HUGE TAHITI SWELL ROCKS CLOSING DAYS OF 2010 BILLABONG XXL BIG WAVE AWARDS

The annual event period for the Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Awards presented by Monster Energy coincided with the end of the Northern Hemisphere winter last Saturday – but a last-minute off-season swell slamming Tahiti has turned the competition upside down with a fresh influx of stunning big wave images. The largest waves seen there in three years (and some of the heaviest tubes ever photographed) heaved across the legendary reef at Teahupoo on March 17, scraping in under today’s final deadline for entering images into the XXL event.

For the first time in the ten-year history of the Billabong XXL Big Wave Awards, a swell with the power to rearrange the potential nominees has come in the final week of the year-long competition. A unique event in surfing, the XXL honors the greatest achievements in big wave riding anywhere in the world at any time -- based on the photographic evidence. Generally, the short list of Billabong XXL Awards nominees has firmed up by late March, a time when the North Pacific and Atlantic are settled down for the season and the South Seas have yet to come to life. But in a year of high surf superlatives, it should not have come as a surprise that an off-season game-changer would suddenly appear.