Catching a Break

It’s sunday morning in Whangamata. As the small Coromandel town rouses, Ella Williams is already out catching waves. She’s been in the water a good long while by the time I roll up to the popular – and incredibly picturesque – surf beach. She’s beaming, buzzing, dripping wet and wrapped in a beach towel.

“I like to make the most of the waves,” she says, as we take a seat under the tarpaulin of her parent’s Learn To Surf stall, an extension of the family’s surf gear business.
“In Whanga’ the waves can be here one day, gone the next. So you have to make the most of them.”

A natural competitor, Ella entered her first surf competition at the tender age of six, but getting to the top required hard work, dedication and a smidgen of luck.

“I didn’t think I was going to be in the World Champs,” she tells me. “I was in Whanga’ looking after the surf shop, getting it ready for Christmas, when I got the call-up. I only had a couple of weeks to prepare!”

Ella’s place in the competition came at the expense of an Australian surfer who had to drop out due to injury. As far as the organizers were concerned, Ella’s invitation to compete was made to make up the numbers.

“No one expected me to win. No one even expected me to be there. I was the underdog in that respect,” she says. “But I was there for a reason: I wanted to win. I’d got this chance and I was going to give it my best shot. And I did. It was very unexpected and pretty cool when it happened.”

Ella says that right up until her win, New Zealand wasn’t taken seriously by the global surfing community.

“We come under Australia! It’s called ‘Australia and New Zealand’, but all the competitions, all the pro-juniors are held in Australia,” she says. “We’ve got one held here in 2014, but that’s the first in a long time. So, we have to go to Australia to compete and it’s hard to break through.”

Despite the Aussie barrier and the financial challenges involved in just getting to the competitions, Ella says there’s nowhere else she would rather be.

“We’re so lucky in New Zealand. We’ve got so many fantastic beaches and the waves here are super-fun. It’s such a good place to live. I plan to stay here.”

Talk moves back to her victory, which she describes as “a great, surreal moment”, crediting her win to something as simple as following her dream – which is the advice she’d offer to other Kiwis wanting to succeed at a global level.

“I took a lot of knocks before I won. I went to comps all over the world and I didn’t get the greatest results. And it was hard. Travelling all the way around the world and getting knocked out in the second heat, and that’s it, and all your money’s gone,” she says, visibly wincing at the memory. “But, you’ve got to keep going. It does get hard but, if you push through, it will pay off in the end.”

I tell her she has a very relaxed outlook and jokingly ask if her easygoing attitude is all a façade that’s hiding a fierce competitor within.

“Maybe...” she muses, steely-eyed and thoughtful. She pauses, looks at me pointedly, and then slowly... slowly... breaks into a wide cheeky grin and says, “I’ll let you be the decider of that”.

Reported by Karl Puschmann for our AA Directions Spring 2024 issue