Why surfboards are better than women

Being both a talented shaper and one of the few females in the industry has helped open some doors in the most prestigious shaping rooms of master board builders in France, California, Oahu, and Maui. Here she stands in her backyard shaping bay in Encinitas. She traces a template for a double-winger fish. If you think finding a female shaper is hard, try finding a female glasser. Dewi Malopsy is one of those rare finds. Studying under old-school shaper Jeff Alexander, she began glassing surfboards on the North Shore of Oahu after moving there from Indonesia.

At age 13, Cher Pendarvis caught her first wave on a wooden paddleboard that she borrowed from a lifeguard. Pendarvis is a shaper, artist, and glasser. She was the first female team rider and shaper for Channin Surfboards and the first female staff member at Surfing magazine, hired as an art associate.

Pendarvis continues to contribute to various outlets, has published several books, and is an award-winning artist. For her surfboard designs, she likes to paint using colors inspired by nature. Then my friends told their friends and so on and it just sort of grew from there. It is encouraging to see if other girls can do it, you can do it too.

You are a very inspiring role model for women who want to try surfing as well as women starting their own businesses. When I was learning to surf, I sometimes found I was the only Woman in the line-up which can be a bit intimidating for some! What would you say to young girls and women who want to try surfing but may feel nervous about taking the plunge?

Everyone is focusing on themselves and what they are doing in the surf when they are surfing, no-one is going to be looking at you as everyone is too involved in what they are doing. So, I would say just do it!

The more waves you catch the more you are going to learn. It makes a huge difference! What surfboard do you c urrently ride, and do you have a preferred style of surfing? Foamies catch everything! I have dabbled with loads of different boards and always find myself going back to the foamie. You have recently ordered a custom surfboard through us which is exciting! What did you decide to go for and why? I needed a really good all-rounder, something I can take out all the time.

It feels like we hopefully have encouraged lots of women to join in and to get involved really. I can do it too! There are a lot of benefits from surfing, especially when some girls may be feeling body conscious and going through that difficult time trying to find yourself.

What changes would you like to see? On all tours, there are very few girls compared to loads of guys. Also, in general, the number of competitions available out there for females are way less than those for men, so I think we still have a little way to go. That was a great moment to see that it was enjoyed and well received. But pretty much it is seeing the stoke after each session. So, if you really want to live the full life and fully embrace the whole ocean lifestyle then you can literally go from zero to hero.

I really want to develop another swimwear collection as well. There are too many things in the pipeline but ultimately, we want to create the go to place for women to go for all things surfing. If you enjoyed reading this piece, then please check back here again… we have some more interviews lined up with some incredibly inspiring water women and will be updating this blog regularly.

Posted in News. Browse Shop. No questions asked. Online Surfboard Trade Ins Offset your old stick against a brand new board! Read on to learn a bit more about some the incredible water women of the world who have inspired me the most: 1. Photo Credit: belindabaggs Pollution, rising sea levels and temperatures due to climate change will inevitably change the way our favourite surf spots look unless we make changes now.

Photo Credit: curvysurfergirl Elizabeth ultimately aims to increase representation of plus size models in the surf industry, proving that girls can rip no matter what their size! Big waves are rare. There are only about a dozen places on Earth known to get waves over about 25 feet on the face with the right shape for surfing, and those breaks rarely have ideal conditions more than a few times a year.

Years pass when those conditions never materialize. The scarcity and unpredictability of big waves keep participation low, and the sport remains overwhelmingly male, with perhaps men and two dozen women total, worldwide.

Most big-wave contests over the years have been grass-roots affairs organized by locals who tended to invite their male friends from other big-wave breaks. Over the past two years, though, Valenti and Kennelly, along with two other surfers, Andrea Moller and Paige Alms, have insisted upon the same right to risk their lives in competition that men enjoy, and for equal pay — and they have been more successful than they ever imagined.

Like most female surfers of her generation, Valenti grew up unaware that women even rode big waves. She learned to surf at age 7 in Dana Point, Calif.

In third grade, she wrote an essay about her dream of becoming a professional and surfing the powerful Banzai Pipeline on the North Shore of Oahu. Valenti excelled in youth contests and, like many girl surfers, idolized Kennelly — a top pro at the time, equaling the best men at displays of fearless aggression and technical mastery in dangerous surf. When Valenti was in her early teens, she signed modest endorsement deals with surfwear companies. She subscribed to every surf magazine but found them boring because they featured action shots of only boys and men, with girls strictly on the beach in bikinis.

When she protested, she lost her endorsement contracts. Valenti was captain of the surf team at U. Santa Barbara and, after graduation, took another shot at going pro. Valenti could not afford to travel to more qualifying contests, so she tried to line up new endorsement deals, without luck.

Although there was no announced prize purse for women and only six female contestants, Valenti made the hour drive north. When she arrived, she got to know Kennelly, Moller and Alms, who had bonded while traveling to Oregon from Hawaii. Kennelly grew up in a small town on Kauai, where her father and brother were surfers and Hamilton, a family friend, was her godfather.

She attracted lucrative sponsorships, but she grew frustrated with the Association of Surfing Professionals which became the World Surf League in for its practice of paying women less than men at every contest worldwide. Kennelly was furious. Without the extra tour points that she typically earned at Teahupoo, she saw no path to becoming world champion and, in , left the tour. Male pros, particularly those specializing in big waves, made a living outside the championship tour as so-called free surfers — earning their keep with sponsors by appearing in photos and videos of intimidating surf.

Kennelly gave that a try and also stopped hiding the fact that she was gay — the first professional surfer to do so.

Kennelly joined a small cohort of surfers who set out on Jet Skis anyway to experience Teahupoo as a proper big-wave break, with barrels the size of the Holland Tunnel — if the Holland Tunnel morphed and whirled like the vortex eye of a crystalline-blue tornado that happened to be spinning within a few feet of hard, razor-sharp coral.

Kennelly surfed flawlessly. Some of your senses — like smell, taste and sound — fade away, while others are so incredibly heightened you feel like you have superhuman powers.

Your sight has pinpoint precision focus, and your sense of touch is so amplified you can feel every drop of water on that wave. Two days later, when the waves got much smaller, Kennelly fell into the reef head first. Rushed to a hospital, she underwent emergency facial-reconstruction surgery. The following morning, discharged onto a Tahiti street with a bandaged head, Kennelly realized that nobody was coming to meet her.

Reps from her one remaining sponsor were in town, she says, hosting male pros at a luxury hotel. Andrea Moller, 39, is one of the most decorated water athletes in Hawaiian history, with dozens of records and race victories in windsurfing, outrigger-canoeing and stand-up paddleboarding in addition to big-wave surfing. She grew up on a Brazilian island where her father owned a marina and taught her to windsurf.

In , Moller moved to Maui for college and took up surfing. When she gave birth to a girl five years later, she named her Keala, after Kennelly, whose career Moller followed. They were rarely willing.

They taught themselves field repairs like changing spark plugs, then motored out to Jaws. They found men convinced that women did not belong there. What are you doing here? But I wanted to have the fun they were having. Moller soon towed into a plus-footer, bigger than anything ever ridden by all but a handful of men. That vision never left her. In , Moller returned to school to become a paramedic, but she continued chasing big surf.

In , a wave hit Moller so hard that it ripped her hamstring muscle off the bone. Unable to walk for months, she depended on her year-old daughter for help bathing. Unfortunately, when I do that in my life, I feel incomplete. Paige Alms, who is 30, grew up on Maui and started surfing at She aspired to ride big barrels like Kennelly and recalls running to a local surf shop whenever Kennelly was there signing autographs.

A Maui surfboard shaper mentored Alms from the ages of 13 to 16 and pushed her into foot waves. She first tow-surfed there at 17, and she started paddle-surfing around the same time Moller did. That morning, they pulled on thick wet suits under frigid blue skies. Jet Skis carried them out to the reef, where foot surf broke in long, even walls. All four women were thrilled by the experience of riding big surf without men; Kennelly, in particular, found the abundance of available giant waves almost dangerously liberating.

Much of their talk was about male pros who make enough to buy last-minute intercontinental plane tickets many times a year to big-wave breaks, then charter boats with catered lunches and pay still other men with Jet Skis to pull them out of danger after wipeouts.

Valenti heard a South African pro mention that a spreadsheet helps him keep track of all the surfboards and safety vests he has stashed in storage lockers around the world. All that practice and travel, plus all those big-wave contests open only to men, help men improve and also accumulate the currency of big-wave success — photos and videos that please sponsors, win awards and earn invitations to more contests.

Kennelly, at the peak of her powers, was making ends meet by working full time as a bartender and disc jockey known as D. One morning last winter, at the pastel rowhouse that Valenti shares near the beach in San Francisco, she sat on a chair in her garage among wall racks cluttered with surfboards. Valenti told me that she became an activist at the urging of a filmmaker named Dayla Soul, who was making a documentary about female big-wave surfers in the Bay Area. On June 17, , Valenti listened as the radio host asked Clark about female surfers.

Because the contest could last only one day, it accommodated only 24 athletes. They were chosen by a small committee of men that included Clark. On the radio, Guess explained that for women to qualify, they would have to rank in the top 24 and compete with men — an approach to athletic competition that is virtually unheard-of, including in all other surfing contests.

So she called in to the show and asked what else it would take for Cartel to invite them. A male surfer named Carlos Burle towed a female surfer named Maya Gabeira into an footer there, one of the largest waves ever caught at the time. She was driven underwater and buried in the waves. Burle found her floating face down, unresponsive and not breathing, her ankle broken. He revived her with C.