In the Lineup: Female big-wave surfers face a dangerous threshold

In the windy, fearsome conditions of the World Surf League’s third annual women’s Big Wave Tour Jaws Challenge at Peahi, Maui, Nov. 26, only one surfer, Emi Erickson, kept her feet after making the sheer drops down the sheer, towering faces, turning and riding ahead of the whitewater to the shoulders. In the final heat she caught one wave and received the highest single-wave score, but placed third behind her sister Hawaii surfers, winner Keala Kennelly and runner- up Andrea Moller, who caught more and bigger waves, taking off deeper and falling in brutal wipeouts.

This was kind of frustrating, Erickson, 29, said last week in a phone interview from her North Shore home. “I was there to get waves. I was having fun, riding my favorite board, a single-fin (that) everybody said was old-fashioned and traditional.”

The WSL commentators snarkily gave Erickson “kudos for just her equipment choice” but praised her commitment and strategy. “She positioned herself in the lineup knowing what kind of wave she wanted, a little bit further over to the channel, but it’s put her in an opportunity to be able to complete this successful ride.”

In a New York Times Magazine cover story Feb. 7 entitled “The Women of Big-Wave Surfing,” Daniel Duane echoed the commentators. “Erickson stuck to the old traditionalist approach,” he wrote, “taking off where she knew she could make the drop, gliding beautifully across big walls to safety.”

Erickson said she took this more calculated approach because, in the first women’s Peahi Challenge in 2016, “I listened to what everyone said: ‘We want to reward you if you take off deep.’ ” She did, and the wind got under her board and she wiped out, tearing ligaments and muscles and sustaining cuts, bruises and “major emotional blockages. I was crippled for two years.”

She said she still wakes up incapacitated sometimes. That makes it difficult to support herself as a pro surfer without sponsors, teaching surf lessons and working in smoothie and coffee bars.

In a Star-Advertiser photograph of six riders having a free surf at Waimea Bay on a 12-foot wave (Hawaiian measure, with a 20-foot face) Dec. 5, there is a young woman — Erickson — wearing a leg brace.

The photo was “from the first warm-up swell we had this season,” she said, adding that she prefers bigger days with 18-foot sets, still crowded, but with “not that many people who want those big sets.” She does.

In the new big-wave contest world, a gladiator mentality — charging head-down into the biggest, hairiest pit — is glorified and rewarded, even if you wipe out. This differs from regular competitions where you are judged not only by wave choice (size always matters) but performance — speed, turns, sticking your aerials, emerging from barrels.

At Peahi in November, Kennelly, Moller and others suffered pounding wipeouts and hold-downs. Kennelly almost blacked out; Justine Dupont dislocated a shoulder; Bianca Valenti was disoriented, possibly concussed.

“In the end, you’re the one who pays,” Erickson said. She wondered, as Duane did in his article, if women are feeling too much pressure to risk their lives, to paddle like men into same-size waves in order to earn the same-size purses they demanded and won from the WSL in 2018. But women are mostly smaller and lighter than men, fewer in numbers and newer to the big-wave tour.

“I’m super feminist and have been pushing forever, but it’s a double-edged sword,” Erickson said. “We need to play on our strengths, not the men’s.”

Erickson started surfing at age 19, after being a runner, skater and boogie boarder. She took an old board from under the house of her father, Roger Erickson, a former lifeguard and big-wave surfer on the North Shore, and headed straight out into big waves with a female friend, Wrenna Delgado.

“We were surfing giant Sunset alone on the stormiest days, surfing big Waimea, Makaha. Without (flotation) vests. No money, no glory. We fed off each other’s energy.”

She’d like to feel that happy energy on the competitive side of women’s surfing.

Meanwhile, she’s an invitee to the first WSL women’s big-wave contest at Mavericks in California, in holding period until March 31, and hoping for more big Waimea swells.