The 9:24 mark is causing me to reassess my previous conclusion that "you can't surf a tsunami." If a surfer could get out to that point where the wave starts to rise up for the first time, but before it actually breaks into the swirling whirlwind that it appears to become after the initial break...then, maybe. The huge moving swell at 9:45 is more like what a surfer is likely to encounter, and it seems like not so much a wave with a "face" than just a very fast vertical wall of water.

It just seems like a fancy form of suicide to try, though. Too many variables to try to figure out, and even a small tsunami is a much different creature than what one encounters in the surf breaks off Hawaii, for example. The latter is still a single wave, tall and immense as it may be, while a tsunami is the whole ocean in motion.