Oahu’s Banzai Pipeline crowned its first queen on Sunday.

Hawaii’s Moana Jones Wong, 22, made surf history by winning the first-ever women’s Billabong Pipe Pro in Loving Memory of Andy Irons. She is the first woman to take home the championship trophy, a surfboard shaped by Gerry Lopez; the day before, 11-time world champ Kelly Slater, 49, earned the men’s trophy with a near-perfect performance in towering, toothy barrels, with Hawaii’s Seth Moniz, 25, placing second.

The event, which kicked off the World Surf League’s 2022 championship season, saw Wong defeat Hawaii’s five-time world champ and Olympic gold medalist Carissa Moore, 29, as she charged dicey, still-big waves, emerging from barrels with a smile and calm grace that evoked comparisons to Hawaii surfing pioneer Rell Sunn.

“Carissa is my favorite surfer, she’s my hero,” a teary Wong told commentator Strider Wasilewsky just after her win, as they sat on their surfboards in the water during the World Surf League’s broadcast of the event.

“I don’t believe it … this was the best moment of my life,” she said a few minutes later as she stood on the winner’s platform, her red helmet replaced by colorful haku lei and holding the winner’s trophy with its painted aqua-blue Pipeline wave by Phil Roberts.

In addition to winning the surfboard and the $80,000 for taking first place, Wong catapulted to the top of the WSL rankings and secured a wild card invitation to the next event on the championship tour, the Hurley Pro, scheduled for Friday through Feb. 23 just down the road at Sunset Beach.

Asked how it felt to be No. 1 in the world, “It’s crazy, all this happened so fast,” Wong said in a phone interview following the awards ceremony.

“I really thought I wasn’t going to win, because I was surfing against the best girl surfers in world and thinking I was not on level they’re on.”

Her ambition and reward throughout the contest, she said, was simply to have the experience of surfing Pipeline in the company of one or two other women instead of the customary male-dominated pack.

“It’s super crowded everytime I go out, so I just wanted the opportunity to surf Pipe, that’s all I was really thinking about,” said the North Shore native, who was born in Haleiwa, raised in Pupukea, and paddled out to Pipeline for the first time when she was 12 years old.

Asked how she knew how to pick the ride-able gems and make it through three barrels in Sunday’s large, disorganized surf — with the wave faces churned by rip currents and two different swells — she credited the late Derek Ho, Hawaii’s first world pro surfing champion, who mentored her in the storied, lethal break.

“I would be out at Pipeline with Uncle Derek every day when it was bad and when it was good, and sometimes when it was bad we were the only two people,” she said.

“He said to get good at Pipe you have to surf it in all conditions, including the wrong swell direction, too windy, too big,” Wong said, “So out there today, I knew exactly how it was going to be.”

She described Ho, who always encouraged and supported her and gave her waves, as “really cool and super special.”

But above and beyond her own career, the first women’s Pipe Pro, Wong added, represented a watershed advancement for her gender and her sport.

“I mean, I think this was the greatest thing in women’s surfing to pretty much happen, to have a contest out at Pipe on the championship tour level,” she said.

“It’s groundbreaking for women’s surfing and women’s history,” Wong added, “I’m so grateful to be part of this, I think it’s just the beginning for women’s surfing, and it’s going to get better and better.”

She was looking forward to the challenge of the upcoming Sunset event, where she will be wearing WSL’s gold jersey, reserved for the top-ranked female and male athletes.

“Growing up, my dad would make me surf there almost every day — I actually surfed more at Sunset than at Pipe when I was younger,” she said, adding her first big contest win was a junior event at Sunset Beach when she was 13.

A five-time finalist on the WSL Qualifying Series at Pipeline, she won the HIC Pipe Pro, one of the events in the open-entry Van’s Triple Crown of Surfing, last year; Moore won the overall event last year and swept all three events in this year’s Triple Crown.

Asked if she planned to try out her Gerry Lopez surfboard, its deck emblazoned with an aqua Pipeline barrel, flowers, butterflies and shells, Wong demurred.

“I’m gonna keep that in my house and just never, ever let anything happen to it,” she said.