One of his friends finally reached him, but getting back to shore was brutal. His feet were cut up badly and bleeding. The physical pain, however, wasn’t the only thing that stayed with him.
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Jason Momoa has shared a terrifying real-life survival story, one that made him quit smoking for good.
The ‘Chief of War’ star revealed on the Smartless podcast with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett that he almost drowned while surfing in his home state of Hawaii. The near-death moment happened at Pe’ahi (also known as “Jaws”), a world-famous big wave surfing spot in Maui.
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Momoa explained that he was nearly a mile offshore when the leash tying him to his surfboard suddenly snapped.
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“It’s so windy on Maui, the board just went. I couldn’t even see it anymore,” he said. At the time, he and his friends had already paddled an exhausting 13 miles along the coast.
Surfing runs deep in Momoa’s blood, as he comes from a family of respected surfers and watermen, and he had trained for tough ocean conditions. Still, nothing could prepare him for what came next. Powerful 10-foot waves started crashing over him, some hitting him hard on the head.
He found himself in a notoriously dangerous spot locals call “Shitfucks,” a place where the water pulls you out toward the outer reef and the waves just keep pounding.
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“I was stuck in this crazy spot, and unknown to me, I was really on the outer reef. They couldn’t see me,” Momoa said. He even tried waving his paddle for help, but the waves were so huge, his friends couldn’t spot him.
The force of the ocean was so strong, it even ripped his shorts off. The situation quickly turned desperate. Momoa remembered thinking about his baby daughter, who was just three months old at the time. Exhaustion hit hard, and he could no longer move his arms or legs.
“I literally gave up,” he recalled. “Inside, I was screaming, and then my foot just hit something, maybe a rock, maybe a whale, I don’t know. I grabbed it, jumped up, and immediately got hit by another wave.”
Clinging to life, he dug his feet into the coral, managing to lift his face above the water just enough to breathe. “I had already given up. I thought I was gone. Then I got this second chance,” he said.
One of his friends finally reached him, but getting back to shore was brutal. His feet were cut up badly and bleeding. The physical pain, however, wasn’t the only thing that stayed with him.
He admitted that before this incident, he smoked two to three packs of cigarettes a day. “I couldn’t stop for my kids, I couldn’t stop for my ex, I couldn’t stop smoking,” Jason Momoa said. But after surviving that ordeal, something inside him changed.
“The moment I came out, I never smoked again,” Momoa said. “I just died out there, in a way. I gave up my life. After that, I couldn’t do it again.”
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