One month ago, BeachGrit stole away to Mexico, near enough to Guadalajara in Jalisco on the mainland there, with a very specific idea. To determine if it was possible to teach a girl to ride out of a full-roter air (a 540 to the skate and snow jocks), if you had the best air surfer in the world, which is Filipe Toledo, doin’ the tutoring.

As I wrote in Mex,

“Women’s surfing fascinates me. When it’s good it draws blood. Carissa Moore’s slices, Lakey Peterson’s grab-rail tail throws, the impeccable style of Stephanie Gilmore. It’s damn rich.

But does it strike you as odd, as it does me, that there ain’t a gal on tour who has an air-reverse on tap? Silvana Lima showed promise and disappeared (back this year on tour). Even half-way good twelve-year-old boys can throw ‘em as an afterthought on a weak end section.

“So why not the girls?”

Along with another coach, Huntington Beach’s Brett Simpson, and iPads with the Hurley Surf Coach app, and GoPros affixed hither and yon, and patrolling the sky, we had four days to coach, and coax, Santa Babs’ Lakey Peterson into the biggest huck ever by a girl.

Did it work? Did she orbit the Pacific?

How about we take you on what is referred to as a… journey.

We made a four-part series on the process. Part one, below, is the construction of a board that goes pop. –Derek Rielly BeachGrit.com

For this project we built Lakey a number of standard Rook 15’s(which are her go-to-model), ranging from 5’8″ – 5’10” x 18 1/4 – 3/8″ x 2 1/4, but the model we had in mind for pulling off this difficult task is a board we have yet to release called the Fever. This is a board we have been working with Pat Gudauskas on for over two years now. We did some minor modifications to this board for Lakey, as you can see in this first episode, but we really felt it was something that would fire her up and give her that extra speed and pop to pull off huge aerials. We are just as excited as you and can’t wait to see the next few episodes and find out how all of this turned out! -CI