Somewhere in the Aleutian Islands, Anna Gudauskas was on her way to a wave she’d never seen before and will likely never see again. She was aboard the Milo, a commercial fishing vessel repurposed for long-range surf exploration. As the boat pushed through the crossing’s heavy seas, it pitched and plunged in the massive open-ocean swells. A long way from home, Gudauskas felt alive and in her element. “It was cold and windy, with fucking huge waves,” recalls her husband, Dane Gudauskas, who was also on the trip.
The rough crossing paid off when a perfect wave came into view. Looming over the lineup, a towering stack of jagged rocks stained with guano jutted toward the sky. Birds circled overhead. In the rocks’ shadow, a steep takeoff morphed into a long, shallow racetrack left. Here and there, boulders punched through the water’s surface, just to keep things interesting.
Riding a twin-fin egg, Gudauskas neatly slid her board into the wave’s curve as she made the drop. Then she slipped through the rocks, set her rail, and rocketed down the line. It was what she’d come to Alaska to find. “It hadn’t been surfed before,” she says. “It’s a fickle wave, and we got an enormous swell. We just happened to get it good that day.” They named the setup “Splash Mountain.”
Over the past 15 years, Gudauskas has traveled to some of the world’s most remote corners to ride waves few people have ever seen, much less surfed, and immersed herself in the cultures of places as diverse as Iceland, the Galápagos, and India. “I like the exploration factor,” she says, “and going to places that haven’t been completely charted and figured out. I think it’s cool that there still are places like that.”
Growing up in Topanga, Gudauskas (née Ehrgott) spent her childhood outdoors. At the time, the canyon still felt isolated from the wider world, and she ran free under the scrub oaks and through the meadows’ tall grasses. An ADHD diagnosis at age 7 made sense of her high energy and the near-desperate need she had to move and to escape.
She learned to surf in her teens from a neighbor, and on weekends and summer days she followed the winding canyon roads down to the coast. For a girl in the early 2000s, Topanga Beach offered a steep learning curve—the lineup retained a tight, regulated hierarchy, and Gudauskas remembers an intense atmosphere of near-daily fights. “It was not welcoming,” she says.
Discouraged by the localism she saw, she never ventured up the road to Malibu and rarely encountered other women longboarders. When Thomas Campbell released Sprout, in 2004, the film was a revelation to Gudauskas. His celebration of longboarding provided a stark contrast to Taylor Steele’s punk-infused Campaign films of the same period. It was also the first time she saw women like Kassia Meador surf, which opened her mind to the longboard’s possibilities and inspired her to try noseriding.
As she went deeper into its culture, surfing provided an essential outlet for Gudauskas, especially because school didn’t come readily. Her parents were professors, and they struggled to understand why she didn’t like going to class. They encouraged her to keep trying, and Gudauskas made it as far as junior college. “I failed algebra three times,” she says with characteristic humor. “It started out easy, and I felt like I didn’t have to pay attention. Then it got hard.”
An interest in environmental policy had initially motivated her, but she couldn’t face the prospect of more hours trapped in a classroom. Recalls her mother, Andrea Ehrgott, “When she first said, ‘I’m going to drop out of junior college, and I want to get into surfing,’ I said to her, ‘Who doesn’t? Realistically, is that ever going to happen?’”
Turning to Craigslist, Gudauskas pieced together a series of jobs that included assisting a fashion photographer, sewing scarves, and modeling with an agency in Los Angeles. Three days a week, she worked at the Mollusk store in Venice Beach. To save money, she lived in a warehouse in Costa Mesa. “I was worried,” says Ehrgott of those early years. “I just didn’t understand the surfing thing. I thought she was going down the wrong road.”
Despite their misgivings about her path, her parents did share their daughter’s appetite for travel. “They were adventurous people,” says Gudauskas, whose older sister, Alex, was born in Egypt. During the summers, the family was always on the move. A geographer, Ehrgott plotted out family vacations to places like Borneo and Tanzania. “Once in a while, they would complain,” she says. “‘Why can’t we just have normal vacations, like Disneyland or Palm Springs?’”
At 21, Gudauskas set off with a friend on a three-month trip to South Africa. Influenced by paging through her parents’ photo albums, she brought a film camera with her to document the trip. Somewhere near Port Elizabeth, their journey took a detour. After visiting a wildlife sanctuary, Gudauskas volunteered to work at the facility and stayed for a month. “It was life-changing,” she says. “I love when something changes the trip to a trajectory that you weren’t planning.”
The experience of going off course in South Africa shifted her perspective. Surfing became the starting point, rather than the sole focus, of her untethered wanderings. “I think the type of surf travel that Anna’s interested in doesn’t have anything to do with wave quality,” says photographer and sustainability expert Meg Haywood Sullivan. “It’s about the people and the places that she gets a chance to see and the animals she gets a chance to meet.”
When Gudauskas couldn’t find anyone to join her on a trip to Sri Lanka, she went alone. It was a dream destination for her, thanks to Sprout. In Hikkaduwa, a resort town on the south side of the island, she paddled out in the early morning as partygoers headed home for the night. Then she explored the city and hiked into the surrounding hills.
“I had inexhaustible energy at that point in my life,” she says. “I wanted to be doing something at all hours of the day.”
Gudauskas discovered that there also were pitfalls to traveling on her own. While hiking in Sri Lanka, she met a man with an elephant, who offered to give her a tour of a local monastery and its art treasures. She agreed, but in the maze of the monastery’s corridors, she realized how isolated she was. She quickly found an exit and headed back to town. “It was just one of those situations,” she says, “where I was like, ‘I was following around this random dude next to a forest in a place where no one knows where I am.’ I think a lot of women are so scared to come off as rude, and I knew at that point that I had to go.”
Traveling alone, she learned to trust her intuition, and mostly she found that her openness led her in transformative directions. “I feel like as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more guarded and more protective of myself,” she says. “But I also have less open-hearted experiences because of it.”
During those years, her compulsion to hit the road bordered on addiction, and returning home felt unbearably confining. “Sometimes I would cry flying into LAX,” she says. “I’d have these panic attacks about time slipping away. I wanted to use every single bit of my life to do something interesting.” Over time, Gudauskas steadily accumulated a network of friends who shared her wanderlust. “It’s so rare to find someone who sees the world in a similar way and who’s curious,” says Haywood Sullivan, who met Gudauskas at a farm-to-table dinner in 2016.
Together, they’ve sprinted through an airport in remote Java, navigated floodwaters in Guatemala, and slept in a riad in Marrakech. During a trip to the Middle East, they dragged their board bags across the border from Israel to Jordan. Later, under the desert sun, Gudauskas rode a runaway horse.
“I think my favorite memories of her are just feeling totally comfortable and at ease, no matter how stressful or hectic or new a situation is,” Haywood Sullivan adds. “I think the theme of a lot of the places we’ve been together is pushing outside of our comfort zones and trying to see the world through a different cultural lens.”
In November 2018, Gudauskas moved into a warehouse in Ventura with her longtime friend Sarah Lee, a photographer from Hawaii. Gritty industrial spaces populated North Ventura Avenue, known as “the Ave.,” and their warehouse sat on a lot next to a painting operation. From her couch, Gudauskas could see the marine layer tantalizing her with cool relief as the relentless summer sun beat down on the warehouse’s iron roof. The two friends decorated with fresh paint and fairy lights, but the dirt and the mice remained.
“I love when something changes the trip to a trajectory that you weren’t planning.”
By then, Gudauskas had started her own company, Sagebrush Bags, making board bags from deadstock fabric and upcycled coffee sacks. The fluid, entrepreneurial life suited her.
“I’m a terrible employee,” she says. “Being self-employed, I’m really goal oriented, and I’m good at holding myself accountable.”
As she traveled, she collected unique fabrics for Sagebrush. The business also complemented the sponsorships she had established with brands such as Prana and Billabong Women.
In Lee, Gudauskas found an adventure partner and a friend on a similarly self-directed path. “Sarah has been a big part of my surfing life and career,” she says. “We’re like a power couple, in a friend kind of way, always just bouncing ideas off each other.”
Each winter, Gudauskas would visit Lee at her family’s coffee farm in Kona. Setting aside her longboards, she’d ride egg shapes in the 6-foot range, adapting her surfing to the wider canvas the Big Island’s powerful waves offered. “I felt like I could go anywhere with her, even more local spots,” says Lee. “She’ll paddle out and slowly take in her surroundings. In Hawaii, that goes a long way. You’re not just paddling out at the peak and taking over—especially as a girl.”
Whenever she looked at the map, Gudauskas saw new possibilities, particularly in the cold waters of the north. The chance to surf a wave that no one else had touched fired her imagination. “I just love the element of adventure and of maybe discovering something that surfers didn’t know about,” she says.
Since 2015, she’s made five trips to Iceland and three to Alaska, where the wild terrain creates a striking contrast to California’s parking lots and freeways. On a winter boat trip between Nome and Seward, Gudauskas surfed six waves that likely had never been ridden before.
Following a parallel trajectory, Dane Gudauskas had also shifted his sights northward and begun exploring cold-water destinations with photographer Chris Burkard. He remembers idly scrolling Instagram and flipping through Prana catalogs during this period, where he saw photos of a woman who had surfed some of the same remote waves he’d ridden. “We were in all these random places and there were no surfers, really,” he recalls. “There’s this tiny island off the coast of Kamchatka, and Anna and I had both been there—separately. There were probably only, like, six people who had been there.”
An Instagram correspondence turned into surf dates at Rincon in late 2018. “I remember telling Sarah, ‘Oh no, we’re just friends,’” Gudauskas recalls. Lee set her straight. “Sarah was like, ‘You realize his driving time from San Clemente is, like, six hours. I don’t think you guys are just friends. The waves weren’t that good—and he’s a goofyfoot.’”
A deeply accomplished surfer in his own right, Dane marveled at the style Anna brought to longboarding when he began surfing with her. “Just watching how smoothly Anna walks on the longboard—I could watch it all day,” he says. “I was tripping all over the place and just looking like a complete kook.”
Traveling and surfing, they wove together their lives and their board collections. “Each board has a different voice,” says Dane. “I’d ridden some different boards, but it was only hanging with Anna that I was exposed to all these different designs.”
During an eight-month trip to Hawaii, Dane discovered Anna’s versatility when she paddled out on the North Shore. “She was on some big, open canvases at Sunset, just gracefully maneuvering the board,” he says. “She brought an aesthetic to it that you would find at Malibu—just a classic California aesthetic.” They married in the summer of 2021.
This past spring, I walked up the driveway to the Spanish-style ranch house that they share. Behind the fence, I could hear ducks quacking. Anna came to the door with their 4-month-old daughter, Heidi, who offered a gummy smile by way of welcome. A California oak shaded the house, and a picture window opened onto a panoramic view of the Ojai Valley. The atmosphere felt unexpectedly domestic and serene. The girl who spent her childhood running is learning to stand still. “The best way I can think to describe being a mom is living childhood again with a new best friend,” she said. “All the things I loved as a young kid, I get to see that through the eyes of somebody who has never seen them before.”
She’s found a different rhythm for her life. Returning to surfing as a new mom, Gudauskas has experienced all the highs and lows that our absurd and beautiful pastime offers. “I had a couple magical sessions at Rincon on my first days back, where it was just knee-high and empty,” she said. But she’s also had sessions where she’s wanted to quit forever. “Surfing is either the best thing ever or the worst thing ever,” she laughed.
After traveling by boat through the Alaskan winter and devoting years of her life to chasing surf in the world’s most wild and unforgiving places, Gudauskas knows all about uncertainty. She understands that surfing will often frustrate and discourage her. Life is chancy and unpredictable. But around the next corner, she might also find the wave of her life, and, in the pursuit of it, she might find something far more magnificent than she had ever imagined. In those fleeting moments, it all feels worth it.
