as told by Maya Gabeira
That surfing lore doesn’t include very many female big wave stories is understandable: There haven’t been very many female big wave riders. Until recently. Over the past ten years a small but very determined cadre of waterwomen have worked their way into the peak at heavy water breaks previously considered “for men only.” One of the most intrepid is Brazil’s Maya Gabeira, who’s earned much respect for her commitment to the steep and deep. But she’s also learned that that sort of rep comes at a price—in this case a near drowning at Hawaii’s Waimea Bay.
I’ve had asthma since I was one year old, so I’ve grown up with that feeling of struggling for breath. And the fear of suffocation. Not the best situation for riding big waves. And the 2009 big wave season ended up being the toughest one ever for my asthma. A lot of the time I was struggling for air, sitting on a chair on land, so it was an especially big challenge for me to be in the ocean, tossed by huge waves, knowing I had such a serious limitation. I learned to work around it. There were a few swells that I was actually 100 percent for and other days when I had to go cautiously and still others when I couldn’t be out there at all. And that was a hard thing to live with because surfing big waves is my life.
But how do you face a big set with no air? If I was going to surf on those really big days, I would have to control my breathing and my heart rate, impossible demands during an asthma crisis. To have an asthma attack during a long hold-down was one more variable to deal with. I had to learn which days I could actually manage, and that meant knowing my limitations. In a crunch, I breathed slowly and hoped for the best.
On the 11th of January, a Monday, the biggest swell of the year hit the North Shore. I was just coming out of a bad asthma crisis and had been taking crazy amounts of cortisone for ten straight days. I wasn’t anywhere near 100 percent. But I couldn’t miss that swell. When Waimea Bay began breaking, I was there.
I paddled out at eight that morning. The bay was big but not out of control. I rode a few waves, but I wasn’t pushing myself hard. Not yet. Every breath was important—and difficult. Those ten days on massive cortisone had left me at about half strength. I’d been out for about five hours and was tired enough when this huge set rolled in and caught everyone inside, just cleaned up the whole bay. The entire pack was scratching like crazy to get over this monster, and I’m stroking hard, trying to slow my breathing, trying to stay calm. But I was last in line when the lip curled over with about twenty boards and bodies all over the place. I had nowhere to go. I got sucked up and over the falls and driven down deep. I’d never experienced anything like it. Twenty feet down and all these boards are banging up against me, and I can feel people flailing underwater—total chaos. Then I’m tangled bad in leash lines, mine and several others as well. You can’t see anything under a wave like that. Not up or down. After the first wave washed over, the ocean calmed slightly but I still couldn’t battle to the surface. I was totally wrapped up in leashes, dragging along underwater and getting nervous about the whole situation, feeling like I was in a fatal accident happening in slow motion. Really slow motion—now fighting for air and for my life.
Then the second wave came. I remember thinking, Wow. I’ve never been down for two waves before. As the second wave pounded me deeper, along with the others wrapped up in those leashes, I knew if I didn’t do something quickly I would die. And, yes, I had all the flashes in my mind—images of family, of people I loved, everything rushing up from the deep.
I was barely sixteen years old when I left Rio and flew to Hawaii. I told my parents I would stay on the Islands for a year, work on my English, and return to Brazil and finish university. I was gone for three years. My parents hated me then, but loved me now. And now I was dying. So I had to do something. I had to get air. So I fought and clawed at my leash, one of those with a quick release—I’d almost forgotten. It never occurred to me that I’d have to use the quick release in an emergency situation. I reached down to my ankle and pulled the release, wiggled free from the other leashes, and finally could swim to the surface. This was the closest I’ve ever come to drowning.
I accept the risks. As a surfer with asthma I know the dangers every time I paddle out. All I can do is do it with love and passion and be dedicated to staying alive. But I’m not going to stop riding big waves because of a bad hold-down at Waimea. And I’m not going to stop because I’m scared to die.
Last year I was driving down Kam Highway at dawn with a Star-bucks coffee, checking the surf. It was blown out and rainy, and I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to shoot. There was no one in the water from Lanis to Waimea to Pipe. I drove by Sunset Beach, and to my surprise there were two little specs way out in the ocean. The swell was a huge washing machine of current and cross chop. I pulled over and watched as South African big wave charger Andrew Marr took a monster closeout in to the beach, riding straight until the wave clipped him. A few minutes later he plodded up the beach, retrieved his bike from the lifeguard tower, and slowly rode off. That left the other surfer out there alone. I waited and watched as the other surfer finally got a massive wall from the outside. It closed out, and then there was nothing. The person disappeared. After a few minutes of whitewater, to the horizon I saw the surfer on the beach coming out of the treacherous shorebreak: It was Maya Gabeira. I couldn’t believe it. No one saw this; she didn’t do it for money or fame.
—Dace Collyer
REALLY GET YOU IN THE HOT CURL!
Waikiki, Oahu, Hawaii. In 1923 an artist named John Kelly sailed over from San Francisco with his young family to do illustrations and etchings for Waikiki’s expanding hotel row. By 1928, Kelly’s nine-year-old son, also named John, was learning how to surf on a miniature redwood plank shaped by David Kahanamoku, Duke’s brother. The younger Kelly soon made friends with two other local haole surfers, a chalk-white scrap-per named Wally Froiseth and a quiet, slender, well-dressed boy named Fran Heath. They rode all the Waikiki breaks and even discovered another half-dozen spots within paddling distance of Kelly’s house at Black Point, on the east side of Diamond Head. When they weren’t surfing, they hung out in an overgrown beachfront lot not far from the Moana Hotel; people started calling them the “Empty Lot Boys.”
Kelly, Froiseth, and Heath watched and learned from the top beachboy surfers at Queen’s and Public’s, laughing in amazement at the manic wave-riding genius of Joseph “Scooter Boy” Kaopuiki, a former state welterweight boxing champion who ran, hopped, and pirouetted from stem to stern on a 15-foot fire-engine-red hollow board, stopping now and then to face the beach, spread his fingers, and waggle his hands like Al Jolson. By the time Kelly and his friends entered high school, however, they looked upon the Waikiki surf scene with a more critical eye. The old guard was just plugging along, doing the same things they had for years: taking the same angles, performing the same tourist-pleasing acrobatic tricks, and riding the same boards.
However, there was still a lot for the young up-and-coming surfer to admire in the beachboys: They dressed well, often got laid, and were the best-connected people in Waikiki. But the beachboys lacked the single-focus commitment to surfing of the Empty Lot gang. “We used to call it ‘surf drunk,’ ” Froiseth later said. “We talked about it, slept on it, dreamed about it; surfing was practically our whole life.”
The older surfers, in other words, didn’t much care about advancing the performance standard, while the new kids cared about little else. This rarely caused any friction since there were waves enough for everyone. But occasionally the two groups collided—literally, in some cases. A middle-aged Duke Kahanamoku once made a leisurely descent into a wave that Froiseth was already riding, and the two surfers banged together violently. Froiseth came up swearing. A friend paddled over and in a quiet but urgent voice asked if Froiseth knew who he was yelling at—he did, of course—and Froiseth yelled back, “I don’t give a fuck who he is!” On the beach, Froiseth was satisfied to discover that the collision had put a fist-sized ding in what, sixty years later, he still dismissively referred to as Duke’s “big longboard.”
The Empty Lot Boys didn’t like longer boards. They didn’t like hollow boards either—too buoyant and tippy. Heath was the best surfer of the group and from a wealthy family, and at age eighteen, he had a beautiful new Pacific System Homes Swastika model board freighted over from Los Angeles. On a summer morning in 1937, Heath and Kelly paddled out to a Diamond Head reef called “Browns,” located near Kelly’s house, to try to ride some overhead waves.
On wave after wave, both surfers kept “sliding ass”—spinning out—as they tried to hold an angle across the steep faces. Kelly stared down at his plank during a backyard lunch break that afternoon and came to what now seems like an obvious design appraisal: too much planing surface in the tail section. The faster the board went, the higher it rode in the water and the less “bite” it had. On an 8-foot wave, the boards were virtually uncontrollable. (Tom Blake had in effect already solved this problem a few years earlier by inventing the surfboard fin, but it hadn’t caught on; the Hawaiian surfers were all still riding finless boards.)
Kelly, on the spot, convinced Heath to hand over his still-new Swastika. After setting the board on a pair of sawhorses, Kelly walked into the garage and returned with a small ax. He stood for a moment looking down at the board’s stern and with a determined overhead swing buried the ax blade 3 inches into the rail. Both surfers then got to work, giving the blocky tail section a more streamlined profile. From corner to corner, the board’s back end shrunk from about 18 inches to 5 inches, and Kelly and Heath blended the new rail lines to meet the original plane shape just below the board’s halfway point. They also thinned out the edges and reshaped the bottom surface near the tail, giving it a boat-hull roundness.
Later that afternoon, with the new varnish coat still tacky, the two surfers paddled back out to a still-humping Browns lineup. Kelly had the new board, and on his first wave it bit into the wave face, and he was able to draw a high, fast angle toward the deep-water channel. Froiseth and Kelly customized their own boards the next day. Not long afterward, Froiseth shouted out, “These things really get you in the hot curl!” With that, the new narrow-tail design had a name.
The hot curl design, like the plank and the hollow, had no lift in the nose or tail; viewed from the side, the top surface was perfectly flat. Because it had less surface area, it paddled slower than the other boards and bogged down in small, flat waves. With a few exceptions—including a sharp-tongued little Queen’s Surf dynamo named Albert “Rabbit” Kekai—the Waikiki beachboys had no interest in the hot curl; hollows and modified planks remained the rule in Hawaii for another ten to fifteen years. Still, Kelly’s new board introduced continuous rail curve, thinner edges, and a rounded hull shape, all of which became standard board design features.
Kelly’s new board was one of those developments that, in hindsight, seems both wildly modern and woefully overdue. Modern surfing begins at the turn of the century with George Freeth and Jack London, Alexander Hume Ford, and the Outrigger Canoe Club. Lagging by a full thirty years, modern surfboard design begins with the hot curl.
—From The History of Surfing, by Matt Warshaw