A Brazilian is emerging as one of the world’s top big wave surfers – and she’s a woman. Maya Gabeira has journeyed to tackle the most terrifying swells, becoming ‘one of the boys’ with the handful of men who share her passion...

She first took to a surfboard as an escape from her own spiralling teenage rebellion, but now Maya Gabeira is breaking as many taboos and preconceptions as she is surfing breakers.

The morning breaks cloudy in Saquarema, a surfing town two hours’ drive north through lush countryside up the coast from Rio de Janeiro. Just off the shore, a dozen surfers, photographers and a cameraman bob up and down on jetskis in the dark water. They’ve been monitoring this particular swell for a week, checking the predictions and data fed to surfing websites from swell buoys, anticipating waves of up to 6m or more. As the waves crest and crash on a low reef, the first of the group straps on a light orange board and drops into the water. Though the wetsuit is heavily padded, the surfer’s long, brown, sun-streaked hair and the curves are unmistakably feminine. There is a girl in this group of tattooed and musclebound surfers. Her name is Maya Gabeira, and she’s on course to change the face of big-wave surfing forever.

She clutches the tow-line as her partner, Brazilian big-wave surfer Carlos Burle, pulls her onto the first wave of the day with his jetski. The wall of the wave amassing powerfully behind her, Gabeira skims across the water at over 40kph, her legs wide on the board, absorbing the hidden bumps on the face. She powers through as the wave crests and white water begins crashing down behind her. She pulls off of the shoulder and drops into the water. Burle picks her up in the jetski. She heads back out to catch another.

“Maya is like, ‘I want that,’” Burle says later, thrusting an arm forwards and laughing. “She wants it really bad and she’s a warrior. You can tell that.”

Not quite. Not at first. If Gabeira’s bronzed skin and sun-streaked hair are typical of the stunning women this area of the world produces with alarming regularity, then her muscular shoulders, toned legs and a body marked by scratches and bruises tell another story. Her voice is thick with a drowsy Carioca drawl, the words coming as if poured into a tall glass on a sweltering Rio afternoon, punctuated frequently by a startling laugh that’s somewhere between a horse’s whinny and a pubescent choirboy practising arpeggios.

Underneath the veneer is a young woman driven to pursue a rush that few of us will ever know, punishing her body and testing her resolve as she breaks into a macho and fiercely-territorial boy’s club – all for a few big waves.

“I thought it would be so cool to have a girl who could do it, just like the boys,” she says. “I thought it was an impressive sport, and so radical and intense, and it took so much dedication. And I thought if I ever saw a girl doing it, I’d be impressed… Right now, I can’t even visualise that that girl is me.”

Big-wave surfing has been around since the late 1950s, when a handful of surfers first paddled into 6m waves on Oahu’s mythical North Shore in Hawaii. Legends such as Greg Noll paved the way for the discipline’s biggest names, from Ken Bradshaw to Laird Hamilton in the ensuing decades. Massive breaks and barrels, like Maverick’s in California, Teahupoo in Tahiti or Dungeons in South Africa, are as sacred to the surfing community as football cathedrals like the Nou Camp, San Siro and Old Trafford are to football fans.

Better weather prediction technology and the advent of tow-in surfing – where the speed of massive waves too fast for paddling is overcome by hitting them at upwards of 75kph with a tow-line and a jetski – has opened up new spots at the rate of two or three a year.

And yet big-wave surfers remain a small group. The physical and psychological strength required to surf big waves is intimidating. Riders must be able to overcome violent wipeouts that break boards and bones, crack ribcages and plunge them underwater for minutes at a time. There have been several women who have joined the men on big waves over the decades. But none have, like Gabeira, made the commitment required to forge a professional career out of it.

“She was the first woman ever to start showing up at other places,” says Bill Sharp, who runs the XXL Big Wave awards, sponsored by Billabong, which has awarded Gabeira the top overall female performance three years running. “She showed up at Maverick’s, Tahiti… I don’t think there’s been another woman who’s chased swells.”

Her ascent is all the more impressive, considering she’s only been surfing for eight years. The daughter of a well-known fashion designer and one of Brazil’s most respected politicians, Gabeira enjoyed a childhood of privilege that spiralled out of control following her parents’ divorce when she was 11. A period of schoolgirl rebellion, of smoking and drinking, came to an end when a boyfriend introduced her to surfing when she was 14.

She was far from a natural. It took her a month to get up on the board in the bubbling white water of the shorebreak. But Gabeira was hooked. She surfed daily during a student exchange year on Australia’s Gold Coast. Upon her return to Rio, she moved straight into a small hotel on a nearby beach. Gone was the obstinate little girl obsessed with fashion and nightlife, her place taken by a surf-chasing tomboy, out in the waves with the boys. Soon after she finished high school, she left her family and country, and moved to Hawaii. She was 17.

“I moved there for the surfing, but it was difficult to see how I was going to be a pro surfer. I wasn’t competing, and I had no sponsors,” she says.

Her meagre English qualified her for a waitress job where she would read the menu to customers and cast covetous glances at the big waves breaking on Waimea Bay. The spot on the north shore of Oahu has legendary status in big-wave circles, its waves reaching anything up to 18m and surfed by legends of the sport throughout the years.

“Hawaii was the best and only place to establish a big wave reputation,” says Bruce Jenkins, author of the illuminating big-wave love poem North Shore Chronicles. “You surfed Pipeline for the biggest tubes in the world. You surfed Sunset for bigger waves in a more challenging setting. And you surfed Waimea when it got really big.”

The locals out in the line-ups are notoriously territorial, calling interlopers off waves, breaking off their fins if they don’t obey, or worse. It’s a shark pit where only the proven get access to big waves. And it’s dominated by men.

But there was Gabeira, paddling out on her own on borrowed boards on the worst days, where rain lashed down on waves the size of three-storey buildings and higher, awash in white foam. She’d sit in the channel on her board, watching local riders like Andrew Marr ride massive waves. She’d watch the waves close out and swallow her fear, getting used to the din and the violent motion of the swell. She’d stay out for hours, surfing in only when the sun set or a shift started. “You overcome your fears when you put yourself in uncomfortable situations and you force yourself to live through that,” she says. “You figure, ‘OK, I can survive this.’ So, if you can survive this, then you can surf it, and then you’re through to another level.”

In February 2006, two years after she moved to Hawaii and on a day when the roads near Waimea were washed over with sand, she paddled out in stormy conditions and caught her first big waves, riding four of a set of the biggest as the men looked on.

Soon afterwards, locals and big-wave riders from around the world stopped thinking of the young Brazilian as a puzzling anomaly and began considering her as one of their own. Burle began mentoring the young Gabeira and teaching her the tricks of tow-in surfing. “I had a lot of guys come to me and say, ‘What are you doing? You’re going to kill the girl,’” recalls Burle. “I said, ‘Listen, she wants to do it – if it’s not me, it’s going to be someone else. And the most important thing is that she’s ready – she’s training. She’s training more than you and me!’”

Later that year, she surfed Todos Santos, a reef off of the Mexican coast, and the fearsome, coldwater break of Maverick’s, which in 1994 had claimed the life of big-wave virtuoso Mark Foo and had been surfed by few women. The photo of her on those 10–15m waves won her the XXL Big Wave award for best overall female performance, her first. The big sponsors came soon afterwards, and Gabeira’s impossible dream of getting paid to travel around the world surfing became a reality.

With it came the resentment. Surfers on the women’s pro tour questioned what a relative amateur was doing on massive waves. The men who had been surfing big waves for decades in anonymity, without the benefit of sponsor money and media coverage, were jealous of Gabeira’s rising fame. She’s been chased off waves and received stinging insults in public from surfers she considered role models. ‘Maya is too young,’ ‘Maya isn’t experienced enough,’ ‘Maya shouldn’t be here…’ It was the same, over and over again.

“There’s so many barriers to break – it’s something new you know…” she says, her voice trailing off. “It’s a man’s world and, once you put yourself out there, you have to take whatever comes your way. And sometimes it’s not nice stuff.”

But recovering from such setbacks seems wired into the Gabeira family DNA. As a young man, Fernando Gabeira was tortured and expelled from Brazil for his involvement with a group that kidnapped the American ambassador in the 1960s. Now a congressman, Fernando has built his reputation on fighting corruption. Last autumn, he came out of nowhere to lose the Rio de Janeiro mayoral race, last by a razor-thin margin. It was a campaign Maya worked on, canvassing and setting up microphones at his rallies. “He deals with such high risks, and there’s so many bad people involved, and he goes out and takes them down,” says Gabeira. “I look at my dad’s life and, seriously, it’s not a problem at all to deal with a bad local somewhere.”

A consistent challenge has been to get her body to sustain the level of abuse meted out by big waves. Burle’s jetski has fallen on her head, and she broke her nose in 12 places last year when her board hit her during a wipeout. Her asthma, a nuisance since childhood, regularly leaves her struggling for air after she emerges from a wipeout. The fitness levels required have meant strict diets, early morning paddling and tow-in practice, and evening workouts with a personal trainer, even during these, her few weeks of ‘vacation’ in Brazil.

“It’s a violent sport, and… everywhere, I’m getting worked, so it’s not like I’m pushing the limits once a year – I’m pushing it every day, over and over again,” she says. “But if you don’t train just as hard in your daily life, then how are you going to push it when the day comes?”

The waves have started getting bigger off of Saquarema, and a small crowd has gathered on the shore to check out the group of surfers. Gabeira takes a few more 6m waves, and a few wipeouts, before her asthma and a sore throat that’s been bothering her for a few days make continuing impossible. Camera crews film her as she emerges from the water and some of the locals ask for autographs.

Gabeira’s fame has begun expanding beyond Brazil, where she recently appeared on Globo TV’s Sunday variety show watched by 80m people, to the greater surfing community and beyond. By Burle’s estimation, Gabeira has more of a chance to push big-wave surfing into the mainstream than anyone else. It’s a prospect both exhilarating and exhausting to the 22-year-old, who still struggles to fathom how she went from travelling the world’s surf meccas on borrowed money and clothes to assuming the mantle of professional women’s big-wave pioneer.

“There’s one Maya who really wants to keep it underground and low-profile,” she says. “And there’s another Maya that wants the challenge, wants to make it big, wants to prove to herself and to everyone that it’s possible in this sport.”

For now, the former Maya is content to rest on the terrace of the Maasai, the most upscale of the low-slung surf hotels in this town, sipping coffee and barely touching her breakfast. The distant whine of jetski motors announces the return of Burle and the rest of the group. As five jetskis pull on to the sand, Gabeira leaves the terrace and heads through a small crowd of people to the group. Her left foot is scraped up from a crash against the reef earlier in the morning, the cuts still red with blood. But Maya shoulders up against one of the jetskis and, her hair tucked under a hat, heaves with the rest of the group as they push one ski after another onto a trailer, smiling and joking… Just one of the boys.

Words: Andreas Tzortzis

Photos: Carlos Serrao

This article originally appeared in The Red Bulletin magazine