SportTechie’s Athletes Voice series features the views and opinions of the athletes who use and are powered by technology. SportTechie recently spoke to professional surfer Kai Lenny about the World Surf League and how a changing environment is affecting the Earth’s oceans.
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Kai Lenny’s first name is the Hawaiian word for “ocean.” Lenny grew up on the northern coast of Maui and rode his first wave at age five. Now 26, He is a seven-time World Stand Up Paddleboard Champion, runner-up at the Kite Surf Pro World Championships, and a 2019 inductee into the Surfers’ Hall of Fame, a memorial to those who have most impacted surfing culture located outside of Huntington Surf & Sport in Huntington Beach, Calif. He has also competed in both windsurfing and big wave surfing.
Lenny has participated in the World Surf League’s Big Wave Tour since 2015, finishing second and third the past two seasons. He recently made a series of media appearances in New York City to tout the WSL’s goal of becoming carbon neutral by the end of 2019.
Riding Giants
“Back in the day, just to survive a big-wave session and get one or two waves was an achievement in itself. I think it goes along with the natural progression of anything. When we first went to space, it was just survive getting there and then getting home.
“Now, with technology, we have some powerful machines, like jet skis, to swoop in and save you if something goes wrong. Back in the day, that didn’t exist. The equipment—being the surfboards and the inflation vests we have. Back in the day, the boards were made out of polyurethane, but basically boards were just this old … technology and material. And there was no such thing as leashes. You weren’t attached to anything. There was no flotation device. You were swimming while [the ocean] was trying to drown you. Now, because of the space industry and other sports like Formula 1, there’s easier access to carbon fiber and kevlar technologies that allow for greater speeds on the wave, and design software that allows you to basically put equipment through a simulation before actually trying it.
“In my quiver that I use consistently, which might be a surprise to a lot of people, is well over 100 boards. Because you really need boards for every conceivable type of condition. If you’re a professional athlete like myself, it needs to be specific. The ocean is never the same twice. I have boards that will work in a certain criteria of conditions, but those won’t work in this criteria.
“The biggest thing in big-wave surfing has always been the inflation vests. [Swimming to the surface] would be like trying to run up the stairs of a Manhattan skyscraper versus taking the elevator [with a vest]. Which one is going to get you there quicker and which one is going to leave you with more air in your lungs? These inflation vests have CO2 cartridges and you pull these tabs, and it blows up like an airbag and that brings you to the surface. I would say many lives have been saved by that technology. I think 10 years from now, we’re going to think of all of this as relics—and that’s amazing.”
Wave Prediction
“As a water athlete, you definitely become your own meteorologist. Being able to read not only the maps and the weather patterns and the cycles that go, but also feeling the change, visually, on land. Being able to look at the clouds and go ‘All right, that specific cloud means this type of wind.’ Or the changing of the water color means that, in one day, there’s going to be a giant swell here because the currents are shifting.
“Of course, with technology, it’s unbelievable. We have surf forecasters and wind forecasters that pretty accurately can predict when a swell or a gale force wind is coming toward some place. I can be in Hawaii and know, for sure, within three days there’s going to be an 80-foot swell in Portugal. I can get on a plane, be there, and with confidence know it’s going to be really big. Sure, the local microsystems will change the outcome of that. There might be an unforeseen wind, but for the most part, you can look at local wind patterns and local tides and get a very good understanding … It’s probably the only way, as humans, we are truly able to predict the future.”
“There are buoys scattered all across the major oceans of the world. NOAA, they have these buoys, and you’re able to go on their website and you can see real-time buoy [data]. Let’s say there’s a buoy that’s 10 hours away from Hawaii. I can know that, if I calculate it right, the swell starts hitting that one buoy—and the biggest swell reading, which could be 20 feet at 20 seconds—and I know that, on Maui, at one o’clock exactly on the dot, that swell is going to hit. It’s mathematical.
“We have local forecasting, like Magicseaweed, which is a surf-endemic forecasting [app]. Surfline, of course. One of my personal favorites is Windguru. That’s just a really accurate algorithm that takes a lot of the models from across the globe and puts it all into one good information [source] for wind and swell. I would say I use Windguru probably the most.”
Social Sharing
“I’m always using my GoPro especially in big waves because there’s an intimate perspective you can capture with the GoPro in such gigantic surf. Some 99.9 percent of the people of the world will never experience being in a situation where there’s an 80-foot wave coming towards them or riding an 80-foot wave. If you have a way to capture it in some capacity, from a point of view, I think that’s really cool. The GoPro—not surprisingly, but surprisingly—can handle the power of a few nuclear bombs, which is a giant wave.
“It’s funny, because sometimes your greatest rides go completely unacknowledged. You’re like ‘That was amazing. That felt crazy.’ But it doesn’t look the same or something. But I think it’s really cool when people see what I do and can be either entertained by it or inspired by it. I always hope that everything I do isn’t to show how cool or what a better athlete I am, and it’s more like, it inspires someone to go do something exciting for themselves. That’s always been my hope. Whenever there’s a viral clip, it’s really cool to see people’s reactions.
“I love seeing people’s reactions that have no affiliation with the ocean or live in a city and don’t go surfing. It’s interesting to get their perspectives. Typically they think it’s a lot more crazy than [from] people who do the sports and are a little more desensitized by it all.”
Sea Change
“In my lifetime alone, being born and raised on Maui, you definitely can see the typical patterns on the ocean are very different [compared] to when I was really young. I would say there are extreme fluxes. Like the wind direction, for example. The trade winds have shifted. They’re not as easterly as they once were. They have a little more of a northerly direction. The rain is a lot less consistent. It might dump for a very long time, and then it might be dry for a very long time. When I was a kid, I would remember in the mornings there would be no wind, and then there’d be wind [later in the day] whereas now it’s just windy or no wind all day.
“It’s pretty ironic that, the worst the storms get, the bigger the waves will get and the better it is for my ‘career’ or my personal endeavors. The problems with these types of storms is that they’re not going to be isolated or localized to one region of ocean … Those are the swells we’re looking for. We’re looking for swells that are produced by these giant storms that are thousands of miles away. There’s a certain truth that Japan could be getting wiped off the face of the earth by a giant storm but, in Hawaii, it could be bluebird and sunny and we could be getting 100-foot waves. That is a conceivable situation. As much as surfers want to see the best waves, you never want to see anyone get totaled by it. [But] the thing is, if it is going to be the end of the world and it is the apocalypse, we’ll go out having fun.”
Sustainable Surfing
“The goal on the World Surf League is always to win a world title because it’s a way to prove to yourself that you can be the greatest big-wave surfer on the planet. What’s really cool about this platform that they’ve given us is the ability to travel to every corner of the globe and surf the best waves on the planet. Also, the fact that they’re really conscious about the environment. This year, they’ve committed to becoming a carbon-neutral league, which is the first of any kind. It’s incredible because the offsets it’s going to require are giant since we travel on long flights, and there’s really no way to get to some place without getting on an airplane in surfing, because places are very remote that we go to.
“I love the fact that they’re giving all of us surfers a platform to have a professional career and, at the same time, understand that the playground or the field that we have needs to be protected. I think it’s good for humanity to care more about things outside themselves. It would be a shame, if the waves that I’m riding today, don’t exist one day.”
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