Why Does Maui Produce So Many World-Class Surfers Who Rarely Qualify For The CT?

The morning after the finals at Oahu’s Sunset Beach, the second stop on the Championship Tour, Imaikalani deVault was back on Maui, parking his Toyota Tacoma at his home break, Hookipa. 

As only the second Maui surfer to qualify for the CT, the twenty-four-year-old received a small hero’s welcome: Half a dozen surfers, fresh out of the water, huddled around his truck bed, chatting and passing around his board with a neon green X cut across it. When the group dispersed, deVault, in a white T-shirt and boardshorts, turned to watch the waves he’s surfed much of his life.

At the main break, the Point, overhead sets were rolling through, and the wind had slackened off. It was unusually clean for a typically windblown and chaotic wave, flawed but still a sufficient training ground for deVault. “It allows for all kinds of different faces to the point that you’re doing airs backside, you can do a lot of turns, you can focus on all kinds of stuff,” he told me later.

A lifelong surfer of the Point, Albee Layer has been in the water with him since deVault was six years old, and he still doesn’t quite know how deVault learned to surf the way he does. “He has a flair that comes with growing up here where he can surf anything and do weird tricks that not a lot of people can do,” the thirty-year-old Maui aerialist and Jaws surfer told me. “But I don’t know where he got the refinement that makes him a CT-level turn and whatever else guy. Honolua probably is the only spot on Maui you could go to learn how to do that.”

DeVault moved around Maui most of his life. He grew up on the west side, where the wind isn’t always as heavy as it is on the north shore. At five years old, he mounted his first board. Soon he was surfing local breaks like Lahaina Harbor and Honolua Bay, arguably Maui’s best and longest wave. When deVault was ten, his family began moving all around the island until they settled near the north shore by the time he was fifteen. There, Hookipa became his usual spot. After putting in his time on both sides of the island, deVault said, “You can definitely see differences between the guys who grew up on the west side versus here on the north shore.” And from years of his home break constantly changing, deVault grew into what he calls a “hybrid.”

When deVault qualified for the CT last December, the only surfer from Maui — population: 170,000 — who’d done it before him was Dusty Payne. Meanwhile, Oahu, with a population of one million, has produced a long list of CT greats including Carissa Moore, John John Florence, Sunny Garcia, Megan Abubo, Seth Moniz, Zeke Lau, Bettylou Sakura Johnson. Kauai, about 73,000-strong, can claim Andy Irons, Bruce Irons, Dustin Barca, Sebastian Zietz (born in FL, grew up on Kauai), Kaipo Jaquias, Rochelle Ballard, Malia Manuel, and Keala Kennelly. Even Hawaii Island (or the Big Island, population: 200,000), produced Shane Dorian and Conan Hayes.

However, Maui has produced the gamut of extreme surfers. There are the big wave chargers: Ian Walsh, Paige Alms, Billy Kemper, and so forth, and so on. There are the air guys, like Layer, who — on top of surfing big waves — brought the double alleyoop and backside double spin to surfing, and Matt Meola, who invented the spindle flip 540. There’s also the jack-of-all-watery-trades, Kai Lenny. Since Maui obviously has no shortage of talent, why have so few of its surfers entered the ranks of the CT?

The answer might begin with the place itself. Maui is a dormant volcano, the second youngest of the major Hawaiian islands to breach the Pacific. To the east, there’s Hawaii Island, an active volcano that grew another 875 acres after an eruption in 2018. To the west sit Lanai, Molokai, Oahu, and Kauai, each older than the next and now dormant. As older islands, Oahu and Kauai have had more time to develop reefs around them than Maui, some surfers speculate. The trade winds blow from the east, and the good winter swells often come from the northwest. As most surfers on Maui know from doleful experience, the island blocks Oahu from the wind, and Oahu blocks Maui from the more westerly swells. When Pipeline is glassy and firing, Maui’s surf might be piddling and blown out.

The volatility of Maui’s conditions can push competitors, or push them away to other water sports. Keith Teboul, a local shaper, recently fulfilled quiver orders for deVault and Lenny’s Sunset wildcard (before he called in sick), but he also shapes for riders who paddle into big waves, tow, foil, kite, windsurf, and paddle stand-up. “It’s a distracting place,” Teboul said the other day in his north shore shop. But for focused competitors, it can have its perks. “As a Maui surfer, if you get into that mentality of wanting to do the tour, you can have some advantages because the waves aren’t as good,” Teboul said. “It’s choppy, and there’s a lot of air waves, so your background as a surfer is a little more complete.” 

Matt Meola met Albee Layer at a surf contest at Launiupoko, on Maui’s west side, when Meola was five years old and Layer was four. Meola placed second, and Layer took fourth. “I got a little Freestyle watch,” Layer said with a laugh. “Shoulda quit right then.”

By the time Meola was eighteen, in 2007, he won a state championship. The next year marked his first season competing in the Qualifying Series. Soon he burnt out. “I’d go travel super far and the waves would be shitty,” Meola, now thirty-two, said. “I quickly realized I had way more fun going surfing with Albee on Maui and trying to do crazy airs,” he said.

The feeling was mutual. “I always hated competing because I always wanted to do an air or try to get barreled,” Layer said. “Back then, that was like, ‘You’re an idiot,’ if you tried an air in a heat.” He went on, “Even when you did do an air, the judges didn’t know how to react to it, so it didn’t really even matter.”

Layer remembered his sponsors dropping him around 2010, after he graduated from high school. He sent résumés and videos to potential sponsors, saying he would do the QS “because I figured that’s what they would want, someone who they thought could qualify,” he said. Faced with multiple rejections, Layer got advice from Meola’s mother, Nancy, who was his manager at the time. “Internet videos are starting to become more of a thing,” he recalled her telling him. “Tell ’em you’re gonna make internet videos and you don’t need the forty grand to go on the QS, you need a thousand bucks a month.”

Things started looking up in 2011 when Meola, then twenty-one, made a reel for the Innersection competition and won $100,000. The next year, Layer sent in his own clip for Innersection. In the video’s introduction, Layer scoops up a bundle of old surf competition trophies, piles them up outside, douses them with gasoline, and lights a match. (They were only 4th place and below.) Cut to: Layer dropping into a giant windblown barrel. The trophies are melting. With that clip, Layer won $100,000. “From there, I was like, I don’t ever want to go back to competing,” he said.

With Jaws — a.k.a. Peahi — in their backyard, some Maui surfers get the itch, drawing them away from traditional (small-wave) competition. “There were always those guys who surfed Jaws,” Layer said. “I’m sure it’s not cool to say how much we look up to Laird but we do.” Nowadays, even Laird’s followers have followers. (They also windsurf and kitesurf the wave. Even the guy who bodysurfed Jaws was born on Maui.)

Among them, twenty-year-old Annie Reickert grew up going down to the cliff at Jaws to watch. “I always told myself, one day I want to do that,” Reickert said. When she was thirteen, she got the urge to follow surfers making the long paddle to the outer reefs. “I convinced my dad to paddle out there with me,” she said. She’s officially been in the business for the past three years now. At the 2019 WSL Jaws contest, Reickert’s first big wave event, she was the youngest female competitor and placed third. But since big swells aren’t always forthcoming, the rest of her repertoire includes short-boarding, foiling, wing-foiling, and stand-up paddling. “Maui raised me to be this crazed water fanatic, and no matter what the conditions are, I always want to be in the water,” she said. 

Reickert, however, doesn’t see many others in her generation taking the multi-sport path. Instead, she thinks they’re more focussed on competing. “Imai kind of broke that mold, being from the North Shore and qualifying,” she said. “I’m sure he’s gonna make all of the kids on the North Shore a lot more motivated to go out and do this because he showed them that it was possible.”

Dusty Payne, the first Maui surfer to make the tour, grew up on Maui’s north shore and moved to the west side in high school. Living there, he was close to Honolua Bay, which fires on north swells, and a number of local reefs that pick up even small southern bumps. “Growing up in such a beautiful place, it’s hard for a lot of us to pack it up and leave regularly,” Payne said. “It’s a blessing and a curse.”

Indeed, why leave a wave-buffeted tropical paradise when you were lucky enough to have grown up there? Surfers who grow up on the island enter into a tight-knit community less aggressive than Oahu’s. “You see the same people surfing in the water everywhere you go throughout the island,” Payne, now thirty-three years old, said. He grew up “treating everybody like family,” with “everybody looking out for each other.” Then, there are all the other things to pull people into the lush and warm outdoors. Meola hunts deer and spears fish. Layer juices his backyard oranges. People like to pack their trucks with friends and boards to go “cruise”—a term that once left a friend visiting from New York wondering what exactly the day held in store. “I don’t think anyone likes leaving here,” Meola said. “I’ve got all I need here!”

But from gromhood, Payne had the singular desire to compete, and watching the tour fired him up to travel. “For me, it’s always been about getting the best waves. I get major fear of missing out,” he said. “They were going to those locations I’d always dreamed about going to: Jeffreys Bay, Fiji, Tahiti, Hossegor, Mundaka.” Had it not been for the pandemic, Payne said, he would still be trying to qualify. “I’m more ready now than ever to compete, and I would love to give it one last crack,” he said, but the lack of QS events in Hawaii makes that challenging.

A few years older than Payne, Maui surfers Ola Eleogram and Hank Gaskell began competing in worldwide QS events in 2008. Soon after, the recession led many sponsors to slim their athlete rosters. “I kind of got pushed out from competing full-time because I got dropped from Hurley,” Gaskell said. “I was only like twenty-two, so I didn’t have the money to travel everywhere.” 

They wouldn’t be the only Maui boys to suffer from fickle sponsors. Among them, Tanner Hendrickson pursued his first full QS season in 2011 and kept trying his luck through 2019. “The lack of sponsorship support is really all it’s come down to,” he said. “Between working for a living and trying to travel and chase the QS, it can be very exhausting and financially stressful. I’ve been told we have a small market to sell to in Hawaii and that’s one of the reasons why we don’t get the support we deserve.” Granger Larsen, another Maui surfer, famously chased the QS, pursuing sometimes more than a dozen events each year from 2011 until 2016, when his sponsorships dried up. “Granger was always so fricking close so many times, and then finally they just gave up on him,” Meola said. “If he would have made it onto the tour, he had the style of surfing back then that would have done pretty well.”

The up-and-coming Maui generation — including deVault, Eli Hanneman, and Cody Young — are charting a different course, inspired by more tour-chasing role models and a growing desire to compete. “Me and Cody, we’ve known that we’ve wanted to do it since we were really young,” deVault said. “My generation and the one coming up next, a lot of us do love competing and are really chasing that.” 

And competition standards might be changing, to their benefit. “Competitions have caught up to their surfing,” Layer said. “Airs in contests are becoming cool, and kids who grow up here know how to do airs, and most of them are not scared of very big waves. So as that becomes more prevalent in competition, the kids from here will get better at competition.” According to some older Maui surfers, though, the younger surfers might simply be better in competitions than their elders.

Knowing Maui isn’t always the most consistent, these surfers — like many of their predecessors — make the wintertime pilgrimage to Oahu’s North Shore. (“It’s hard to train to be some competitive machine if you’re spending all your time on Maui surfing these kinds of waves,” Meola said.) But they feel the same pull for home that Meola and Layer do. “Maui can be this perfect little black hole sometimes that you don’t want to leave,” twenty-three-year-old Young said, calling from Oahu. But he would still leave home to chase the tour. With a win at the 2019 QS Sunset Open and finishing 79th on last year’s Challenger Series, he’s on his way.

Nineteen-year-old Hanneman made the sacrifice. He recently bought a house on Oahu’s North Shore and packed up his life on Maui’s west side. (A sponsorship from Hurley helped.) “It’s so hard to leave it,” he said, though he has “every intention” to return. At the 2021 HIC Pipe Pro, he placed fifth, qualifying him for this year’s Challenger Series and making him Maui’s next most likely CT hopeful. Like Payne, though, he described being from Maui as “a blessing and a curse,” and he needed a more consistent training ground. “Even though Maui is my favorite place in the world,” he said, “it’s always gonna be there.”