Des Bouillons on a keeper during the Nazaré Big Wave Challenge. Photo: WSL
Michelle des Bouillons already had plenty of reasons to celebrate. A week ago in Newport Beach, California, the Brazilian surfer was named the winner of the Women’s Biggest Wave category at the Big Wave Challenge. It was the second time she’d won the award, after taking the same category in 2024, and the third consecutive year she’d been among the finalists.
But Michelle didn’t leave Newport Beach completely satisfied. The award came for the same wave that she believes should also be recognized as a world record.
On December 13, 2025, Michelle was towed into a massive wave at Nazaré during the WSL’s big-wave event. An independent technical study commissioned by the surfer later measured it at 24.99 meters (82 feet) – more than eight feet above Maya Gabeira’s current women’s record of 22.4 meters (73.5 feet), set at the same Portuguese break in 2020.
The Guinness record, though, remains with Gabeira.
“A lot of people came to me and told me it was worth pursuing, that there was a real chance I had broken the world record,” Michelle told The Inertia. “The last record happened in 2020. It’s been six years without another woman challenging the record.”
Michelle and her team had hoped the Guinness decision might come alongside the Big Wave Challenge award, but it didn’t.
During the awards ceremony, Michelle says Bill Sharp, the founder of the Big Wave Challenge and a figure closely involved with the record process, told her the difference between the two waves was too small for him to recognize a new record.
“He said that because the waves were only a few feet apart, he wasn’t going to give a new record right now, that he wanted more,” she says.
Michelle wasn’t convinced. “It felt very vague to us,” she says. “In a race, if you go half a second faster than the record, you break the record.”
So instead of waiting for another decision, she is preparing to take the case directly to Guinness.
She already has much of what she needs: a technical measurement, footage from more than three angles and letters of support from people within the big-wave community. She also has a lawyer helping with the application.
“The only thing we really need now is to understand exactly how the application works, the fee and all of that,” she says. “But we’re going to do it properly.”
View this post on Instagram
The Wave
The wave came early in Michelle’s heat at Nazaré. Ian Cosenza, her partner and fellow Brazilian big-wave surfer, was driving the Jet Ski. Before they went out, he had told her just one thing: “Michelle, just trust.”
When the set appeared, Michelle knew she had found the wave she was looking for.
“That was definitely the biggest set of my heat,” she says. “That was my pot of gold, my chance to win. So I wanted to surf it as radically as possible. I thought, ‘This wave is supposed to be giant. It’s not supposed to be about doing maneuvers.'”
At the time, she had no idea just how big it would look on video.
“When you’re in the middle of that situation, everything happens so quickly,” she says. “Only afterward, when I got out of the water and started looking at the images, talking to the team and understanding the proportions of that wave, did it really hit me what had happened.”
The measurement was carried out by Paulo Vinicius Lopes, who also worked on Rodrigo Koxa’s 2017 world-record wave. His frame-by-frame analysis uses Michelle’s own shin as a proportional reference to establish the wave’s height.
Lopes then compared it with Gabeira’s record: “He said, ‘Michelle, I measured it in a way that leaves no room for doubt, and your wave was bigger,'” she says.
More Than a Personal Record
Michelle says her pursuit is about more than adding her name to the record books.
“I think records are made to be broken. It doesn’t make much sense to go six, 10 years without anyone breaking a record.”
She believes another woman’s big-wave record could push the sport forward and give the next generation something to chase.
“My search is really about that. It’s not just something personal. It’s something for women’s surfing.”
