Windsurf · Pro era & decline
1993
Windsurfers ride Jaws
At Peʻahi on Maui's north shore, windsurfers sail one of the biggest waves in the world, before tow-in surfing makes it famous.
Peʻahi (Jaws), Maui · Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)
Peʻahi, on the north shore of Maui, is one of the best-known big-wave breaks in the world. Surfers named it Jaws in 1975 and were the first to catch waves there.
Windsurfers followed. In the 1980s Dave Kalama, Mark Pedersen and Brett Lickle sailed Peʻahi, and by the early nineties a small group of Maui sailors were riding it. The windsurfer Kai Katchadourian sailed there for the first time in April 1993, in a session where Mark Angulo went first, and remembers it as a landmark.
In the same years some of these sailors, among them Kalama, Lickle and Mike Waltze, helped invent tow-in surfing at Jaws: a jet ski pulled the surfer into the wave, just as the sail had done.