It may make your heart skip a beat to see Kai Lenny surf in Pe’ahi, a big-wave location off Maui’s north coast. You may have seen it on video, but nothing prepares you for the speed and unshakeable confidence of a hard braking turn at the top of a massive wave, Frequently, precisely in the dazzling turquoise window of a lip about to pitch—for that quick turn back toward the bottom, as if he desired the weightless drop of the down curve more than he wanted to make it out alive.
Have a look at some of the stunning surfing moments of Kai Lenny
Lenny, who is twenty-nine years old, has been lighting up big-wave surfing for the past five or six years with feats that are beyond comprehension. He’d be towed into position by a Jet Ski, then drop the towrope on a quickly steepening wave with a fifty-foot face and start carving quick tiny rhythmic turns before launching a 360-degree airborne rotation, as if he was having fun. Perhaps he was having a good time, but that would be unnatural. Those waves were packed with the kind of violence you’d expect to see in a speeding truck wreck, and Lenny was going faster, turning harder, and more fashionably than anyone before him.
Where did he get his calm demeanor and fast reaction times that bordered on optical illusion? Pe’ahi is a component of the solution. There are few sites on Earth that create waves of such magnitude and beauty—some say none at all—yet Lenny was born just up the road.
