Billy Kemper (HAW) winner of the 2018 JAWS Challenge at Pe’ahi, Maui, Hawaii, USA.
PHOTO: © WSL / Hallman
A new season on the WSL Big Wave World Tour is officially underway with the 2022-2023 competition window opening Tuesday through March 31, 2023. A roster of men and women will be on standby for the Quiksilver Jaws Big Wave Challenge presented by TUDOR and the TUDOR Nazaré Tow Surfing Challenge presented by Hurley for the next four and a half months now.
The Jaws event will feature both men’s and women’s competitions, with 24 men and 12 women slated for the paddle-in event. Heats will consist of six surfers each and for the first time, the BWT will be introducing a six-person priority format. “The priority system was highly requested by the surfers and is beneficial for Jaws because it creates organization and added safety in the lineup on massive swells,” the League wrote.
“This new generation of big-wave paddle performance comes after Maui’s ‘Strapped Crew’ – Laird Hamilton, Dave Kalama, Brett Lickle, Mike Waltze, Pete Cabrinha and Rush Randle – were the first to surf Jaws in the early nineties,” Ben Collins wrote in 2021, touching on the fact that Jaws’ profile as a paddle wave is still relatively new. “It was exclusively a tow wave until around 2011, when surfers such as Greg Long, Mark Healey, Nathan Fletcher and Sion Milosky, and especially Shane Dorian, pushed the boundaries of what was possible when it came to chasing these monster waves under your own steam.”
The Nazaré event, however, will strictly feature towing, with nine two-surfer teams competing in a total of six 40-minute heats. Each team will surf in two of those heats total so that competitors can alternate between surfing and driving the ski.
The WSL is also introducing a brand new campaign to coincide with the 2022-2023 big wave season. The WSL Big Wave Record Chase will be a season-long campaign focused on verifying and awarding new world records. The league didn’t explain what their new model for verifying wave size would be (establishing and verifying world record waves often takes more than a year), but they did share that the campaign will dedicate $500,000 in prize money to new world records for the Largest Wave Surfed – Unlimited (Female), Largest Wave Surfed – Unlimited (Male), Largest Wave Surfed – Paddle (Female), and Largest Wave Surfed – Paddle (Male).
