Giants From The Deep: World Champion Big Wave Surfer Maya Gabeira and the Challenge of Riding Mountains of the Sea

In today's episode, I speak with Brazilian big wave surfer Maya Gabeira, one of the most famous female surfers in the world.

Maya is a seven-time world champion in the World Surf League and a two-time world record holder for the largest wave surfed, including in 2020, where she surfed the biggest wave of the year for both men and women combined.

Beyond that, and perhaps as no surprise, she is also deeply committed to ocean conservation and is a board member of Oceana and a UNESCO champion for the ocean. Maya was also featured in the HBO series 100-Foot Wave, which chronicled a group of surfers surfing the waves at Nazaré, Portugal, perhaps the biggest and most challenging wave on the planet.

As part of that journey, she had a terrifying and very high-profile crash where she was knocked unconscious by a huge wave at Nazaré, broke her leg, and almost drowned. 

And yet, with all of that, I found Maya to be down-to-earth, humble and almost shy, with a wonderful sense of humor, And we discussed how she first discovered surfing in her hometown of Rio de Janeiro off Copacabana Beach, Why she was driven to such an extreme relationship with the ocean and what it feels like to skip down the face of one of the largest waves on the planet.

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