She felt a burden to prove that female big-wave surfers can keep up with men - more so because she helped found, in 2016, the Committee for Equity in Women’s Surfing, an activist group that started with the modest ambition of getting women invited to big-wave contests, from which they had always been excluded, and grew unexpectedly into a reckoning for the global sport of competitive surfing. It was already afternoon when Valenti decided she had to get in the water. Valenti watched these men do what contemporary big-wave pros must to succeed - deliberately ride the most dangerous and violent portions of the day’s biggest waves - displaying astonishing skill and bravery, but also losing control and cartwheeling down heaving blue mountainsides, shattering $1,500 surfboards and being pushed to the bottom of the sea and requiring rescue. Valenti took in the scene: 16 other boats crowded with photographers, 12 men on Jet Skis racing in and out of the danger zone to rescue surfers after wipeouts and, among the waves, 50-plus men from what might be called the international big-wave jet set, an almost exclusively male community of pros from Europe, Africa, Australia, Hawaii and California. Valenti also follows the guidance of a Stanford neuroscientist and her personal sports psychologist to conjure spirit animals appropriate to specific surf conditions: killer bee, spider monkey and, that day at Jaws, a character she called Malolo bull kitty, a cross between a flying fish, a bull and, well, a kitty. Back home, she jumps off 10-meter diving platforms to overcome fear of long falls and practices the breathing techniques of an eccentric Dutch athlete and endurance guru, Wim Hof, who is known as the Iceman, in hopes of better surviving long underwater hold-downs after wipeouts, when turbulent water prevents a surfer from rising to get air. And she openly confessed that it was her life’s dream. Valenti knew that getting barreled at Jaws would be a career-defining moment for her. Jaws is one of the world’s two most important big-wave breaks the other is Maverick’s, a half-hour south of San Francisco, which Valenti surfs regularly. She had surfed smaller waves there many times but waves of this size only a few, and on this particular afternoon, she had yet to get in the water. But that day Kennelly was trying to avoid hospitalization by restraining her native impulse toward extreme risk-taking.
tubed, the ne plus ultra of the sport, by riding inside the whirling cylinder created when the lip of the wave curls over and forms a tunnel before collapsing. The wave did not qualify as mind-blowingly huge, and Kennelly did not get barreled, a.k.a. It wasn’t the kind of ride that attracts endorsement deals or wins the big-wave equivalent of an Oscar at the annual World Surf League Big Wave Awards. Kennelly had already ridden a 40-footer that day, paddling her surfboard to catch a wave at its tallest point, hopping to her feet and soaring down the enormous blue face, then turning hard onto the unbroken wall and riding fast in front of the curl until the wave petered out. A strong wind was also creating bumps on the ocean surface, like boulders on a bad dirt road. They were too big, really, with plenty in the ideal range of 40 to 50 feet on the face but others in the borderline-impossible range of 70 to 80. The waves that day, at a surf spot called Peahi or more commonly known as Jaws, were the biggest in recent memory. Kennelly, 40 and a slight 5-foot-6 with spiky peroxided hair, lives on Oahu in Hawaii and is the best female big-wave surfer on Earth. Valenti, who is 33 and a muscular 5-foot-5, with a small, square jaw and friendly brown eyes, lives in San Francisco and is the best female big-wave surfer on the United States mainland. One sunny morning in January 2018, on a white boat in the blue sea off the Hawaiian island Maui, Bianca Valenti and Keala Kennelly sat on a beanbag listening to “German Sparkle Party,” a song by the Something Experience, and waiting for the right moment to surf 50-foot waves.