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. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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