic for spiritual reasons and has her own sincere rituals, she performs ahead of each match, and so on, gives her an outlet and a connection to that spirituality. Yeah. And that may be why there's such a... strong tie for many of the performers and audiences to catch fatish, potentially above and beyond a love for wrestling or a sense of purpose or fulfillment as a performer, whatever it may be, everyone's individual reasons. Certainly not money, apparently.

Yeah. Wemboyo, a practitioner of catch fatish, so a catch fatish wrestler, said it well when he spoke to Damien Abraham for the vice show, the wrestlers. I can never abandon my traditions. I have a contract with my bacoco. I can't abandon. they are my grandparents. You don't abandon your grandparents.

Yeah. It's your ancestors. Yeah. That's your ancestors. That's your tie to like what came before you. It's your tie to the land. I really want to emphasize that Wemba and Boyo is a big guy. And he's got really big pecks. And while he said all that thing that I was just saying about grandparents, he was making him dance.

He was just flapping him around. You know what? That's beautiful. My babococo. Yep. That's beautiful. What a tribute. That's a gorgeous tribute. That's catch fatiche, Congolese Vita Wrestling. Can you make your pecs bounce?

I used to, I was getting so close to it and then I stopped working out as much. But it's one of my goals. I'm back on it. I'm back on it. And it's one of my goals to make them bounce once more. And when I do, I'll say to myself, you don't abandon your grandparents. So we're in the Pacific Ocean. We are in the San Diego area. Go pods. Yep.

To really get to the heart of this story, the peak of this story, you got to get in a boat. And you got to head 100 miles west of San Diego. Okay. This is the story of an infamous break out in the Pacific Ocean. Cortez Bank. Okay. Have you ever heard of this? Maybe ringing a distant bell?

It is a sea mount that has, depending on the break, on the surf, there's 20 to 30 feet of clearance from the top of what you might think, visually, it helps to think of it as almost like a mountain top under the water. Okay. Now you have that in mind, but kind of shift it just a little bit. It's a little bit more like an underwater mesa. It's like a flat top. Natural or man made? Totally natural.

Okay. And this site, thousands and thousands of years ago, was a barren island. It was, you know, a tidal island that you could see and you could stand on. There were even some peaks that didn't go underwater. So it was, it was an island. It most likely did not have full vegetation and was pretty exposed. But that was thousands of thousands of years ago, and sea level has since risen, since the ice age. Like, we're talking in that time frame.

So of the skirt lines, am I right, fellows? And now the sea mount is underwater. And it catches some of the gnarliest waves in the Pacific Ocean, which... Yeah. Being the biggest ocean produces a lot of waves. Don't let the name fool you. Right. Absolutely right.

It's frequently at odds with the shore and itself and the sailors and anyone else who wants a piece. And not only is this a very dangerous shoal bank that has caught thousands of ships, you know, that's just on the recorded record. And, you know, years and thousands of years previous, who know, knows who got caught up on this bank, but is also the sight of a failed attempt at creating a micronation off the coast of California. This rings a bell. This rings a bell. Okay. Okay. Like, I can't remember a name. Okay. I don't remember the characters or why this comes to pass. But we love a micronation. We do. And Trump's America, who doesn't love a micro nation, you know? Oh, but we should all get one

for ourselves. Should be like those fucking websites that you can write into and they'll make you a lord of a square foot of land in Scotland just so you can be Lady Josier or whatever.

I'm going to get you a Lubbubu and a Migrownation. That's, your birthday is coming up Taylor. This is what you're getting. Spoiling it. You could run on that, Elon and Mark Cuban. You could run on that. A Laboo and an independent

micronation for every citizen. That's better than what's going on now. Well, and it depends though, where you set up your micro-nation. It might be a tricky situation, which is definitely the case for abalone. As in abalone as in the material of oyster shells, I believe, or something like this. Yeah, abalone is like a type of mollusk that's native to Pacific waters, and specifically like this area of California. There were a lot of abalone. Okay. Well.

So, Taylor, I'm going to tell you the story of an impossible. possible breathtaking surf break, a thriving jungle of kelp, and the perfect habitat for North Pacific, lobster, tuna, abalone, bluefin, great white sharks, like an absolutely idyllic Pacific haven, and also the story of a sunken abalonea. this rings a bell. I think that like the bell this rings is that like before I made a podcast like this one, I listened to a lot of podcasts like this one. There we go. I think it probably got covered on one of them or something like that because I have this like faint memory of yeah, this and embattled and ultimately sunk in micro nation. Also back in the Esperanto episode, somewhere in the mid-60s. I was just going to say that. Yeah, there was an Esperanto micro-nation. situation. Esperanto is popular for use among micro-nations because it's the universal language, it's egalitarian in its cast, right? All the world speaks Esperanto, which we did. Yes. And the larger point stands that there's something interesting not only about the micronation

itself, but also like the rise and fall of. Let's start way in the past. Please. Because I already mentioned the thousands and thousands of years. We'll return to that time when what is now known as Cortez Bank was still considered an island. It was still slightly above sea level. On the timeline, how many years pre-Libou era are we? 10,000. 10,000 years PL, folks, pre-Libou. This is, they didn't even have Birkins to put the Labubu's on yet. So true. So there are a chain of islands off the coast of California. They're called the Channel Islands. And one of the bigger ones that is very close to San Diego is San Clemente Island. Now, currently, in the era of Lubu, the Navy owns San Clemente Island,

and actually all the Navy SEALs, that's a primary training ground for them, is out there. They're actually sea lions. Sorry, excuse me, the Navy SEALYONs. Technically, their ears are in a different place. You got me in the technicality. You're good, yeah, good. So thousands of years ago, tens of thousands of years ago, before the Navy Sea Lions were at San Clemente Island.

There were ancestors of what are now the contemporary Tonguev and Chumash indigenous peoples. And the Tonguev took up residence in what is now like the Los Angeles area. Chumash were a little bit further south, so kind of coming into closer to what is now San Diego. So being almost 60 miles from San Clemente Island off the coast, you can imagine how when people got out there, they were certainly isolated. So we know that the folks who did live on San Clemente, and at the time, of course, wasn't called San Clemente, for these folks, they most likely called this island Kinkapar.

Okay. And having, being so isolated out there and relying mainly on, fishing and harvesting kelp subsisting off of the ocean and marine life, these folks most likely traveled to Cortez Bank, this barely there island, because of all the magnificent fishing that was there and the marine life that was there. So we know that according to the archaeological record and the roughly 7,000 documents, Archaeological Sites that are on Kinkapar, which, by the way, is the greatest density compared to any spot in North America for archaeological sites.

I know. Good for you, Kinkapar. Yeah, yeah. It's doing really good. So according to this very rich archaeological record, the island is called Kinkapar. And then in my research, I read that the folks who lived there were also called Kinkapar. So we'll refer to them as Kinkapar, even though we can kind of place them as ancestors of the Tongue of and the Jumakab.

Sure. The Kinkapar being so close to Cortez Bank and Cortez Bank having such a rich wildlife, marine wildlife, they most likely traveled there at very select times of the year. And you can imagine it was select times because this shoal would catch some insane waves, some very... Narnly to you, bitch. Yeah. So the Kinkapar used Cortez Bank as a fish. ground. Now, we know the story of westward expansion and the colonial takeover of the west coast of North America and what that did to indigenous populations. And the

Kinkapar, even though they were isolated, were still subjected to disease and colonization and warfare. Nobody lives on that island now on Kinkapar. By the time that the Kinkapar had made contact with the Western world, Cortez Bank had completely gone underwater. There was no way that it was ever an island, because again, this was thousands of years ago. So as the kinkabar culture essentially disappeared, so too had Cortez Island. Now, Cortez Bank runs about 25 miles long, and it's about seven miles wide. So we talk about that underwater mesa structure. I think that's a little more helpful when we're talking about this width of the area. And it still is a mountainous underwater region. So not all of the heights are the same. In fact, there's one particular

mountain top that we could talk about in this scenario called Bishop Rock that rises between three and six feet from the surface, depending on the tides. And that's current day. So if you can imagine three to six feet underwater, just out in the goddamn middle of the Pacific Ocean, right? You go 100 miles out and then all of a sudden, oh my gosh, what's down there? Crazy sharp basalt rock on breaking waves. Nice, nice, nice. Cool, cool, cool. Scary. So, of course, it's modern day called Bishop Rock because in 1855, a boat called Stillwell S. Bishop ran a ground and got a puncher wound in its hole. It was able to hobble back to San Francisco and everything was fine. But when they came back to San Francisco, they said, okay, well, there's something there and we should

chart that because that's a very dangerous shipwreck situation there. You could cut your foot if you stepped on that. Yeah, you got to be careful and put on your sandals. Put on those water shoes. So by the mid-1850s, this area was getting on the map. More and more charts were being created. The gold rush was happening in Northern California in the 1850s. And so there was a lot of maritime transit trying to take people to Northern California. So I think we mentioned in our episode about the Darien Gap, the Panama steamers, how there was a lot more traffic from East Coast of North America to the West Coast going through Panama, even before the Panama Canal.

Episode 32, folks. Damn, you're good. You're so good. It's getting harder as we get into the hundreds now that I've got three digits to keep track of them. So as more of these people movers were in transit off the coast of California, this bank, this shoal, was coming on more and more people's radar. It was hitting more and more maps. Probably hitting more and more boats.

Exactly. Hey. Or less and less if it's being mapped better, hopefully. Hopefully, yeah, yeah. It's kind of hard at this time because news doesn't travel as fast and... And more ships, more ships cluttering the harbor than it was probably intended to be built for. And, you know, all of that. Yeah.

Yeah. And one of the things, as the technology of the ships changed, they used to have to go further off the coast of California, just because of currents and that kind of thing. But as more and more steamers came online, like these just big people movers, they wanted to stay closer to the shore. And this put them more in direct contact with Cortez Bank. The whole area, Cortez Bank, is actually called Cortez Bank because, huh. And at 1853, a steamship Cortez banged into the shoals. So.

Should we call Cortez Bang. Yeah, exactly. Yes. So there's a lot of different run-ins with Cortez Bank. Thank you. Thank you. Good job. I just want to hear a good job. That's all. I was a good job. You did a good job.

Lots of different run-ins, but the most current identity that Cortez Bank has now is that it is gnarly surf spot, my dude. Nerly fucking surf spot, Brosephine, Miner. That was Brosephine Mitchell at the end there, but I just, I hit a pitch and I just kept going. Cool, cool, interesting, interesting. Tell me more about the gnarly surf spots off the coast of San Diego. So this definitely falls in the category, a big wave surfing. So this is the type of surfing that you typically get towed in. So you're on the back of a jet ski and you're either like on a rope and you get towed in

or there's like an attachment, like a bed attachment where you and your board are on that and then you drop off that and drop into the wave. Dang. It's less of paddling to get into a wave, and it's more about like your partnership with your jet ski driver to drop you in these places. Okay. Extremely dangerous, gnarly, I guess we could say.

You'll want a Red Bull sponsorship before you tackle these guys. Oh, yes, exactly. You need that money. Get that money. Will Billabong pay me some amount of money to put their logo on my chest when I do this? Yeah, yeah, Quicksilver. I'm looking at you, please and thank you. And big wave surfing has become more and more popular, again, actually kind of similar to the transportation of the 1850s, as technology has gotten more advanced and people feel more comfortable in these huge wave scenarios.

So having a jet ski, having really like thin but still warm wetsuits, inflation devices that you can fit under your wetsuit. Go-pros to record and propagate. Exactly. Yes, exactly. because you can't have a recorded big wave ride without either video or photography of it. And God hands you the perfect blue tube and it's... Yeah, and it's a hundred feet tall, you know. But all of a sudden, it's you're a Hemingway character where you got to paddle in and know that no one will believe you.

Exactly. Yeah. Even if you conquered the scene, no one will believe you. And it's like such a, such a terrifying reflection of like our, I guess the state of our technology. and the way that we survey each other and ourselves and very cool. So these big wave spots have become more and more popular. There's one in Northern California, Mavericks, that on certain swells, especially northern winter swells, it just gets real big. Wyoming Bay and Hawaii has huge, huge waves.

There's a spot off the coast of Ireland. There's a very famous spot off the coast of Portugal, Nazare, which is just on the edge. of this really deep, insanely deep underwater canyon. And so it sends up these huge waves that just crash right on the shore. And actually, my half-brother TIG, whom you've met, he went to Nazare. He's a surfer. He lives in San Diego. Okay.

He went to Nazare not to ride these big waves because that's just, he doesn't have Red Bull sponsorship. They haven't given him his wings yet. Is he driving the jet ski? He's not driving the jet ski. You know how you get the wings? Josie, I'm going to blow it. your mind and all you need is Canna Red Bull. You know how you get the winks? Click,

look. Yeah. No, he went, he went to Nazare to like see it, be there, but also he knew some of the folks who were training. So he did some training with them. Cool. That's a lot of fun. Yeah. Before you can ever even get in the waters of Nazare, you have to, and I assume that it's similar to a lot of these other big wave spots, you have to be able to have such disciplined breath control that you can hold your breath for two minutes straight because that's how long or even longer you could potentially be held down by these waves. Yeah. And it is such a churning mess of strength and water. And one thing that I learned in the research too, these waves kick up so much energy and there's so much air coming into the water that the density of the water becomes so much different that

It's foam. Wow. It's essentially made foam. And a body that floats in water doesn't necessarily float in foam. Wow. But you can't breathe aerated water. You can't breathe foam. You have to be able to, one, really be comfortable in the water, hold your breath for this long, and be strong enough to fight against this crazy amount of strength.

Don't freak out. And don't freak out. And, yes, and stay calm the whole entire time. Yeah. How dramatic work, dramatic stuff. It's very dramatic. And it's like modern day contemporary surf culture. It's very machismo.

It's very like, I got to ride the biggest one. I got to do the biggest thing. I got a big, big, big. Let me tell you about a little movie called Blue Crush Boys. Okay, let's all calm down. One of the things that I watched for this research, and this is where actually Alice found this story that she told me, was HBO has a, it's essentially reality TV. I wouldn't call it so much as documentary as I would, maybe reality TV, called 100 foot wave.

Okay. And it follows a set of big wave surfers who, as you aptly noted, Taylor, are sponsored by Red Bull. There we go. Oh, great. And when you lit up there, I was like, oh, I bet I called something with that one. Yeah, you did. You totally did. And they travel around the world, riding these big waves, following these big waves.

And one of the places that they go is Cortez Bank. In the realm of the reality show, they have to be very scientific in the way that they track storms and they track currents. Because a lot of these big waves, they don't pop off unless it's a very particular direction that the waves are coming from. So it usually is very seasonal. And it can be kind of like clockwork, like, okay, Mavericks in the winter. That's what we'll watch. The Santa Ana wins. You know, some things are reliable.

But even when you know that, okay, the Santa Ana wins or we'll be coming in or whatever it is, it doesn't always mean that these really big waves, and we're talking like 20 feet tall, 30 feet tall, 80 feet tall, like some big ass boys. And you need to be able to predict them in time to get there and surf them too. If you have a shore break, which is Mavericks, which is Nazaree, then that's a little easier to keep track of, right? You can head to the airport, get there, drive, boom. But when we're talking about Cortez Bank, the timing has to be even more precise because you have a 20-hour boat ride to even get there to see if the waves are at all surfable. And even if they're super

big, they might be super closed out. So all the white water just goes all in one go and there's really nowhere for you to surf. But that's what makes a lot of these big wave point breaks and these just big wave sites, very dependent on the geography of the location. So if you have waves that are coming straight in, if you think about like lines of waves and they crash on the shore break and oh, pretty wonderful, those are more likely to close out to kind of just crash in one fail swoop. Sure. If you have a point that the waves are hitting against, the energy of the waves is actually

going to come around that point. And so you have more likelihood of having a more diverse face of the wave to surf on, if that makes sense. So instead of just the close out, there'll be kind of this beautiful like ripple effect where first it starts here and then it starts to break all along the edges. And you can surf kind of where along those edges, right? And that's the idea of the barrel, gnarly barrel, dude. Of Hokusai fame, the perfect arcing wave, right? Yes, yes, exactly. In layman's terms, energy and displacement and ripple aside, we're talking about the primal search for the perfect wave.

Yes, that's exactly it. The tallest mountain, the perfect wave. And so in the 1990s, is the first recorded period when we know that surfers went out there decidedly following the big wave rumors, rode these waves, captured it on film, still photograph and video. And therefore, like we mentioned before, like entering into the, like, record that these waves were ridden. And a lot of these were, you know, the 20, 30 foot waves. But these things do grow, right? They can get bigger as the swell increases. And the climate change, too.

And climate change, yes. 1990s, when these waves are first recorded. Recording is now in progress. Exactly. Yes. So this is when, like, the big wave culture kind of is starting to come online and more of this technology. And Cortez Bank has entered into that legend. And one of the interesting things about it as a surf break is the fact that because there is no land, it's a really kind of disorienting foreign space to be.

All it is is just horizon, blue horizon. If you're lucky on a very clear day, you can see that island's Kickapur, or, or San Clemente Island to the north of you, but most likely you're not going to see that. So you're just kind of like, I hope the wave will break this way and it takes a study to do. But even these really, really experienced surfers say it's like surfing the moon. It's so disorienting to not really know where the waves are coming from. That's the allure. It's like surfing the moon.

Exactly. And because the sea mount that it creates Cortez Bank is so, incredibly steep compared to the rest of the sea floor, the waves that hit it essentially just kind of get snagged on it, right? So it looks like it's all flat swells, flat swells, and then all of a sudden, as it comes closer and closer to Cortez Bank, these waves just rise out of nowhere. And they're these huge colossal things. So I think that's probably part of this disorientation is they feel like... You can get blindsided with them. Yes. Exactly. To reestablish a dynamic that I think has sort of come up a few times over

the years on the show, I'm an earth baby, you're a water baby. I like land, tree, hug, ground. You like swim big wave water fish, right? Even at the very beginning of the episode we were talking about this, you're an accomplished ocean swimmer, right? Which is a bit different from being an accomplished swimming pool swimmer. There's all kinds of forces at play in big waves and rocks and things like this. Currents and temperature, yeah. I guess I have a multi-part question. Number one, do you have a background of any kind of your own in things like surfing?

And number two, what do you think about this version of the water and the ocean and this break that are presented to you and also have the whiff of home to them, right? Are they alluring to you? Do you think that you would enjoy being out there? Do you think that you would get got by a wave? Like, obviously it's different with surfing. to catch a big wave and with swimming, you're probably not. Is your fascination and invigoration a fright? What is it?

That's a good question. I have surfed before. I like went to a camp as a kid and my brother Tig has taken me out surfing. He took me out like a week ago. But I never really took to it super well. And one of the reasons, I was a teen and I was here for the summer. And I was like, You know what? I'm going to surf. Like, I'm just going to surf every day. I'm close enough that I can, like, figure how to get there. I'm just going to, like, see if I can, like, become a surfing person, a surfer. Why not? Why not?

There's a, like, a learning break close by to where I was living at that time. And Turmeline Beach, which is, like, a surf park. And it's really designed to learn how to surf. Like, this is the type of break that's good for beginners. You get big, long boards that are easier to start with. And I thought, okay, this will be good. I was surfing there by myself one day when my big, long board got away from me and it hit somebody else.

Oh. It hit another guy who was learning how to surf as well. And it hit him. Was he hot? No, because he yelled at me. Damn. Yeah, that's not hot to Josie, getting screamed out by a strange man. That seems like low on the list.

Low on the list. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was really, really mad at me that I had lost control of my board and that it hit him. And he said, Shut out, bra. It's a fucking surfer culture. Exactly. And see, but that's the thing.

It's like, I think there is another layer of surfing culture that is kind of machismo, that is very competitive. Exclusionary of women in a lot of ways. Exclusionary of like a folks who might be different too. Like, you know, this is a locals only break. And like, you know, like very territorial kind of stuff. And after that experience, I was like, well, I don't feel comfortable. being out here.

It's crazy how one bad experience like that with like a shitty person in the space can just kind of wreck it. What a shame. Well, I mean, I guess there's a silver lining in that I felt like it confirmed for me that I felt really comfortable in the water without a flotation device, without a board, without this big thing. You didn't need the foulus. I didn't need the foul. I could just free ball it.

Yeah. I turned more towards swimming after that because my mom did it. I could go and do it. with somebody else. I think that was part of it is I didn't have like a surf partner at that time

but I had plenty of swim partners. See, if that guy were hot and chill about it then you would have a surf partner. Yeah, yeah. That could have gone a totally different direction. My life could be so different, yeah.

And I think when it comes to Cortez Bank, there are reports of plenty of divers who have gone out there. Again, you have to calculate it at the very precise time so that you're not... Have to get dropped off, I imagine. Yeah. And you're not there

when the big waves are coming. Fuck, no, because you would die. You would get dashed against the rocks and you would simply die. I think that's how I would enjoy Cortez Bank as being able to go underwater and see what's there because the diversity is insane. It's relatively untouched, even though there are plenty of fishermen who have visited it. There's reports of Pacific lobsters that do, you know, you can find them out here off the coast of San Diego. But the ones out there in all these.

like crevices and caverns. 650 years old. Oh, there's a report of a guy like holding a lobster at his chest. And he was probably like 5-7 or something like that, 5-8. The tail of the lobster hit the floor. Damn. Like that's how big. That's a skook-um lobster.

Untached. Skook-em-as-Flock. Yes. Yes. I would love to see that. And I wouldn't love to be in the water. Maybe at the same time as a great white shirt. shark but no they generate the shark randomly and you're there or you're not right yeah to control if the shark decided that it wanted to check out the break the same day you did then you run into each other this is the way the cortez bank is known now right but just a few short years before the big wave

craze in the 1960s cortez bank was the object of a different type of goal a different type of hmm how am i going to make my mark on the world's goal Legacy, baby. Once again, we come back to legacy. So before there was, yeah, the legacy for Big Wave, it was the legacy for capitalism, essentially. So this was the big attraction about Cortez Bank. So the idea was that there was so much abundant sea life to be harvested out there that a gentleman Joe Kirkwood had this idea to create on the shoals, on the sea mount of Cortez Bank, an island, kind of re-islandize the Cortez Bank, and create his own micronation where there would be an island outpost

from which he and his fellow citizens could harvest and ship away the seafood and, you know, The abalone, the tuna, the whatever it is, the lobsters, the, like, you know, fucking six-foot lobsters that they find. Pull up your boat, drop a neck, and take your pick. So Joe Kirkwood was going to name this micro-nation, Lemuria, which is a lost continent under the sea. It's kind of an old, old name, but... An Atlantis analog. Yes, exactly, yeah. Fun fact, did my fifth grade science fair project,

on Atlantis, I believe. That one didn't get me to Guilford Mall, but it did get me a bronze. Got me to the gym. I got to the gym. You got to start somewhere. You got to start the gym. Class Jim, Guilford Mall.

Beauty. I made it to the gym, but I only got a bronze at the gym. So Joe Kirkwood was going for the Guilford Mall with LaMaria, but he only made it to the gym with bronze because the media coined another term that became much more popular.

Good job. Abelonia. Abolonia made it to Guilford Mall. Yes, yes. Abolonia made it to Guilford Mall. And then it didn't do too well at Guilford Maul, but it made it to Guilford Mall. Made it to Guilford Mall got to look inside the Spencer Gifts. That's all we're here for, right?

Yes, exactly. Get yourself some sort of novelty lamp. Joe Kirkwood was a B movie star. He had appeared in a few ABC television made for TV movies. His most iconic, if you want to call iconic. I do. You know me and you know that I do. I know you do. His most iconic role was playing this comic strip boxer by the name of Joe Paluka.

Yeah, I know Joe Paluka, yeah. Old-timey. I want to say like 30s, 40s, but that could be way out of whack. 1930. Your boy carries again. Your boy fucking carries again. Okay, nice, nice. So he's kind of an interesting figure, right?

Yeah, B movie star, his dad was a popular golfer, a trick-shot golfer. Okay. So he kind of has this like nepo baby vibe, but he's also just like... But like nepo baby to a trick shot golfer? Yeah, yeah. That's kind of fun. Yeah, kind of like a comical, clowny figure, we'll say. Sure.

And so he comes up with this idea of creating a seafood empire, right, off of Cortez Bank. And here's a quote from Joe Kirkwood in his manuscript that was part like memoir, part fiction book, part like spec script. for a TV show movie. Good. Efficient. Quote, what the hell was I doing out here anyway? Only an idiot would attempt such a preposterous scheme as building a new country, and only a numskull would be out here trying to do it. But building this country was exactly what I wanted to do, what I had to do, end quote.

Only a dumb bitch would do this, but dear reader, you're looking at a dumb bitch. Exactly. Makes sense. So he cooks up this plan where he is going to go out there and drop a whole bunch of essentially boulders to create kind of this atoll shape on Cortez Bank. And then he was going to work with the city of Los Angeles to have some of their landfill trash transited 100 miles off the coast of San Diego and dumped in the middle of this atoll. to create terra firma between the boulders. What do you think of that solution? I don't think we should be putting more trash in our oceans.

It feels like that one wouldn't really play well in California. Well, yeah, this isn't the mid-1960s, so it is a little different. We didn't care. We didn't care. The more the better. Penn's oil down the stream, you know, storm drains, whatever. On the one hand, I don't think I'd like to live somewhere micro or macro that was built on a pile of garbage. Good point. Yes. Seagulls, you know? Yeah.

On the other hand, I kind of admire the resourcefulness in terms of, well, I guess it's like maybe the city of L.A. will want to get rid of some of their garbage, you know, you scratch my back, I sketch. As utilitarian deals go, I've seen worse. Exactly. And he isn't a total, I mean, he's a wacko, but he's not like a total nutcase. Because... Empathy on bittersweet infamy, folks. We love it here first and foremost. We work. We work hard. Mainly a wacko, but not Not always. Just a kooky guy. Sometimes he's just a nut.

He's just a kooky nut. Yeah. A stroke of insight that he does do is that he contacts a very specialized diver and in general, just kind of a waterman figure by the name of Jim Houts. Jim Houts is kind of known in this era because just overshot, Jacques Cousteau's record for the deepest dive. But before you start thinking of 100 miles off the coast of San Diego, which our story is taking place, you need to head east and go to fucking Death Valley to a site called Devil's Hole, which is a deep underwater cave. I don't think we should go there.

I think we should stay here. What I had previously thought was a fairly imposing murder rock, but. Oh, my God. This is horrid. Boke, tell me more. Jim Houts. He started as a Navy demolitions expert. So this was before the Navy SEALs or even the Navy SEAL Alliance.

And he knew how to explode things underwater. This was his professional and military training. So he extended this to kind of his hobby work. And then he opened a dive shop. he kind of extended further into like this pre-red Bull record-breaking professional career of being a diver. Professional adventurous diver. Yeah. And he was interested in all the science that is needed too.

So one of the things that was really notable about this 315 feet dive that he did in a cave system, he didn't do it with any type of special augmented air or tanks of air, which now you can have mixtures of nitrogen or helium that can kind of help support you. He just did it with like straight up compressed air. Wow. Old school. You go to the gas station and you fill up your bike tires like that. He's just like huffing off of that guy.

He's one of these very like high adventure, gnarly guys. And Joe Kirkwood, our B movie star, approaches him and says, what do you think about this? I want to build this like rock donut filled with, you know, the jelly of L.A. trash. Yeah, I want a jelly donut. Dirty diapers and use syringes and the works, cardboard boxes with grease stains from pizzas. Yes, exactly, exactly. And Jim Haltz is like, this guy's fucking nuts, isn't he? And then he thinks, let's give a shot.

And I like it. Yes. So Jim was familiar with Cortez Bank because at this point, a few fishermen had also noted it. You know, you can go out there and fill your boat, Buku amounts of fish. At this time, you could still fish for abalone, which is now completely illegal in off the coast of California. There were so many at that time, and there were even more so out at Cortez Bank. So it was really easy to find them. he would go out there for these deep-sea fishing expeditions.

And so he had known it. And so when he heard about this idea of, yeah, filling it with the trash and everything, he's like, you know what? I think it might be easier if we just took out a huge boat, like a USS ginormous, you know, cement boat, one of these things that has like, you know, an airplane runway on it. And chuck a rock in San Diego, and you'll hit one of those. We take it out there and we scuttle it on Cortez Bank, meaning you simply, like, run in a ground. That's not a bad idea.

I mean, it's actually a bad idea, but... It's a bad idea. But it's better than the trash. Right. It's better than just, like, dumping loose trash in the ocean. That's true. His idea, Jim's idea, was to scuttle the boat and then pack it in with these big boulders that they were going to get from a guy in Ensonata. in Mexico.

I got a guy in Ensenada. Yeah, exactly, exactly. My bolder guy. My bolder guy outside of Tijuana, he knows exactly what we need. And they were going to pick the highest point of Cortez Bank, that Bishop's Rock that we talked about, that has like three to six feet of clearance of the surface of the ocean. So they're like, we don't have to do too much because it's right there. It wants to be an island so bad.

We're just going to re-islandize it. We're helping. Yes, yes, goals, hashtag goals. Hashtag goals. And because of the way that Bishop's Rock is situated at such a steep incline, they could scuttle the boat, create this island, but there would still be a really deep drop off right next to it. So they could still motor in boats and fishing equipment

and have all this kind of transportation of the shipping of the seafood. And the scuttled boat would function as essentially refrigeration, processing, a factory, right? a canning facility, like, they could do all of the capitalist machinery of the fishing industry out there and then ship it back to the coast. And why does this need to be its own country? I think, yeah, that's a good question. As opposed to being like a boat that we crashed against Iraq. Yeah, yeah.

And built some infrastructure on. Right. I think maybe because once you start building the infrastructure, you have to stake a claim to that said infrastructure. sure. You're subject to regulations and laws unless you are the law. Yes, unless you're in international waters. Yeah, that's true. And exactly, exactly. So they find one of these huge, ginormous boats. It's called the SS Halisco. And it had been a U.S. naval ship before it was bought by a Californian whaler, right as the whaling industry was kind of veering off into oil and gas.

So the ship was like pretty much on the rocks already, if you will. Wow. I will. Thank you. It's one of these cement built ships. So it has like all of this steel infrastructure and it's filled with cement. But the way that it's engineered. That's witchcraft.

That shouldn't float. The buoyancy, the weight of, I don't know. It's total witchcraft. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any. Nobody knows how it works. But even in its later life, SS Helisco could still float. So they're like, great.

We're going to take that from San Francisco. We're going to hire a tow boat to take it all the way down to Cortez Bank. We're going to get our insinada guy to bring up all the boulders. And we're going to go out on our own boat. And this was Jim Haltz, who had a big enough boat that could handle this type. of journey. So the plan is in place. Jim goes out there a few different times and lays out a track where they will scuttle the Helisco. He puts out particular buoys to know exactly where they're going to line them up. Right. Have the current kind of crash it in, drop the anchor, boom,

batta bing. I'm sure that there is nothing that one could account for mistakenly or fail to account for in the controlled scuttling of a boat that would make it into like a really dangerous situation. Exactly. No, no. And certainly, certainly the fact that Joe Kirkwood took the SS Helisco and had it gutted and sold parts for salvage. And in that process, accidentally sold the main anchor.

And let's put some quotation marks around accidentally because I think it was more like, oh, how much can I get for the anchor? Oh, let's sell that, yeah. How many hundred pounds is this giant steel thing? Like, how does one accidentally sell this? And perchance, a very vital piece of maritime equipment when you are trying to scuttle and anchor the boat in this very specific situation. You're going to want to alter the physics at various points in the process to be more beneficial to your cause.

So as plans were coming into place, Kirkwood was also getting a lot of pushback from, the California and federal government. This is the mid-1960s. We are at the heyday of the Cuban missile crisis. And so according to Kirkwood and his lavish manuscript, he claims that the government was really breathing down his neck because they thought another Cuba was going to be just off the coast of California, that he was going to create this micronation and immediately set up communism that would, you know, rot the interior of the continental U.S. While I get the point that I think that your tone is making, that this man thinks a lot of himself and his capabilities of being the next Cuba, I do also think that this was an extraordinarily

both touchy time geopolitically and also very, very petty about communism and shit specifically. This is true. Yeah. And also, I do think it's like the FBI's job to keep track of every seeming whack job who's setting up a micro-nation off the coast because we're not taking applications for new neighbors. This is true. So is he flattering himself, maybe, but stranger things have happened.

And there are more perhaps practical, historically, or, you know, like looking back with hindsight, practical considerations, like, wait, where's all that trash going to go? And wait. Yeah. Would the mafia get a hold of this? Island and build a casino? You're crashing a boat? Yeah.

What's happening here? Are you seceding? Yes. Is this Civil War? Yeah, what's happening? Yeah. Can we maybe grab a coffee, talk about it a little bit? Exactly.

Let's chat. So with this added pressure, though, Joe is like, you know what? Let's just get it done. You put the buoys down, right? Right, Jim, we got the buoys in place. Let's just, we got everything. We're ready to go. Let's just do it.

We're like 98% of the way there. Jim looks at the weather, because again, you got to know what the weather's going to be like out there before you head out. Red sky in mourning, sailors take warning. The Tuk really helps with that. That was good. That was nice. That was transported. That was good.

I like that. Thank you. That transported me, that bird. Wow. So he studies the weather and he sees there's a swell coming off of the Sea of Japan. And he thinks, okay, the way that the source. looks like it's moving. This should go further north, and it'll actually leave us with this area of calm, high pressure waters off of the coast of Southern California. And he's like, you know what?

I think, I think we can do it. I think now is a good time. So, Sunday, November 13th, 1966. Let's do it. A team of our cave diving, Jim Houts, our nut job. B-movie actor, Joe Kirkwood. Hello, you, Joe, if you're listening. Along with, you know, the guy from Encinada with his boulders. Right. We got a few, you know, Albuquer Canning, Nepo Babies. Sure.

On board, too. Sure. It's a rag tag. It's oceans. You've never heard of my family. My name is Francis of the Sea. Of Chicken of the Sea Dynasty. Exactly.

Yes. Got it. They set out, if I can return to the nut job situation of Joe Kirkwood, he arrives at the Balboa Bay Club to set out on this journey wearing pleaded khaki trousers, a cashmere sweater, and a pair of fur ski boots, like after ski, apra ski boots. So like, like first generation ugs kind of via five. How cold does it get in San Diego in November? I mean, the Pacific Ocean can be very cold, but I don't know, like, in the 60s, high 50s? Like, not that fucking cold at all. No need for cashmere nugs, no, I would say.

Yeah. Those are for the ski, shall we? So, of course, everyone's like, who the fuck is that guy? Mm-hmm. Get a load of Hollywood over here. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So they head out on this series like this Armada, right?

And the tugboat is called the Whitney Olson. And it is hauling the SS Helisco down from San Francisco. So it's coming quite a ways. But they're making good time. And they plan to get there in the evening of Sunday, November 13th. And then they're going to do the scuttling Monday morning. Everything is easy, breezy. Ready to go. Now, at this point, the government is kind of saying, wait, wait, wait, we never got our coffee. Where are you going? What's happening? So apparently Kirkwood does get a call right before they set out. And it's a senator saying, like, you can't do this. This is against the law. And it's punchable by a fine. And Kirkwood's like, well, how much is the fine? And the U.S. attorney says, well, it's a $50 fine. And Kirkwood says, okay. I'll do that then.

I'll do that. Do you have like a square reader or what are we doing here? Yeah. Oh, you know, I've got it in cash. Do you have change? Yeah. One of those, definitely. Knowing that the government was kind of tying themselves in a few knots about this

and the implications of, as you mentioned, this kind of fraught international era of U.S. politics, which I guess we could claim has never ended. But it was always burn. the world of intern. Yeah. Kirkwood has a plan that what he's going to do is he's going to say, we got caught. It was a strange situation.

As you know, Cortez Bank is shipwreck alley. There's been so many ships that have been downed by this fateful area. Our boat just got scuttled here. Oh, my gosh. Oh, no. Okay. And so he would pay the $50 fine and then still. have this situation where he's already been phoned about this though the intent has already been

discussed with an attorney and it's been in the press all of this okay he's just going to say prove it oops yeah exactly yeah prove it bitch and and unsink the boat if you want but there's a big sunken boat there whether you like it or not yes exactly so it's monday morning 915 a m november 14th 1966. And everything seems like it's really ready to go. All the buoys that Jim Holtz placed out are still there. Everything's looking very clear. This is when he learns about the fact that there is not the anchor that he was told there would be on the SS-Hilisco, which is like, okay, cool, cool. Why don't we put a pin in this? We'll figure this out. We'll let the anchor go, the one that we have, and then we'll have the tugboat kind of pull the boat where it needs to be, this could still work. Let's try

this out, considering we're here. We've made the journey. No. Sunk cost fallacy has sunk boat fallacy, I guess in this case. Yeah. It's cost a lot of gamblers, their shirts, that logic of like, well, we've already, we've come this far, haven't we? Yeah. It's at this point. They look out at the horizon west. Red sky at morning. And notice that. there does seem to be a swell coming out of the northern Pacific. Like we talked about with the surfing, these swells, they can kind of like, you know, one of the surfer terms was like, it looks like corduroy, you know, like it has these like long lines that are coming and they seem, you know, no big deal, whatever.

But then when they hit a sea mount that is three feet under the water, that's going to make a big fucking wave. That's going to change those little lines of course. orderoy into like cut off jean shorts vibe right away. You know what I'm talking about? Absolutely. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. You described it perfectly and no elaboration is needed.

I'm so glad someone does. This is great. I'm sitting here on the jet ski waiting for your safer turn. Wave to me when you're done, okay? Thank you. Thank you. Watch out for those striations. They get bigger.

These waves, these swells start coming in. And they start just as like kind of little waves. S.S. Halisco is kind of moving up and down and up and down. And by this point, Joe Kirkwood and Jim Houts are on the SS Helisco. They're working with the anchor. They're trying to get things set. There's a few other of the team who are also assembled on board. And the SS Halisco is moving up further up these swells and dropping even farther. And you can imagine just how that King seasick these men were feeling. Jim Holtz is the captain for all, you know, hierarchical purposes. And we've done Titanic April. We know what that means. That means you listen to the

captain. Whatever the captain says, you do. Came right back to maritime disaster. I couldn't, I couldn't go far. I couldn't go far. I went to another ocean, though. Pawn skipping. Yeah. I'm pawn skipping. Yeah. Jim orders everybody on board to put a life jacket on. Kirkwood and two of the other men on board refuse. Oh, why? Because it's like, it'll make me look lame in the pictures. I don't even know. Even Jim and recounting the story.

How immature. He can't even like really describe it besides just like they were stunned. They were two like deer in the headlights, kind of like this brain lock idea of like, it's fine. No, it's all fine. It'll be okay. We're on a boat. We're not in trouble.

We're on a boat that's going to be an island. You're on a boat. Put on a fucking life jacket. Yes, yeah. And even in this even more weird way, Kirkwood just kind of gloms himself to one of the masks. Okay. And it's not a sailing mask is one of these cement boats. So it doesn't have the mask, but in that, whatever, with a sail on it.

Anyway, he's holding on to some type of device where they put, you know, olive oil, something like that, right? Popeye? Remember she's in that, like, horn thing? I see what you, I thought you were talking like the oil deal. Yeah, those little chimney things that olive oil is sometimes in in the Popeye comic stripping movie. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. So they're just, he's just holding on to Dear Life for that.

He's like, I don't need a life jacket. I've got this guy. It's like, uh, okay, okay. That's stupid. The life jacket allows you to be slightly more mobile if you'd like, but okay. Yeah. You're missing those trees in that ground that I was talking about earlier. So the boat goes even higher as these waves get bigger, right?

And so then it's dropping further as it's gone higher. And Jim describes it as like an elevator falling. It has that feeling of like, where you're kind of suspended like an inch or two above the floor before you drop with it kind of thing. Yeah. Wiley Coyote style. And to give you a sense of the type of power that's happening with these waves, a cubic yard of water. So if you can kind of like give yourself a meter, a meter. cubic meter of water.

Sure, yeah. Ways around 1,700 pounds. Wow. So that's as much as like a VW bug, like a car, like a small car. Sure. And so when it is weighing that much and moving at 35 to 45 miles per hour, it packs a lot of energy and it packs a tremendous gnarly punch. When these swells change from just the bumps of up and down to actually cresting waves that are breaking on the S.S. Halisco, the amount of force is insane. I mean, it's a crashing V. It's a car crashing into you.

You know what I fucking hate about the ocean jersey? Too much physics. Oh my God. So many physics. So many of them. And variable. Physics that changes on a dime unless you've just got like a beautiful mind. for this sort of thing, as they say, it's so bewildering to me how, I guess the physics in general, but certainly the deadliness of the physics at their most extreme. Yes, yes. Where the SS-Hilisco is, it's still like moving in this incredible amount of energy from the waves, right? It's still kind of moving up, it's moving down. But that one anchor that they did drop has caught on Bishop Rock.

So while it's not fully scuttled, it's still connected to the ground. It's still connected to the earth under the water. So as it's moving up and down, it has this incredible force moving against it that's causing the whole thing to almost shake apart, right? Because the tension from the anchor chain. And Jim is yelling at everybody to just like get off the boat. You have to get off the boat. Kirkwood is refusing.

I quote from his manuscript, I gave myself up to the hanging on to that mask for all I was worth. Absurdly, I was determined that no wave would wash over me if for no other reason than that people are always being washed overboard in movies. So he would defy the movie like schick. He was stronger. Got it, got it. That's only in movie.

That only happens in Dimster novels. Well, that's stupid. That's fucking dumb. Oh, yeah. That is really dumb. What a long trail to understanding an idiotic line of thinking. It was pretty wild. Kirkwood is out there, hang on for dear life, getting pummeled.

Meanwhile, Jim is essentially kind of hiding in the leeward of the Hellisco, of the SS-Halisco's, like, infrastructure, the kind of the, if you think about like the captain's bridge or something like that, he's in the leeway of these huge waves so that he's not getting directly pummeled by the water. But, of course, the boat is moving at a considerable speed and it's just absolute pandemonium. Help me out. Help me out. Leeway. Leeward. Here's the boat. And Jim is like behind the captain's bridge, we'll say that this is. And the wave is like hitting this way. Right. There's a, the, the bridge is acting as a barrier between him and the bear and the waves. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And these waves are climbing from like 20, 25, 30 up to 50 feet high.

Right? Those Red Bull waves. The Red Bull waves, they're big ones. Eventually, Kirkwood is swept overboard, just like in the movies. They were documentaries. Dimes Store documentaries. By some stroke of luck, he is picked up by the tugboat, Whitney Olson. Jim Haltz dives off.

Oh, my God, dives. S.S. Halisco. With a V. Yes. Damn. Okay. Ooh, Jams care. Yeah.

And he times his jump just so that he knows that he'll be right behind a wave. So he won't be, you know, the closest next wave is as far as he can get from it. But he also knows that the suction from that big wave is going to pull him out towards the tugboat. So that's exactly what happens. The current takes him right to the tugboat and he gets pulled up onto the deck. Again, it helps to know physics. Everybody who was on board, the SS-Hilisco, makes it out alive somehow. Okay, good. Cruelty-free.

Yes. They watch from the tugboat as this huge ship, this ginormous ship, just completely cracks apart. It's just pummeled and pummeled and pummeled. Yeah. Come on. Idiots. Yeah. Yes.

Nothing remains in terms of, like, what can be seen outside of the water. It is severely shipwrecked. Right. And the boulders never make it. They get wind of this incident and they're like, we're not. We were still at the bar. We were going to take a tequila shot and head out, but now we'll just stay. I've got a cousin in town.

We'll crash her her place. It'll be fine. Exactly. We'll take her kid to the zoo. World famous, San Diego Zoo. The whole idea is totally kaput. Abolonia will not stand. It doesn't even make it off.

the drawing pad. What a shame. It really doesn't. And it's because these waves are just so insanely huge. And it was more than anybody had thought before they got out there at this particular really, really shallow part. Because remember, Jim Holt had been around there. He'd been fishing around there. He'd seen it. But he had never seen it at this particular winter date. Remember, they're in November. mid-November, yep. He'd never seen it with this particular swell coming off the sea of Japan, and it just fucking hit it at the perfect angle so that these waves popped right up

and came crashing right down on them. They theorized that maybe the SS-Hilisco could have properly been scuttled and with all the boulders could have held up to that wave action. But for how long is a very good question. and how likely are you to want to be in the canning factory of SS-Hilisco during one of these pummelings? Absolutely not. No way. It's sea level rise and wave action that has worn this thing down to what it is even today.

There's no way that Abilonia would ever stand. Joe Kirkwood, though, still really wanted to hang on to it. He went to the press. He told any reporter that would listen to him that it's still going to happen. Ben, it's going to make it, just you wait, I'll show you all. He blames the government pressure about Cuba and a micro nation off the coast of California that that was the issue, not his poor engineering or selling of the anchor or, you know. That idea all around, like nothing about it good.

Yeah, yeah. Shit idea. He does point out, it does seem kind of funny, though, that they're worried about communism and abalone, even though his whole purpose is like, no, no, no, I want to make a fucking buck. I'm as capitalists as they come. I thought the same thing during that communism thought I did think, like, he's calling it a micronation probably for like tax evasion reasons. Yes, yes. He's just talking about making a factory, basically.

Yeah, yeah. He just wants to make it on the ground factory just in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Exploid a bunch of natural resources. What could be more capital than that? Exactly. We'll never kill all the Buffalo, Josie. How could we? Never, never.

There's so many. You can take as many as you want. How could we fish all of the abalone away? That would never happen. We'd have to be pretty stupid to do that. Yeah. Our boy Joe Kirkwood, though, he is not such a dummy dumb. He's a kook, but he ain't no dummy dumb.

He ends up making a nice little fortune for himself by purchasing a golf course on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where he became a millionaire. So he made out pretty well. Great. Jim Health. He went on to work on his diving shop. He, last he checked in, which I saw was maybe just about a year ago. He was living in Laguna, so just up the coast of San Diego. It was a grandpa to a few grandkids running around, still in the water, loving life. Yeah. Yeah. No, he's married to the sea. That's a common affliction in your neck of the woods. Yeah, that happens. Seems to be doing what he likes. The SS Halisco has now made Cortez Bank an even more dangerous shipwreck spot because of the added debris in the area. These big wave surfers have learned about through experience, but more and more people every year make the trip, the 100 mile trip off the coast of San Diego to surf this huge big wave in the winter and still fishermen go out there and fish what they can. divers go out there when weather permits, and it's just out there 100 miles out, one of the biggest surfable waves in the world that we know of, too.

And I think that's kind of the exciting thing about Cortez Bank is that it's so far off the coast and it makes you wonder, perhaps there's a sea mount somewhere deeper in the Pacific or way down in Antarctica or somewhere that we haven't even begin to imagine. Yeah. It's an interesting proposition, right? The desolate island. We love our desert islands and we love our promise of adventure just on the other side of that blue horizon, right? That's a big one. That blue bubbly horizon. What of the ecosystem of the area? Any adverse effects from all of a sudden there's the SS Helisco now added to the mix? There have been so many shipwrecks there that I imagine that... The fish like it by now. All the weak ones have been evolved out of the line.

Well, you know, sometimes shipwrecks do create more habitats for certain fish and wildlife. As with Titanic, they discovered entirely new organisms had come to fruition down there. Yes, exactly. And, you know, thank goodness the trash from Los Angeles never made it out there. So there's plenty of other trash out in the middle of the Pacific. The North Pacific Jire is just a huge trash island. So that's another fun one. Well, thank you so much for bringing us that taste of.

San Diego right before we bring everyone a taste to BC. We move up the coast, that same Pacific Ocean to our left, and boundless possibility on the right when we tackle the big Skukum BC road trip. We will see you most weeks in August. Thanks for listening. If you want more Infamy, we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinfamy.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast,

shoot us a few bucks via our coffee account at K-O-Hifin-F-I.com forward slash bittersweet infamy. But no pressure. Bittersweet infamy is free, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing. Leaving a review, following us on Instagram at Bittersweet Infamy. Or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it. Stay sweet.

My sources for this episode included The Wrestlers, Season 1, Episode 9, Voodoo Wrestling. Voodoo Wrestling is empowering women in the Congo on the YouTube channel Vice News, and wrestler turns opponent into a goat and catch-fatiche match on wrestle map. The sources that I used for this week's episode included an article from Atlas Obscura, Abolonia, the island nation that never was. It was meant to be a seafood paradise, written by Anne Ebank, published June 28th, 2018. I read an article from Sports Illustrated, A Rare Swell hit 100 miles out to sea. These big wave surfers dropped everything to go.

Written by Blake Silverman, published May 22, 2025. I read an article written by Keith Medell. Southern California's biggest waves, the story of Cortez Bank, which was an excerpt from surf sand and stone, how waves, earthquakes, and other forces shaped the Southern California coast. I read an article from Surf Line, On the Shoulders of Giants, the Discovery of Cortez Bank, published October 18th, 2022. I read two articles from The Inertia, the first, A Conversation with the King of Abilonia, written by Chris Dixon, published November 15th, 2011. and an article, let me tell you what happened at Cortez Bank, written by Sam George published January 13th, 2025. I read excerpts of Chris Dixon's book, Ghost Wave, the discovery of

Cortez Bank, and the biggest wave on earth. This was published 2011 by Chronicle Books. I looked at the Wikipedia page for Cortez Bank. Lastly, I watched episode three of season three of HBO's 100-foot wave series. The episode was entitled Cortez Bank. If you're looking for more infamy, head over to coffee.com, where you can sign up to become a monthly subscriber to the podcast. We'd really appreciate your support. And when you become a monthly subscriber, you can join the Bittersweet film club and hear us talk all about movies. This month, we are chatting Battle of the Sexes, the 2017 film about Billy Jean King winning the Battle of the Sexes. Special thanks to to Lizzie D. for that selection, and that's another perk of the Bittersweet Film Club. When you

join, you get to tell us what movies to watch. Special thanks to all our monthly subscribers, Terry, Jonathan, Lizzie D, Erica Joe, Sof, Dylan, and Sactyl the Cat. Bitter Sweet Infamy is a proud member of the 604 Podcast Network. This episode was lovingly edited by Alex McCarthy with help from Alexi Johnson. Our cover photo was taken by Luke Bentley. The interstitial music you heard earlier is by Mitchell Collins, and the song you are listening to now is T Street by Brian Steele. You know,