Women Making Waves

Introduction


I was born and raised on the East Coast of Australia, where endless summers were spent at the beach with an extended clan of cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. We were the typical Aussie beach family a large, rambunctious crew of groms, all salty hair, deep tans, weather-beaten feet that hadn t seen shoes in weeks, zinc-smeared faces in Day-Glo colors, faded togs, frothing for our next adventure in the waves.

We were kids of the Slip-Slop-Slap generation, the iconic sun protection ad campaign that was drilled into every Aussie s consciousness from a young age slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen, and slap on a hat! While my male cousins surfed shortboards at a rather perilous and unpredictable beach break at Warana on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, my sisters and I would happily boogie board and swim alongside them for hours on end. Back then, it seemed like surfing wasn t really for girls. The only surfer girls I ever saw were the pros on TV Layne Beachley, Wendy Botha, Pam Burridge, Lisa Andersen. And although I was a fully fledged waterbaby having successfully navigated my way through almost every water sport available, I had accepted that surfing was out of reach, not for me a boy s thing.

It was only many years later, after a twelve-year career in London s fashion scene, that I decided it was time I learned to surf. My career in fashion marketing ran the gamut from wildly creative collaborations with global industry icons to the unrelenting hamster wheel of newness and innovation. We had moved our young family to Los Angeles, and initially my need to be in the water was fueled by grief. I had just lost my youngest sister, Julia, to the devastating effects of mental illness back in Australia, and the ocean of sadness, shock, and sense of loss were debilitating. I felt closer to her when I was in or near the ocean, and like many of the women profiled in this book, I knew instinctively that the ocean would heal me.

Lara Einzig

The women in this book are my sea sisters and I believe that by sharing these remarkable stories, we inspire other women to make wiser and more empowered choices in their own lives. They learned from the ocean, from pushing themselves, trusting themselves, and dancing with this element. Water is the gateway to emotions and feelings. It offers the opportunity to be fully broken open, to be totally annihilated, to be brought to our knees in humility. These women and I have been defined, and are continually redefined, by surfing. What we learn each time we go into the water, we bring with us back to land and put that into the world. It s the ebb and flow of the tide, the giving and receiving and the giving again. Kassia Meador, former pro-longboarder and founder of Kassia+Surf