A Brazilian is emerging as one of the world’s top big wave surfers – and she’s a woman. Maya Gabeira has journeyed to tackle the most terrifying swells, becoming ‘one of the boys’ with the handful of men who share her passion…

She first took to a surfboard as an escape from her own spiralling teenage rebellion, but now Maya Gabeira is breaking as many taboos and preconceptions as she is surfing breakers.

She was far from a natural. It took her a month to get up on the board in the bubbling white water of the shorebreak. But Gabeira was hooked. She surfed daily during a student exchange year on Australia’s Gold Coast. Upon her return to Rio, she moved straight into a small hotel on a nearby beach. Gone was the obstinate little girl obsessed with fashion and nightlife, her place taken by a surf-chasing tomboy, out in the waves with the boys. Soon after she finished high school, she left her family and country, and moved to Hawaii. She was 17.

“I moved there for the surfing, but it was difficult to see how I was going to be a pro surfer. I wasn’t competing, and I had no sponsors,” she says.

For now, the former Maya is content to rest on the terrace of the Maasai, the most upscale of the low-slung surf hotels in this town, sipping coffee and barely touching her breakfast. The distant whine of jetski motors announces the return of Burle and the rest of the group. As five jetskis pull on to the sand, Gabeira leaves the terrace and heads through a small crowd of people to the group. Her left foot is scraped up from a crash against the reef earlier in the morning, the cuts still red with blood. But Maya shoulders up against one of the jetskis and, her hair tucked under a hat, heaves with the rest of the group as they push one ski after another onto a trailer, smiling and joking… Just one of the boys.

If you want to read the whole story of how Maya Gabeira have become a big wave rider visit rebulletin.com