Would You Be Willing To Die For The Gram?

The ocean was in a punitive mood when the sun lit up Nazaré’s Praia do Norte headland on December 3rd.

Roped into a massive set wave, the experienced Brazilian big-wave surfer Carlos Burle, 58, was erased by an avalanche of whitewater before he could make it to the bottom.

He disappeared for well over 30 seconds and, according to bystanders, was repeatedly pounded by the four or five waves that followed his. Later, in a video recorded in the Lisbon airport departures lounge just before boarding his flight home, he told his fans on Instagram that he had “taken many waves on the head” but had never lost consciousness or swallowed water.

Roughly 1 minute and 30 seconds elapsed between his fall and the moment his tow partner, Lucas “Chumbo” Chianca, reached him. As Chumbo tried to pull him onto the rescue ski in the impact zone, another wave detonated on the pair, knocking both of them off and down again.

Burle was visibly winded, struggling in the whitewater closer to shore, and nearly blacking out when Chumbo swam back toward him, grabbed him, and inflated his vest to keep his head above water. At this point, Willyam Santana and another driver arrived on their jet skis. Their first attempt to extract the pair failed. On the second, Santana reversed the sled toward Chumbo, who pushed himself and Burle onto it, finally getting them clear of the impact zone and headed toward the beach.

Limp and unable to stand on his own, Burle was helped onto dry sand by surfers and rescue crew. But then a surge climbed the beach violently, dragging rescuers, victim, and even a rogue jet ski dangerously close to him.

After surviving the final obstacle in a series of sadistic punishments, Santana and members of the local fire brigade administered oxygen and wrapped Burle in a thermal blanket. Speaking to UOL afterward, Burle said, “I had never felt such an urge to breathe. When they took off my vest on the beach, it felt like I was born again. My lungs were tight. I wanted to breathe and I couldn’t. It’s a terrible sensation.” He recovered enough to walk slowly to a truck and was taken to the hospital for a check-up.

He walked away unscathed from his self-professed “worst beating ever.” Santana, who survived a near-death situation at Nazaré two years ago, was no doubt a guardian angel preventing what could’ve easily been Nazaré’s second casualty, following the untimely passing of Márcio Freire in 2023. Yesterday’s episode was also somewhat of a karmic return: the man who saved Maya Gabeira in 2013 was now forced to accept a rescue from another to settle Nazaré’s debt.

In Burle’s own account, relayed to Brazilian media hours before boarding his flight back to Rio, he remembers everything, including keeping a POV camera in his mouth too long while trying to record an image that would explain the scale of what he was experiencing. He remembers delaying the inflation of his safety vest because both hands were committed to not losing the camera as he was being driven underwater. “Excessive confidence,” he called it.

If there’s any comic relief in this situation, it’s that even the most seasoned and gnarliest big-wave surfers are still susceptible to the temptations of content creation. Burle later asked himself: “How far will we go to get a good shot?”

Judging by this one, preferably not to Portugal.