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Moments after the buzzer rang in her heat in the Da Hui Backdoor Shootout yesterday, Moana Jones Wong would once again take women surfing at Pipeline to another level. Taking off on a near below sea-level wave and at least double overhead face, Moana would have no time to bottom turn as she parked herself into the thickest and most beautiful wave of the day. The Pipe Master held a firm line on a rocky wall while a monstrous tube covered her from view. And like a Queen she is known to be, Moana would gracefully come out after the spit. It’s undoubtedly the best wave-ridden wave by a woman at Pipe and also being received as a front-runner for this season’s Wave Of The Winter.
Moana shared these candid words about the historical wave to her Instagram.
“The vision I had while I was in this barrel was the most insane thing my eyes have ever seen, the entire ride I was like “HOW THE F@ck ARE U EVEN ON THIS WAVE”…. 😂😭BEST WAVE OF MY LIFE !!!!! ”
Wanna know more about the Hawaiian phenom? Check out our feature ‘ All Hail the Queen of Pipeline’, from Issue 584. Tracks writer Kate Allman caught up with Moana just after she grabbed the surfing world’s attention for the first time from a masterful performance in last year’s WSL Pipe comp.
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ALL HAIL THE QUEEN OF PIPELINE
Moana Jones Wong is being carried up the beach at Pipeline, weighed down by multiple celebratory leis locals are draping over her head.
The grinning rookie, who is a mostly new face to international viewers of World Surf League (WSL) broadcasts, seems unable to decide on an emotion. One moment the vision captures her covering up tears with her hands, the next, launching both arms into the air in triumph as she sways through the crowd on her husband Tehotu Wong’s shoulders. It’s the same grinning, double-arm claim that has appeared time and again inside the pit of gaping barrels. Each time, Moana emerges Houdini-like from yet another of Pipeline’s treacherous offerings.
She has just torched five-time World Champion Carissa Moore by 14 points to claim victory at the Pipeline Pro final. Scoring two 6.67s and then a 7 in the dying seconds of the final to etch her name into surfing’s history books. She’s the first winner of a women’s Championship Tour (CT) event at the notoriously heavy break. It’s an impressive feat for any surfer to take down a defending World Champion but this win is made more impressive by a 22-year-old Hawaiian local who only narrowly scored a chance to compete as a wildcard rookie.
“Is it too soon to call her the Queen of Pipe?” WSL commentator Chris Cote asks guest commentator Kelly Slater, as the crowd throngs around their new female champion and momentary world number one.
“No. Done,” replies Kelly.
If Moana Jones Wong was not a household name before the 2022 Pipeline Pro, she surely is now. The Greatest of all Time (GOAT a.k.a. Kelly Slater) is not the only person dubbing her ‘Queen’ of the break at which he has won eight CT events, including the 2022 final one day earlier (in the week of his 50th birthday, no less). The nickname has been floating around O’ahu for months.
It started when Moana pulled out a slew of impressive performances on Hawaii’s North Shore in December, including fourth overall in the 2021 Vans Triple Crown of Surfing. She firmly put to bed any claim to underground status when her all-female team scored the most points among the women in the Da Hui Back- door Shootout in January. A vlog she posted in the days following the event showcased her unmistakeable, cool, goofy-footed glide down violently bending walls of water.
Every drop is followed by a masterful navigation of a throaty tube and an almost nonchalant exit from the monster’s jaws. Social media became flooded with iconic photos of Moana’s beaming grin, pearly whites glowing like a lighthouse from the depths of tubular glory.
“We all got invited to the Backdoor Shootout and that’s when the girls really went off,” she tells Tracks.
“The waves were firing out there, it was 10 feet, bombing Pipe, and Bethany Hamilton packed a sick closeout barrel. Keala Kennelly got some sick ones, Malia Manuel got some sick ones. That was the first real opportunity that women had to show what they could do at legitimate Pipe. We really showed up and everyone went for it out there. It was awesome.”
The photos from the Backdoor Shootout lit up an Omicron-plagued world, frothing for travel and surf content. In the aftermath, not only did the world know Moana’s name, but various iterations of nicknames began popping up like surfboards tombstoning across the North Shore. The simple ‘MJW’ is now pretty common; it’s the three-letter acronym she became after marrying her Tahitian surf sweetheart-turned- coach, cheer squad, and number one hype-man Tehotu Wong in 2020. The pair first locked eyes in the lineup at V-land when Moana was a teenager, but it took Tehotu many more years to woo her.When they eventually married – she was 20, he was four years older – she added his surname while keeping her own.
The ‘Smiling Assassin’ is another popular reference, for the blinding white grin that identifies Moana in a barrel, even from far off.
“Everyone tells me, ‘you look so happy when you’re in the barrel – you look like you’re smiling’,” she laughs with a cheerfully infectious snicker.
“It’s true, if you zoom in on my face in a lot of photos, I’m smiling in the barrel. Even in the final the commentators were like, ‘She’s just going to smile her way right through that barrel.’ It shows how happy I am experiencing that feeling. I am absolutely in love with it.”
Growing up, Moana could only dream of the notoriety she has earned at the break she calls her, “Second home break” (she began surfing Sunset before Pipeline, she tells Tracks). North Shore born and raised, she comes from a long line of local surfers in her parents, grandparents, and Hawaiian ancestors. Her parents would take Moana and her sister island-hopping, snor- kelling, sailing, and surfing across the Pacific. The ocean was her home as much as solid land. She reckons she stood on a surfboard before she got out of nappies. She even paid homage to the immense spirituality surfing holds for native Hawaiians in a thesis she published in 2021, during her senior year of studying a bachelor of applied science, majoring in Hawaiian and Indigenous health and healing at the University of Hawaii. The project was titled, ‘Surfing: More than a Sport’.
“Surfing basically connects native Hawaiians to our culture. It heals us, it helps us figure out who we are, it gives us a purpose, and it’s really crucial to us as native Hawaiians,” she says. “I feel so connected to my culture, my ancestors and the ocean when I am out there.”
Moana paddled out at Pipe once or twice in her teens but began surfing it religiously after she turned 18. Four years and innumerable beatdowns later, it’s fair to say she has earned her stripes in the notoriously tricky lineup.
“How many times have I surfed Pipeline? I don’t know, it’s really hard to put that into a timeframe,” she says. “Because every time I go out there it’s usually at least a six-hour session. It’s never just a one-hour session. It’s usually three hours, six hours.
“The longest I’ve ever been out there was almost nine hours. Not even coming in, just out there the whole time. I couldn’t really move for like a week after that. I had heat stroke, dehydration, it was bad.”
“When you get stuck out there you have to wait a long time to catch waves. It’s so hard to be in the right place in the crowd because there are so many people paddling around. It’s very easy to get out of position manoeuvring around everybody. It’s chaos.”
Adding to the intimidation of the crowd and North Shore swells heaving over a shallow, crunchy reef at Pipeline is the fact Moana is often the only woman paddling in. Big-wave legend Keala Kennelly would occasionally keep her company, flying in from her home island of Kauai. And while the WSL ladies show up in December through February for events during the winter swell season, Moana says she rarely has a female buddy to surf with through the rest of the year.
She vividly recalls the excitement of witnessing the world’s best female surfers arriving in O’ahu for competitions when she was a child. In fact, she was only six or seven when she first asked Carissa Moore for an autograph at Sunset during the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing. Soon enough, posters, hats, T-shirts, all scrawled with Carissa’s signature, clad young Moana’s bedroom walls.
“Carissa has definitely been a huge inspiration and a hero to me my entire life,” Moana says.
Moana competed regularly as a teen and held a six-year contract with Billabong from the age of 11. But at 17, she decided she had been pushing too hard and took a break from contest surfing. When she returned to competitions almost six years later – in December 2021 – she embraced a new attitude whereby competition results would not define her. Lo and behold, she started surfing better than she ever had.
When Moana unwittingly conquered her hero in February, another surprising fact dawned on the stunned WSL commentary team. The last time a rookie won a women’s Champion- ship Tour event was in 2010, when Australian Tyler Wright won at Sunset Beach in Hawaii. Wright had gone on to become a two-time World Champion.
“I think I have the potential to become a World Champion,” says Moana. “I’m not going to say that will happen, but I know that I have the potential and if I work hard and keep improving. I think that’s totally possible.”
For now, Moana says her game plan is just to keep enjoying surfing and competing – not to let results define her.When she was eliminated in the opening round of heats at Sunset Beach two weeks after Pipeline, she told Tracks afterwards that she felt happy with her performance and enjoyed tough heats. Perhaps the GOAT said it best while guest commentating her final at Pipe: “Moana doesn’t seem like she has any sort of rigid game plan in this final, she is just surfing and enjoying herself.”.
“Pipeline and me click. I just feel really at home out there,” she agrees.
“It’s like Pipeline has its people. I think the people that have a connection out there, we can really feel it.We feel like the wave is treating us a little differently than it’s treating everybody else because it’s familiar with us, we’re an old friend or something.”
Whether Moana will be awarded a wildcard at the next CT event in Portugal or falls off the Tour when the WSL leaves Hawaii, will be a decision for competition officials. One thing’s for sure: the nickname appears likely to stick around. Footage of the trophy presentation at Pipeline offers insight there.
When Moana finally arrives at the stage, contest announcer Kaipo Guerrero asks a crowded Banzai beach: “Is it okay to start calling her the Queen of Pipe?”
The response is deafening.
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