In the middle of 2023 while Maddie Meddings and I were still touring our first film, ‘Yama’, there was a longboard contest that was planned to run at Kirra with only one prize money division.

Sick of these ‘open’ divisions being stacked with men and seeing that there wasn’t anyone entered yet, I put a call out on my Instagram looking for any women who might be interested in entering to try and fill it up. The first person to respond was Pacha Light who had never done a longboard contest before but was willing to pull out the single fin if it meant claiming our space in the lineup.

From there, Pacha, Maddie and I decided to do a film together that focused on Ecuador. Pacha was born in the Andes in a town called Cotacachi and lived for the first years of her life with her mum off grid in the thick cloud rainforest of a region called Intag, one of the most biodiverse areas in the world. Pacha’s mum bought the land in the late 1990s and still owns it as a means to preserve it from the never-ending threat of mining. When Pacha was little, she and her mum and brother returned to Australia and Pacha went on to build a career as a professional surfer.

A few years ago, she went through a profound shift. She made the decision to quit the competitive circuit. In the midst of the pandemic, her father who still lived in Ecuador, passed away, and Pacha also parted ways with her longtime sponsor, Billabong, citing environmental concerns about the brand. As border restrictions in Australia lifted in 2022, Pacha headed back to Ecuador to try and piece together the puzzle of who she was and as she put it at ...