You don’t really equate Portugal with massive waves, but big wave rider Garrett McNamara knew a sick wave when he saw one. So, he pulled a Bodhi and rode it. Now the video’s making the rounds, the general consensus is that the wave is 90 feet high and…if that’s true, you’re lookin’ at the biggest wave ever surfed. And I thought surfing Tofino was hard! McNamara, you might recall, surfed a wave caused by a falling glacier in Alaska a while back. Suffice to say, he’s got balls big enough to fit in a dump truck.

Forget beer and UFC. Real men buy kayaks. Like Sam Freihofer and Tod Wells, who just took a leap of faith over Metlako Falls, in Eagle Creek, Oregon. That’s an 82 foot plunge, by the way, and beats the former record for a tandem kayak jump by 12 feet.

Dean Potter, slack-lining his way into the record books.

Any video with Dean Potter, high altitudes and no safety harness is gonna be good and this one doesn’t disappoint.  Dean Potter is the American daredevil I blogged about a year ago, and he has a curious habit of climbing mountains without safety equipment, and either jumping off it, or slacklining it (tight-rope walking without equipment) and then BASE jumping his way down.

This video includes footage from his world-record BASE Jump in 2009, with a wing-suit.

I am really at a loss here whether Potter, or Felix Baumgartner is the baddest of the bad.  I take comfort though in knowing that there are guys like this with more testosterone than any reasonable guy should have.  Guess I’m not the only one who took Point Break way too seriously.  Bodhi would be proud.

On August 16, 1960, American Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger boarded a helium balloon at Wright Field, Ohio. For the next hour and 31 minutes, Kittinger ascended into the stratosphere. Then, at 102,800 feet, or 31,333 metres for us metric system devotees, he stepped OUT of the balloon gondola. What transpired for the next 13 minutes and 45 seconds was beyond awe-inspiring. Kittinger fell without a parachute for 4 minutes and 31 seconds and reached a maximum speed of 614 miles an hour plummeting to Earth. Suffice to say, this is the highest skydive in history, and the record has stood for 50 years. Now Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner, of BASE Jumping Christ the Redeemer fame, wants to break the record, some time within the year, in a highly publicized jump that would see him take a leap of faith from 23 miles above planet Earth. I hope he makes it, but I have to nod in respect to Kittinger first. A man who jumps from 20 miles in the air and lives to tell about it has cojones big enough to fit in a dump truck, and while records are made to be broken, Joe Kittinger will always be remembered as the first man to jump from space.

Wanna take a dip in the pool?  Make sure you  take your altitude sickness pills first.  Some of these pools look downright creepy.  Check out the pool at Marina Bay Sands…yikes.  Then again, the pool at the Golden Nugget holds a certain appeal.  These would be the top ten most extreme rooftoop hotels around the world, and they probably won’t be appearing at a Best Western near you.

Now for some BASE Jumping of the underwater kind, or blue hole diving, as it’s known.  World champion free-diver Guillaume Nery was doing a free-diving competition in the Bahamas and made this stunning video of him free-diving (yes, that means diving while holding your breath) at Dean’s Blue Hole, which is the second-deepest blue hole in the world.  I have no clue which blue hole is officially the deepest, but at 202 metres, or 663 feet, is more than deep enough to earn this guy bragging rights for having gills for lungs.  For real, how do you really hold your breath that long???  For the record, he doesn’t actually touch the bottom, but he still has my vote to play Aqua Man in the upcoming Marvel movie.  I’m kidding, they’re not making an Aqua Man movie.  I’m just sayin’ conceivably, if they DID, he should play him.

You’re not gonna see them whipping into a phone booth to don a red cape anytime soon, but there are those among us who do some pretty superhuman things.  Guys like Alain Robert, the Human Spider, who’s climbed some of the world’s tallest buildings, including Petronas Towers and the former World Trade Center with only his hands and climbing shoes, Wim Hof, aka the Iceman, capable of functioning in extreme cold for long periods (like running an Arctic marathon shirtless at 20 below zero!) and Daniel Tammet , aka the Brain Man, who once recited the first 22,000 digits of pi, and learned Icelandic – one of the world’s most difficult languages – in a week.  Although the Hulk will always be my favourite.

Anyone ever tell you to take a cold shower?  I’m not sure if anyone ever told Lewis Gordon Pugh to cool off that way, but it seems he’s done one better than that.  Well I wouldn’t say better, but a lot colder.  Last week, Gadling.com reported that Pugh successfully swam a kilometre of arguably the coldest waters on Earth – Pumori Lake in the Himalayas, near Mount Everest.  At 17,700 above sea level, Pugh’s little dip set a world record for the highest altitude swim ever recorded, and the longest known time anyone’s swam, let alone survived, a glacial lake swim, at 22 minutes and 51 seconds.  brrrrrrrrrr.

The picture says it all.  Daredevil Austrian BASE Jumper Felix Baumgartner scaled one of the largest and certainly most famous statues on Earth way back in January 1999.  What made this jump so spectacular was that this was the lowest BASE jump on record at the time.  At 95 feet, Baumgartner had just seconds after jumping to pull his chute.  The high jumps like Burj Khalifa might be sexier, but it’s low jumps like this that are riskier because there’s precious little time for the parachute to open before the jumper becomes road pizza.  This jump went down in history as one of the most dangerous, and most spectacular ever caught on film, and enough to make Environmental Graffiti’s The 5 Most Mindblowing BASE Jumps in History, and my own personal thumbs up.