Tunnel Vision: How Moana Jones Wong Became the Undisputed Queen of Pipeline

“So, what or who pushes you out there?” I ask, aware that she’s one of very few women in the lineup at Pipeline when it gets to a certain triple-overhead size-metric.

“I’ve never really needed anyone motivating me out there,” she says. “I do it for my own pleasure. I don’t need people on the beach, the social media, the cameras — I just love the wave so much that I’d surf it with no one around, really. Third Reef or two-foot, I just want to be out there. It’s hard to describe the connection I feel with the wave, but I think if you ask anyone that devotes a lot of time to the spot, they’d tell you that Pipeline has some kind of energy or aura to it that feels like something more than a wave.”

It's almost comical that Jones Wong says she’d surf it “with no one around,” regardless of how true that statement might be, considering that most of the best waves she’s ever caught out there had dozens of cameras pointed at her, plus hundreds of thousands of eyeballs watching said-waves on webcasts and IRL during the events where she caught them.

Take, for example, the 2023 Da Hui Backdoor Shootout. An uber-local, specialty teams-event that goes down each winter at Pipeline, Moana got invited to compete on a team with four other insanely accomplished surfers (Makua Rothman, Kala Grace, Billy Kemper, and Tahiti’s Eimeo Czermak). The year prior, Moana had won the 2022 Billabong Pipe Pro as a wildcard, smoking 5X World Champion and Olympic Gold medalist Carissa Moore in the two-woman final. In other words, coming into the Backdoor Shootout, she had built up a serious rep to live up to, especially alongside four surfers who had some heavy reps of their own. See: 4X Peahi Challenge winner Kemper and WSL Big Wave World Champion Rothman.

Then, as fate might have it, the waves got really big for her team’s heat. Like, Third Reef Pipeline-big, which means around 20-25-feet tall on the wave faces. It didn’t help her confidence either when her teammates like Billy Kemper, Makua Rothman, and Kala Grace were getting drilled so hard they’d suffer concussions and require saving from lifeguards and water patrol.

But on one day in particular, right after the horn blew to end the heat, after Jones Wong had waited nearly all day long, dodging wash-through sets, grappling with fear and doubt, Pipeline sent her a certain, solid set. One of those waves-of-your-life type set waves, actually. Head down, laser-focused and lost in the moment, Jones Wong scraped into what many would call “the wave of the winter,” that season. A wave that certainly would become the wave of her young life.

“I started screaming for Moana to go,” recounts Kala Grace. “I’ve actually never yelled that hard for someone to go on a wave in my life. She ended up catching it and riding it absolutely perfectly. It would’ve been a 10-point-ride in any event and in my eyes, it was the best wave ever ridden by a woman. It was the best wave ridden by anyone that winter.”

“That was a life-defining wave,” remembers Jones Wong with a glint in her eye, attempting to stifle a smile. “It was one of those waves you hope you get your whole life and I’m pretty lucky I got it so young.”

Despite her recent success out at Pipe, there was actually a period of time when Jones Wong considered giving up surfing altogether. Your typical North Shore surf grom, born and raised on this side of the island, Jones Wong had a successful amateur career with the support of major sponsors having won four national titles by the age of 15, and already competing against women much older than she on the WSL’s Qualifying Series, chasing a spot on the World Tour.

En route to the Big Show, a torn MCL tossed a wrench in her momentum and during six months of recovery, she discovered her main sponsor had dropped her. Feeling frustrated and soured by the surf industry, she stepped back from surfing and enrolled in university, nearly an hour’s drive west across the island.

“It was a big change,” says Moana. “Like, as a grom, I never thought I’d go to college; all I envisioned was just being a pro surfer on the World Tour.”

And yet. Once a certified, full-time college student majoring in Hawaiian Health and Healing, something was pulling her to Pipeline—a wave she admittedly avoided before this point in her life. Regardless, she put her time in and, over the course of the next few winters, largely just surfed Pipe and Pipe only.

“Listen,” says Jones Wong. “I’ve actually always been a super shy person. To the point when I was beginning to surf out there again, I’d paddle out way down the beach so my friends wouldn’t roust me. But even still, Pipeline…it made me fall in love with surfing again.”

A few winters later and she’d sign a new professional contract with Volcom, making her a bonafide pro surfer while simultaneously graduating from UH West Oahu. Then, in early 2022, she nabbed a wildcard spot into the Billabong Pipe Pro, the WSL World Tour’s first and most difficult event of the year. Call it her breakout moment, but Jones Wong rose to the occasion and tore through the field of the best women on the planet, all the way to a final with Carissa Moore—whom she bested in proper conditions—making her the best surfer in the world at the start of that year.

“Watching Moana progress at Pipe in a lineup full of pretty aggressive men has been really cool to see,” says Grace. “You only see one girl out there when it’s ‘real deal Pipeline’ and that’s Moana. And she’s out there to get the wave of her life like the rest of us. Her connection to the wave is as deep as it gets.”

“She’s just the type that’s never ever turned down a challenge,” agrees 2024 Lexus Pipe Pro champion Barron Mamiya. “Growing up with her, it was almost like she welcomed it and loved a challenge. Watching her evolve in to the person and surfer she has become out there today is really inspiring.”

Her career appears to have snowballed from there, with Jones Wong starring in Amazon’s “Surf Girls” series last summer. A limited series reality show that spotlights the paths of four Native Hawaiian surfers over the course of a year, "Surf Girls" followed Jones Wong alongside three other women.

“It was cool,” she shrugs, “but having even more cameras follow you around all the time was…different. I don’t even like bringing my family to the beach to watch me compete because of the pressure!”

This past season, she had yet another first, receiving an alternate invite into the iconic Eddie Aikau Big-Wave Invitational event, an honor that few surfers on earth ever achieve. And then a week later, yet another first, when after earning a spot into the 2023 Vans Pipe Masters, she’d advance into another final with Carissa Moore and win the event.

These days, between surfing, training, and traveling, Jones Wong runs her nonprofit Moana Surf Club, a relaxed mentorship program for girls to surf and bond with one another. She’s also launching a small business with her Tahitian husband Tehotu Wong called Moanalani Designs, a beachwear and apparel brand that’s starting with a run of Tahitian pareos and sarongs.

While Moana, now known to most as the “Queen of Pipeline” admittedly needs no motivating, and, if anything, remains the bar-setter among women out at the break, I ask her what kind of advice she gives the young women hoping to follow in her footsteps out there.

“You can’t really rush the process at Pipe,” she says. “You understand that it’s the most dangerous wave in world, but I guess what keeps me coming back is not only the challenge of it all — but the community of surfers out there that have also devoted their life to that wave and ‘get it.’ You feel really connected to that community because you’re all connected to her [Pipe]. I think that if you do it for yourself, and not for anyone else, you’ll feel that connection.”