“Fun-fact, I started swimming before I started walking,” Kya Jo Heuer says with a laugh.
For someone raised in the Mentawai Islands, perhaps that’s not as unusual as it sounds. When we speak over Zoom, the teenager is juggling final preparations for Rip Curl’s Girls Go Surfing event – an annual gathering designed to introduce more girls to the sport and strengthen Indonesia’s growing community of female surfers. Later that evening, she’ll board a flight to Japan for a WSL event alongside a handful of fellow Indonesian competitors.
We catch up in the small window between training sessions, event logistics and international travel – a schedule that hints at just how quickly the young surfer’s world is expanding beyond her home waves.
The first time I met Kya was at the trailer premiere of Snapt5 at White Monkey last year. Amid the crowd, Matt George pointed her out with a simple endorsement: she’s one of the best. It wasn’t long before the rest of Indonesia’s surf scene seemed to agree. Within months, Kya had earned an invitation to the prestigious Padang Padang Cup. By the time we spoke again this year, she was part of Indonesia’s senior national team, deep in preparation for the Asian Games in September.
Growing up in the Mentawais has shaped her surfing in unexpected ways. While many competitive surfers spend years learning to handle larger, more powerful waves, Kya’s challenge has often been the opposite. “When you grow up in the Ments with some of the best waves in the world, it’s hard to surf small beach breaks and onshore wind,” she says. “That’s probably the most challenging part.” Big waves, she explains, have always felt natural. “My first barrel was probably when I was 10 or 11. I didn’t make it out, but I saw the vision.”
Kya is quick to clarify that she’s definitely not one of the first female surfers from the Mentawais. There have been women surfing there long before her. What is perhaps less common is pursuing the sport competitively. Kya is among a small group of local girls making that transition from free surfing to competition.
Was competitive surfing always part of the plan?
“I mean, my dad always had that vision for me,” she says. And “My mum probably only started seeing it in the last few years, when I began training in Bali.”
Today, Kya spends much of her time training in Bali as part of Indonesia’s national team setup.
“So where did the accident happen?” I ask, recalling the photographs from Kya’s recent cover story in Surftime, a regional surf magazine. Was she training in Bali or chasing barrels back home in the Mentawais?
Without hesitation, she pulls back her hair to reveal a scar running from the side of her head toward her cheek. The injury, she explains, happened on Bali’s east coast three months back at a break near Keramas she’d never surfed before. She had paddled out with a few friends on what seemed like a relatively small day.
What followed was anything but routine.
After pulling back from a wave her friend was paddling for, Kya found herself in the worst spot possible to wear the rest of the set straight on the head. The final wave pinned her against the reef and she doesn’t remember much from there.
“I blacked out,” she says.
When she resurfaced a few seconds later, blood was pouring down her face. Shocked by the severity of the cut, her friends helped her back to shore before rushing her to the nearest hospital. What followed was a frantic search for the right plastic surgeon, under strict instructions from her mother not to let just anyone stitch her up. By then, she says, she was battling the worst headache of her life. At the third hospital visit, after a six hour long surgery in Nusa Dua, her face was finally held together by stitches.
A month and a half later, she was back in the water.
Does paddling back out make her anxious?
“No,” she replies instantly. “But next time, I’ll probably wear a helmet when I don’t know the break.”
The answer says a lot about Kya’s relationship with risk. Growing up in the Mentawais, watching her father send it in waves of consequence, she developed a comfort in bigger surf from an early age. Tubes are where she feels most at home. It’s also where she believes she holds an advantage.
“When I compete and see many surfers from Bali totally rip, but not that many know how to get barreled, I know that’s kind of my superpower. Just knowing that one extra thing puts me ahead,” Kya says, recalling last year’s WSL Nias Pro, where she found herself seeking shade from the blistering Indo sun throughout the event, finishing an eventual third.
With her place on Indonesia’s national team, Kya has plenty to focus on this year. But she’s equally determined about her WSL ambitions. The dream, she says, is to become the first Indonesian woman to make it onto the Championship Tour.
Before September arrives with the Asian Games, there are still events in Japan, Korea and the Philippines on the horizon, and the possibility of a major WSL event at home in the Mentawais. Nothing is certain yet.
But when she talks about the prospect, her voice lifts.
“Imagine pumping HTs, stand-up barrels, spitting out, 10-point rides, and it’s home.”
