Kai could splash around all day in front of the old Zen mission, or at Sugar Cove, in Spreckelsville. She would just start crying.” Fortunately, the Lennys lived in Paia, a small town with many beaches. His father, Martin, told me, “She couldn’t even look at photos or home movies from those first four years. Once he could walk, he would simply vanish-at the mall, in the neighborhood. What distinguishes Kai Lenny from this lineage is his ability to surf very big waves as if they were small-shredding, dancing, as if fear has somehow left him alone.Īs a baby, Kai ran his parents ragged. Traditionally, those who surf the biggest waves are more concerned with not falling than with style, and people watching them are mostly astonished that they don’t die. Nobody knows how big a wave might be ridden on a tow board, although Lenny has expressed a determination to find out. The few people still interested are towed into place on a short, narrow board built for high speeds. When the waves reach a certain size, or when the wind gets too strong to paddle against, as it was that day at Pe‘ahi, even a gun becomes inadequate. Most surfers, including very good ones, make a point of not owning a gun, in the interest of avoiding poor choices. Above fifteen or so feet, waves require a board known as a gun-longer and faster-paddling than a modern shortboard. Big waves also move faster, so that just catching them calls for unusual skill and specialized equipment. ![]() The difference of a few feet in height or thickness can mean the difference between a tough fall and a catastrophic beating. I had travelled on Lenny’s support boat, sixteen miles, from Kahului Harbor.Īs waves get bigger, they get wildly more powerful. Surfers often make their way to the great wave, which has a deep channel beside it, by boat or ski. In the mist are the lower slopes of a dormant volcano called Haleakalā, which rises more than ten thousand feet from the sea. The coast is rugged and rural: tall sea cliffs, tropical forest, a few muddy farm roads. But the wipeouts were rare and not terrifying. A few people got pounded and had to be rescued from the white water by ski drivers. But it was not huge by local standards, and the surfers in the water were all locals. The surf was in fact huge that day-twenty-five feet or more on the face. “Just wish it was three times this size.” “It’s so fun,” he said, with Pentecostal conviction. His eyes seemed to be starting out of his head. He pulled out of one wave with an attempted double rodeo flip and splashed down beside me. On that February afternoon, Lenny seemed to be on the biggest wave of every set-fading, hucking airs, downcarving right at the edge of physics, disappearing into foam-choked barrels. He first surfed Pe‘ahi at sixteen, and he tries to be out there whenever it’s ridable. There are few places in the world-some say none-that produce waves of comparable size and beauty, and Lenny was born just up the road. Where did he come by his poise, and his reaction times, which border on optical illusion? Pe‘ahi is part of the answer. Those waves were packed with speeding-truck-crash quantities of violence, and Lenny was going faster, turning harder and more stylishly, than anyone before him. ![]() Possibly he was enjoying himself, but if so that was unnatural. Whipped into position by a Jet Ski, he would drop the towrope on a rapidly steepening wave with a fifty-foot face and start carving quick little rhythmic turns, then launch a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree aerial rotation, as if he were enjoying himself. Lenny, who is twenty-nine, began to light up big-wave surfing five or six years ago with performances that defied understanding. But millions of video-content consumers watch their best efforts-or their worst wipeouts, which can drive even more online traffic. ![]() Professional big-wave surfing is a niche activity, practiced by only a handful of brave souls. These things aren’t done, or at least they weren’t. When I first saw it, from the back of a Jet Ski, in February, I yelped involuntarily. ![]() You may have seen it on video, but that doesn’t prepare you for the velocity, the impossible confidence, of a hard braking turn at the top of an enormous wave, often right in the luminous turquoise window of a lip about to pitch-for that abrupt turn back toward the bottom, as if he wanted the weightless drop of the downcarve more than he wanted to make it out in one piece. Watching Kai Lenny surf at Pe‘ahi, a big-wave spot off the north coast of Maui, is slightly heart-stopping.
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