
LOCAL SURF CONTEST + GLOBAL COMMUNITY FUNDRAISER
LOCAL SURF CONTEST + GLOBAL COMMUNITY FUNDRAISER
LOCAL SURF CONTEST + GLOBAL COMMUNITY FUNDRAISER
LOCAL SURF CONTEST + GLOBAL COMMUNITY FUNDRAISER
LOCAL SURF CONTEST + GLOBAL COMMUNITY FUNDRAISER
WOW 2024 / OCTOBER 19-20 / Capitola beach
PRESENTED BY:

Nohemi Kawasaki - By Alexandria Bordas
The stats!
Name: Nohemi Kawasaki
Age: 22
Stance: goofy
Fave surf spot: Pleasure Point
Favorite board: 9’6” Pearson Arrow
Years competing in WOW: 4
Hometown: “Hard to say…”
First spot surfed: A spot somewhere along the coast in Santa Barbara

Nohemi isn’t quite sure where to claim as her hometown when asked, and it could be because she’s more like a daughter of the world.
She spent her earliest months of life in the small town of Lake Amatitlan in Guatemala, before being adopted and moving to the Palo Alto area. As a child through young adult years, she frequented Santa Cruz and Watsonville, visited Hawaii and traveled up-and-down the California coast. Although she didn’t start getting serious about surfing until middle-and-high school years, she’s always been drawn to the water, which she sees as a natural extension of being born lakeside in Central America.
“I should’ve known I would end up being a surfer, especially when I look back at pictures of myself as a kid where I’m photographed wearing a tiny O'Neill wetsuit when I was two, then another photo of me poking my head around a giant longboard when I was seven,” Nohemi said. “There were always these hints that I was going to grow up to become a surfer, and it will be part of my life forever.”
Not one to pigeonhole herself, 22-year-old Nohemi has surfed all types of waves on all types of surfboards. It’s part of why she loves surfing so much, because no two sessions will ever be the same and just because she caught an epic wave one day doesn’t mean she’s guaranteed to have a similarly successful time the next day. She’s incredibly chill, almost too chill, at least that’s how she said her closest friends and family describe her.
Nohemi chalks up her stoically zen state from lessons about life she’s learned from the ocean.
“It teaches me that things are always moving, conditions are always changing, big or small, just like on land,” Nohemi said. “If there's a giant set at Maverick’s, how do you react? Be calm, be chill. Life freaking throws so many things at you, so be calm, you got it.”
Speaking of Maverick’s – the legendary Half Moon Bay spot known for some of the thickest, heaviest, gnarliest waves in the world – Nohemi has worked her way to becoming a consistent presence in the lineup during the biggest winter swells there over the last couple of years.
To rewind, it was at 16 that Nohemi asked for a surf coach as a birthday present. She competed on the Santa Cruz Mountain Surf team as a middle schooler, but it wasn’t until after she got her first taste of surf stoke around 14 that she started to get serious. The moment she realized she wanted to get more into surfing was when she dropped into a wave at Cowells and rode it down the line for the first time, changing everything she previously experienced as a grom surfer.
“I was on a yellow foamie and I had gone out with just my dad, where as usual, I would catch waves going straight,” Nohemi said. “But then I made one subtle adjustment, not sure how I did it, and my board just shot down the line and I was so stoked and my face was like ‘what is happening!’ It was so addicting.”
She worked with a surf coach for a couple of years to transform her surfing on many different technical levels. Together they’d analyze videos, closely monitor surf conditions and create incremental goals. When Nohemi started feeling like she was being held back from chasing bigger waves out of concerns that she wasn’t yet at that level, it was her boyfriend, Anthony, that first told her with certainty that she was ready to make that jump.
The couple met in the summer of 2020, and she said he helped her actualize her big wave dreams.
Nohemi had always been curious about bigger waves, ever since she caught her first overhead one at Pleasure Point when she was 15. Again on a foam board, she paddled out alone at the Point during a particularly larger swell.
“It was going off one day at the Point and I paddled out on a Wavestorm with my family and friends watching me,” Nohemi said. “I turned and dropped in on a bomb, probably at least overhead, and it felt so sick. That’s what started it for me – the obsession with big wave surfing.”
She said she processes fear in different ways from those around her, and isn’t necessarily scared of the giant faces of 20-foot sets like most others might be – instead she sees it as an opportunity for ultimate adrenaline, a chance to be utterly present with mother nature.
But she doesn’t take surfing at Maverick’s lightly – she trains hard, in-and-out of the water. She surfs as often as possible, but in between sessions she’s at the gym lifting weights, doing underwater exercises at the local pool to build her lung capacity and practicing meditative breathing. She cross-trains all the time, always with a focus on the next winter at Maverick’s.
She said her first real season of surfing Mavs came last year when she finally caught and stood up on a wave after spending the previous two seasons paddling around the lineup and learning from those around her. During those two winters of observation, she would watch others to learn about the complicated intricacies of the spot and the lineup culture, as well as connecting with the couple of other women who were out there, including Half Moon Bay local teenager Zoe Chait, and the famous Bianca Valenti.
“When I see there are only about three of us women out there the last few seasons, for us it’s about how we can push each other,” Nohemi said. “We’re the only girls out there amid a whole lineup of men, so we often look at each other and say: “let’s just charge, let’s just be women who can charge it.”
Like every big wave surfer who dreams of dropping in on a massive behemoth, Nohemi took a beating by the first wave she rode at Maverick’s in 2023. She describes the waves as Maverick’s as “heavy”, and that riding down the face of the green wall made her feel like she was a paperclip just skipping along.
When she wiped out she said she quickly had to push all fear and panic out of her mind to refocus her energy on staying calm, breathing and remembering her training.
“It’s so loud out there and when you wipe out it sounds even louder, like bombs were going off all around me,” Nohemi said. “You're getting pulled down as you’re working to pull your life vest to inflate it, which becomes another loud sound once it expands open. Your adrenaline and heart rate are pumping and you’re just trying to stay calm in the middle of all of that.”
But being the chill person she is, Nohemi didn’t overly panic. Instead, she leaned into the trust she had in Anthony and her team who was out in the water with her, as well as her safety gear. Once she finally surfaced, she knew her people would be there to assist.
As a competitor with the Santa Cruz Longboard Union, Nohemi is focused on achieving small goals season-to-season so she doesn’t lose her drive or passion for the hobby turned sport.
Because she takes a few moments before heats to sit in silence and listen to music, people can at times interpret that as unfriendly, but Nohemi said it’s her way of preparing. It’s a hard line to walk surfing and competing with close friends – she doesn’t shy away from admitting she’s competitive and wants to win, but also doesn’t want to see her friends upset after heats when they don’t advance.
So, she and many of her friends came up with a system: “The second the horn goes off we tell each other for the next 15-minutes we're not friends, it's on. And I take advantage of it, I go into each comp really focused,” Nohemi said.
“I tell them “I love you” and “you got this”, but then I focus on my heat,” she said. “In terms of the chill surf vibes and competitiveness, it's a hard balance between wanting to give a wave away to a friend who desperately might need it, but you need it too. The comedown from a heat is a hard mix of feelings and emotions.”
That’s why Nohemi looks forward to Women on Waves each year, because the spirit of the event is not rooted in competitiveness or needing to help your surf club win. She gets to leave that part of herself at home and lean into the celebration of women’s surfing that Women on Waves promotes.
This will be Nohemi’s fourth year at WOW and despite competing in incredible events year-round along the coast, this comp is especially fun for her.
“It's really nice, because I am so competitive to just know that it's not a legit competition with all this pressure to perform and the message instead with this comp is so different that I get to go out there and show off just being a woman in surfing,” Nohemi said. “We all support each other and it’s okay that some of us are competitive all the time, but for that one heat at WOW it’s just about supporting each other.”



