The Story of Pe‘ahi (Jaws), Maui
Pe‘ahi means “to fan, to beckon” in Hawaiian — and the wave that breaks off this stretch of Maui’s north shore has beckoned every era of big-wave surfing to reinvent itself: windsurfers first, then the tow-in revolution, then the paddle kings and the first generation of women’s big-wave champions. Three local surfers renamed it “Jaws” in 1975, after watching it turn from playful to lethal as suddenly as a shark attack.
The Ridge
The physics were modeled for National Geographic in 1998: an ancient lava ridge rises from roughly 120 feet of water to 30, and swells longer than a thousand feet between crests — the 15-second-plus products of North Pacific winter storms — trip over it all at once. Refraction bends the flanks of each swell inward, focusing the energy on the middle of the crest like a converging lens, and the result is the most photographed A-frame in big-wave surfing: a marquee right and a world-class left, on faces from 30 to 80 feet, November through March. The trades blow hard side-offshore across it, which is why the first people to ride Pe‘ahi arrived under sail.
Strapped
Windsurfers from Ho‘okipa — Mike Waltze, Dave Kalama and their crew — sailed Pe‘ahi through the 1980s while surfers watched from the cliff. Then Laird Hamilton, Buzzy Kerbox and Darrick Doerner started towing each other into waves behind a boat in 1992, and by the mid-1990s the Maui “Strapped” crew had brought jet-ski tow surfing to Jaws, foot-straps and all — suddenly the unrideable 60-footers were being ridden, and the wave became the proving ground of the tow era. The first Tow-In World Cup ran here on January 7, 2002, won by Garrett McNamara and Rodrigo Resende. All of it staged, then as now, out of Maliko Gulch — a sliver of a bay down the coast where launching a ski between sets is its own timing game, and the rescue fleet lives on big days.
The Paddle Kings and Queens
Around 2006 three Brazilians — Danilo Couto, Márcio Freire and Yuri Soledade, the “Mad Dogs” — began paddling Jaws with no skis and no inflation vests, and the sport followed them back to its arms: Couto’s paddled left won Ride of the Year in 2011, the mass paddle sessions of January 2012 flipped the peak for good, Shane Dorian’s 2016 paddle barrels swept the awards, and Aaron Gold’s 63-footer that January was the biggest wave ever paddled at the time. The contests wrote history too: Billy Kemper won four titles here, Maui’s Paige Alms won the first-ever women’s big-wave event in 2016 — becoming the first women’s big-wave world champion — and Keala Kennelly took the wind-torn 2018 edition. The last live contest ran in December 2019; as of the 2024–25 season the Pe‘ahi Challenge lives on as a locally run video-award format. Six days after Mad Dog Márcio Freire died surfing Nazaré in January 2023, Jaws delivered one of its great paddle days — locals rode it in his honor. Watch it all from the cliff, tread lightly on the farm road that gets you there, and leave the lineup to the few dozen humans it was built for.