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Monday, 5 February 2007
A mother, chemistry professor and surfer. Not exactly the emblem of a minivan-driving soccer mom, but Sarah Gerhardt (pictured) isn’t exactly the emblem of the California surfer either.
And Gerhardt is just one of about 20 women who have been paddling into the once-male sanctuary of extreme surfing by trying out super-sized surf - waves that measure more than 20 feet on their faces.
More and more women are being drawn to the dangerous sport because of the exploits of such adrenaline junkies as Gerhardt and fellow Santa Cruz, Calif., surfers Jenny Useldinger and Jamilah Star.
That so many hail from Santa Cruz is a testament to the city’s reputation as a wave mecca. But until Gerhardt arrived in 1998, no woman had tried to conquer the monster waves that break a half-mile offshore. Her feats inspired Useldinger.
“We spend our whole lives with the boys telling us we can’t,” said Useldinger, the first woman to surf a treacherous break called Dungeons in South Africa. “When you see another female doing it, it’s like, ‘Oh, I can do that.’”
Most surfers tackle giant swells for the thrill. Gerhardt did it to escape. Surfing transported her to a totally peaceful world, where she could forget the difficulties of life while growing up in Pismo Beach, Calif.
After graduating high school she made a pilgrimage to Hawaii to sample her first big waves. She embraced the challenge, and for the next three years juggled college with surfing.
Word of huge waves at Santa Cruz led Gerhardt to move there and she began testing the waters in fall 1998.
“When I finally got there, I didn’t know if I could make it out and didn’t know what I would find,” said Gerhardt, who earned a doctorate at UC-Santa Cruz.
When Gerhardt caught a wave her third time out, all the men cheered in support, she recalled.
“Big waves help me know what I value most, what my priorities are, what I will settle for,” she said.
As the subject of the documentary “One Winter Story,” she shares those lessons with other women interested in big-wave surfing. Gerhardt tells them it takes years of seasoning to overcome the fear of facing walls of water.
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