"It was something that I had never seen before out there," Alo Slebir, a veteran of large swells, tells PEOPLE Johnny Dodd is a senior writer at PEOPLE, who focuses on human interest, crime and ...

A split second later, a wave growing to the size of a 10-story office building — and traveling faster than any swell he’d ever ridden — rose up behind him, and Slebir found himself rocketing ...