Introducing: Surf Girls: Kaikaina
Photo: Ha a Keaulana/The Gnar Gnar Honeys
Surfline
Link copied to clipboard
Surf Girls: Kaikaina is a new short documentary series which profiles five Hawaiians who represent the future of female surfing. These young ladies Hokulani Topping, Vaihitimahana Inso, Ēweleiʻula Wong, Puamakamae DeSoto and Moana Jones Wong have different personalities, ride different surfboards, like different waves, have different goals but they’re bonded by friendship, their shared Hawaiian culture, and their mutual love for surfing in its many forms and incarnations.
Their fun and exciting lifestyle is distilled into three episodes, created by
Naturally, the first episode introduces our young stars: where they’re from, how their surfing journeys began, what drives them… with all the requisite shredding clips, of course. But turn up the volume. You’ll be surprised at how different they all actually are from one another.
One year ago, surfer Gigi Lucas stood for the first time in the soft, warm sands of NaNa Dune outside of Jacksonville and experienced a rare feeling: a sense of privilege as a dark-skinned Black woman.
Lucas, an athletic beauty with an enviable crown of dreadlocks, is acutely aware that the surfing lifestyle she adopted as an African-American woman wouldn t have been possible only a few decades prior. Overwhelming gratitude swept over her on American Beach, which contains a history lost to the larger world and even to some in her own community. The 33-acre stretch of shoreline was purchased by Florida s first Black millionaire, A.L. Lewis, in 1935 to provide beach access to Black residents at a time when many beaches were deemed white-only. He advertised it as recreation without humiliation.