My mother was 41 and I was 14. We were 27 years apart, but we were equally seduced by the challenge of the waves, the power of the ocean, and a never-ending quest for adventure. We surfed together during what became known as the golden age of Hawaiian surfing.

One moment always comes back to me. It was a spring morning in 1959, shortly before I was to graduate from high school. My mother and I rose at dawn and went out to the lawn to check the Makaha surf. We could see that there was a 6- to 8-foot swell running, with glassy waves.

We waxed our boards — on waves like these, we couldn’t afford to slip — then hoisted them under our arms and headed down the beach. We walked a quarter mile along the bay, side by side, our bare feet crunching on the cool morning sand. During my childhood, I had longed to spend time with my mother, but she was always busy working. There was comfort in walking with her, in sharing the anticipation of the surf — which, of course, contained its own unknowns.

A golden disk was just coming up over the mountain, a delicate breeze was flowing down the valley. The air was filled with the pungent, musty smell of kukui nuts that had washed ashore. We paddled out, dodging incoming waves, to a spot we knew well, just past the underwater coral heads. We arrived and sat upright, our bare legs straddling the boards and our feet plunging into the morning sea.

A set approached. We let the men take the first wave. We claimed the next one, heading our boards toward shore with a few little paddles and turns of the feet. As the wave approached, we lay flat, readying ourselves. I paddled like mad to catch the wave and felt my board rise in the water. My mother did the same.

In a few seconds, the power of the wave propelled us. We popped up to a standing position and angled to the right, heading down a wall of water that was feathering with ocean spray. It felt like flying. I was gliding down the face, keeping close yet just ahead of the breaking wave as it crested with white water. My mother was doing the same, standing on my right side, closer to the outer edge. Several times throughout the ride we both slowed down, stalling before turning and cutting back toward the breaking wave, shooting down the wall of water closer to the curl for added acceleration.

The ride went like that, both of us slowing down, cutting back, speeding up, always in tandem. It was one long, unforgettable moment. Not one of symbiosis, exactly, because we had parity as we rode that wave. It was more simpatico, or deep sympathy — a kind of knowing each other and each other’s moves. It was an elemental connecting with the waves, with the ocean, and with each other.

A few months after that, I would leave Makaha again for life in San Jose, Calif., as an awkward young bride. My life and my mother’s would soon flow in their own directions, sometimes diverging, sometimes converging, sometimes just running in parallel. But that morning, as we sped across the wave together, I couldn’t help thinking how lucky we were.

Vicky Heldreich Durand is the author of “Wave Woman: The Life and Struggles of a Surfing Pioneer,” from which this is excerpted and tells the story of her mother, Betty Pembroke Heldreich Windstedt.