Yesterday afternoon, after a day of building swell, heroic tubes and death-defying wipeouts, Keala Kennelly, by all accounts, got the wave of the day at Teahupoo.

“I had to drop straight in,” she said when we called her this morning. “When it sucks off the reef that hard and goes below sea level, you can’t really come in at an angle. You have to drop straight down and lay a bottom turn and get into the barrel and get a good line and hold on. I felt like my position was good. But then I saw the whole thing go mutant.”The perennial XXL winner is no stranger to the End of the Road; she was the first woman to tow here a decade ago, and has been chasing giant swells ever since. (Ironically, her worst injury was on a small day back in 2010.) So what happened on this one?“I got the shit kicked out of me,” she laughed. “My helmet blew off my head, I got whipped back over onto the reef onto the whole left side of my body and I thought I broke my hand. It’s still super swollen. But all in all, I just have a couple scrapes and bruises. Considering the beating I got, I’m pretty unscathed.”And how exactly does one deal with the entire Pacific Ocean coming over one? “You just try to relax,” she explained simply. “Even though everything is telling you to fight for your life. I was trying to relax and trying not to slam the reef — trying to stay flat and hold my breath as long as I could. But it’s really hard to stay relaxed when you’re getting obliterated.”How does this rate to other Teahupoo bombs over the years? “Definitely the biggest one I’ve ever caught,” she said. “But I didn’t actually realize it was that big at the time. I was just bummed I didn’t come spitting out of the barrel. When I saw the guys in the channel, I was like, ‘bro, I didn’t even make it,’ and they all showed me the photo and said that it didn’t really matter.”