Big Wave Surfing

How it started

Big wave surfing traces to a single session at Waimea BayNorth Shore break on Oahu, Hawaii. Avoided by surfers for over a decade before 1957 due to its dangerous, fast-breaking waves. in 1957, when a crew of California transplants, most famously Greg Noll, rode a break Hawaiian surfers had avoided for fourteen years, ever since a young surfer drowned trying to escape it in 1943.1 Nearly three decades later, in 1984, the sport got its most prestigious stage: the Eddie Aikau Big Wave InvitationalFounded 1984 in memory of Eddie Aikau, a legendary Waimea Bay lifeguard. Only runs when Waimea Bay produces sustained 20-foot Hawaiian-scale waves, sometimes years apart., an invite-only contest at that same bay. For the entirety of its history, every invitee was a man.4

Into the lineup

Big-wave surfer Buzzy TrentPioneering big-wave surfer, part of the original Makaha crew in the 1950s. Publicly opposed women competing in the sport he helped create., one of the sport’s own pioneers, put the reasoning in writing in 1963: women, he said, were “much more emotional than men and therefore have a greater tendency to panic.”2 That attitude held for decades.

It began cracking in 2016: the first women’s Peahi Challenge ran at Maui’s Jaws, and California’s Coastal Commission voted to require the Mavericks contest to include women, though that February’s event still ran with zero women in the actual field, just alternates.3 Four surfers, Paige Alms, Keala Kennelly, Andrea Moller, and Bianca ValentiAlms and Kennelly are both two-time WSL Big Wave Tour champions. Moller is also a paramedic; Kennelly is the first openly gay surfer to win a world surfing title., founded the Committee for Equity in Women’s Surfing that same year specifically to force Mavericks’s hand. The contest didn’t actually run a women’s heat until 2018.2

Betty DepolitoProfessional big-wave surfer since the 1970s, part of the “California Golden Girls” era. Organized the first-ever women’s surfing event at Pipeline in 1980., surfing professionally since the 1970s, spent eight years fighting for a permit for the first standalone women’s big-wave event, the Women’s Waimea Bay Championship, finally securing it in 2017. That same year, Kennelly became the first woman ever invited to the Eddie, though the contest didn’t run that season. The sport’s oldest and most famous single contest didn’t actually include a woman in a completed event until 2023, thirty-nine years after it was founded, when six women, including French surfer Justine Dupont, competed in the biggest Waimea swell in the contest’s history.4