Photo: Laurent Pujol

“The guys are always a bit intrigued when they see a girl in the water at La Graviere when it’s heavy… I just try to make sure I don’t fall on my first wave, otherwise you’ll get dropped in on every time. The locals there don’t really gift me waves just coz I’m a girl or anything, but they’re friendly enough anyway, I guess they know me a bit by now.

I love these kind of conditions at La Graviere where you have to step up, I love the intensity of it. I tend to watch the guys surf more than girls and the Europeans more than the international surfers. I don’t idolize the guys or try to model myself on them, I just think that if they can do it, then so can I. When it’s 6ft, glassy and perfect well that just makes me even more keen to get shacked. When it’s like that, I’m frothing for it as hard as anyone.

At the start, I found it hard to surf those kind of waves properly, tuberiding is a long apprenticeship, and a big part of that is instinct rather than technique. But I’ve practiced long and hard and pushed myself to surf better in hollow surf, it seems like it’s paying off.

Laurent Pujol called me about geting this type of photo and I’m always keen to try new things, the hard thing is Laurent told me not to stall, not to accelerate, and definitely not to put my hand in the face because the spray would ruin the shot. I reckon you can see that from my body position in the barrel… I don’t know what to do with myself haha! It’s not that easy to just stand there and it was really hard to stop myself from instinctively putting my hand on the face like you do every time you pull in.”