Surfing
Surfing
Meet Moana Jones, the Pipe specialist pioneering her own path
Red Bull’s new series, No Small Feat, shows what it takes to build a career at Pipeline, from the perils to the peaks.
Four years ago, Moana Jones figured she’d never surf a good wave at Pipe. The Pupukea local and pro surfer had grown up on Oahu’s North Shore, and had a penchant for getting barreled. At 18, with years of experience in the water and a lifetime of longing to master the notorious lefthander, she felt ready.
Until she wasn’t. For an entire session, she bobbed around the lineup. Watching waves roll by. Catching nothing. Pipeline, she decided, would forever elude her, like her own white whale of a wave.
“I almost gave up,” says Jones. “I thought, ‘I can't surf Pipe, it’s way too hard.’ Because it is a very hard wave. It's not like others.” Indeed, with its nearly-vertical drop, ever-packed lineup with a specific pecking order, body-crushing power and razor-sharp reef, there’s no room there for error.
But Jones, armed with more grit than most, returned the next day. By then, the swell had dropped. The crowd was smaller. Again, she waited. She grew frustrated. Finally, at peak irritation, a wave came through and she decided to go for it, wipe out hard and call it a day.
Moana Jones
© Jake Marote/Red Bull Content Pool
“I remember paddling super hard,” she says. “I stood up fast, pulled into the barrel and thought, ‘This is the close out. I'm not gonna make it.’”
Except, it never closed out. Jones made it through the first section. And the next. And the one after that. Until, finally, she flew out with the spit to hear whistling and cheers from the beach. Even then, she didn’t think the applause was for her.
Yet, that wave was the turning point in Jones’s trajectory. Since then, she’s been on the path that a number of men but few, if any, women have walked: making mastery of Oahu’s infamous wave her core expertise. No Small Feat Season 2, dropping this week on Red Bull TV pulls the proverbial curtain back on what it takes to build a career not only as a professional surfer, but more specifically, as a specialist at one of the world’s most dangerous waves.
All new episodes now streaming on Red Bull TV:
The series, which also features Maui big-wave surfer Annie Reickert, hops back and forth between the islands, for concise portraits of two women forging distinct professional lives on their own terms. Along with the jaw-dropping shots of the types of waves each woman wrangles (read: big, throaty and life-threatening), No Small Feat is both a day-in-the-life and a glimpse of the villages it takes to make a successful pro surfer.
In Jones’s case, family, faith, community and marriage are among the key pillars of her life. At her family home, one can nearly sink their toes into the fertile and supportive soil that nourished the future athlete. As her mom, Dussy, shares photos of Jones as a little girl, she describes Moana’s first waves on a Walmart boogie board, day after day in Haleiwa. Kai, Jones’s sister, is a supportive sibling, praying for Moana’s safety every time she paddles out.
Jones’s community is another component of her success. She grew up with fellow pros Barron Mamiya and Makana Pang and credits with helping to mold her into a skillful surfer.
“I was competitive with them,” she says. “They pushed me to charge harder because they’re braver. But I couldn’t let them be better than me.”
That is, until it came to her whale of a nemesis. “There was a point where I was like, ‘Okay, no, thank you, I'm good. I don't want to go out to Pipe,’” says Jones. “I didn’t want to get hurt. And I didn’t want to accidentally hurt someone else by being in the wrong spot.
“I'm a pretty cautious person,” she adds. “I'm not going to just send it on anything–even to this day, I'm still scared. I'm stressing the entire time out there.”
Moana Jones
© Jake Marote/Red Bull Content Pool
If Jones feels cautious by default, she credits her husband, Tehotu Wong, with helping her find more confidence both in and out of the water. The two first saw each other five years ago at V-Land, another North Shore break. While they didn’t speak to each other for another year–again, at V-Land–Jones felt a connection.
Of that first session together, she says, “I just knew. I thought, ‘This boy, we're going to end up getting married. We're going to be best friends. We're going to have the best time. And for sure, he’s the one.”
I still struggle with not thinking I'm good enough: Not good enough to be sponsored. Not good enough to graduate college. All these negative thoughts.
No Small Feat offers a glimpse of their dynamic. In one segment, Wong is the one to encourage Jones in the face of a big swell even when–like her first days at Pipe–she doesn’t believe in her abilities. And that dynamic, for Jones, has been life-changing.
“My relationship with my husband has taught me so much. He's basically made me into the woman that I was supposed to be.
“I still struggle with not thinking I'm good enough: Not good enough to be sponsored. Not good enough to graduate college. All these negative thoughts. As soon as I say something negative, Tehoto’s like, ‘Nope, cut it out.’ And then I work on it. I've gotten so much better at that.”
Jones may, indeed, still suffer from self-doubt,, but she’s pursuing her goals and dreams anyway. And not just at Pipeline. She recently earned her college degree in Hawaiian Health and Healing, in which she found a way to combine her love of helping people (medical school was, briefly, on the table) and her connection to her Polynesian ancestry. It’s a culture, she says, in which spirituality is imbued in every facet of life. From surfing to shaping boards; from conflict resolution to foraging for plants with healing properties.
The deep faith that Jones has in spiritual and religious terms is her ultimate buoy. Just as her sister prays before her Pipe sessions, Jones prays, too.
“My faith plays a crucial role in my life,” she says. “I've had a lot of traumatic things happen in my life. Without my faith, I’d be in a bad position in my life.
“Every time I pray for something-- for example, like I prayed for me and my husband to be together; I prayed for me to be able to surf Pipe; I’ve prayed for a lot of things that got answered– I'm happy to have someone up there that's looking out for me. That makes me feel secure.”
That doesn’t mean not doing the work. For Jones, the spirituality that comes with surfing, the faith she holds closely and the dedication it’s taken to chart her own professional course all come together at the wave that’s become her calling card.
“What I love about Pipe is that you have to work hard for it. You don't just go out there and sit around and then boom, you get a good wave. No, I have to work so hard to catch a good wave at Pipe. Sometimes I'll sit out there for six hours.”
And therein, she says, lies the appeal. “That's why I'm so drawn to it. You wait for so long. You try so hard. You finally get a super-sick wave. And that is the best feeling in the world.”
