Wait A Minute, Is This The Best Wave That’s Ever Been (Body)Surfed?
Kalani Lattanzi just did the improbable.
Hawaii was recently hit with its first real swell of the season, more on the L side of XL but substantial nonetheless.
Waimea broke, Haleiwa and Pipe had their windows, but it was Jaws that stole the show. By now, you’ve probably seen Billy Kemper and Francisco Porcella’s succulent bulbs on the west bowl. While these waves were fantastic by any standard, they’re not unlike previous tubes we’ve seen at Peahi.
That’s why, when we stumbled across the above ride by Brazilian bodysurfer Kalani Lattanzi, we genuinely could not believe our eyes. People have bodysurfed Jaws before, but to our knowledge, no one has ever ridden a proper tube to completion — let alone a six-second foamball ride to seamless exit.
This begs an important question — on a relative difficulty and magnitude scale, is this the best wave that’s ever been surfed? Sure, stand-up surfers and bodyboarders have been deeper on bigger waves, but getting into and out of a wave of this caliber with nothing more than swim fins and a mini charcuterie board is genuinely baffling.
“I got there around 2 pm and swam from the rocks at the bottom,” Kalani told Magic Seaweed. “I’ve been waiting for a Jaws hand surf session for a while now, just waiting for the right swell.
“It was so crazy, when the set came, I could feel the current dragging my body to the peak. Easy to tell when the set’s coming and I had to swim the complete opposite way and into it. Stuck in the lip, couldn’t see but then I dropped and got a beautiful vision and saw everyone screaming in the channel like ‘wooowww’ [laughs] best barrel of my life.”
We almost forgot to mention: Kalani also bodysurfs Nazaré (see below). So perhaps his antics at Jaws shouldn’t be so surprising.
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