Maui Surfer Girls founder Dustin Tester celebrates 25 years with first book: ‘Saltwater Sisterhood’

June 17 was a special day for Maui Surfer Girls founder Dustin Tester. 

The day marked the Silver Jubilee of her surfing school that empowers females and the publishing of her first book: “Saltwater Sisterhood.”

“Ironically, the book landed on my front door, literally on the 25th anniversary of opening day of my first teen camp, 2001,” Tester said.

The 52-year-old Tester proudly showed off her book at Ukumehame Beach Park last week as surfers, a few boys, but mostly girls, were heading out to sea to take a surf lesson guided by her Maui Surfer Girls staff.

“So it was cool that this got published and it came a week early and it landed on that anniversary date,” said Tester, a 1991 Seabury Hall graduate who grew up on Maui and started surfing when she was 8 years old.

“Saltwater Sisterhood” is a coffee table book that includes 10 short stories about the evolution of Maui Surfer Girls. The book retails for $60, but $20 for each book goes to Tester’s philanthropic work, including scholarships to attend surf camps for teen-aged girls that take place at Camp Olowalu.

“Basically, we want to give back, especially nowadays after the (Lahaina) fire,” Tester said.

Through Tester’s nonprofit, Mana O Maui, full-ride scholarships have been provided to female teenagers and women from Lahaina to attend its overnight camp programs.

Mana O Maui — the acronym MOM is no mistake — empowers Maui County residents through adventure education, surf therapy, Hawaiian cultural learning and the healing arts, according to its website.

“Our immersive, therapeutic programs support mental, emotional and physical well-being while fostering leadership skills and a deep connection to the land and ocean,” the website said.

After graduating from Seabury Hall in 1991, Tester left Maui to attend the University of Northern Colorado and then Prescott College in Arizona.

“My dad said I got a degree in camping basically because it was an outdoor education school,” Tester said of Prescott College. “We were whitewater kayaking, rock climbing, doing all these insane Southwest adventures. And I thought, ‘Well, I grew up on Maui and surfing’s my passion.’ And surfing taught me so much.”

Tester’s degree focused on wilderness therapy.

“So I got psychology courses with these outdoor education courses. And I thought, well, I would love to empower teen girls through surfing because that’s what surfing did for me,” Tester said. “And so I said ‘I’m going to pass that gift forward.’”

The idea to start Maui Surfer Girls came to her in 2000 when she was working at a rock-climbing camp in North Carolina.

The next year, she started the company that would become her life’s mission, but it was not easy.

“I was like, ‘Wow, I think I can do something like that on Maui,’ “ Tester said. “Not at that scale. It was like 200 girls for five weeks.”

Not long after having that thought, she fell from a rock and “broke my ankle really bad.” Still, she decided to go forward with her plan to start a girls surf school on Maui.

“I hit the ground running,” Tester said. “I went to all the (hotel) concierge desks, and by 2001, there was already like 15 surf schools. I mean, it was inundated, but we were a girls school. We were the only girls school at the time.”

Eventually Tester added boys to the mix for surf lessons, but the one-week and two-week camps are still just for women, held every three months. She also runs teen camps in the summer for girls 13 to 17 years old and also offers a counselor in training program for women 18 to 24 years old who formerly attended the teen camp.

The 11-day teen camps are for up to 24 girls at a time. The women’s camps are for up to 12 at a time. They all sell out regularly, Tester said.

“The camps are my jam, man,” she said. “They’re a lot of work. There’s so much overhead and so many logistics, but it’s truly what I started Maui Surfer Girls doing. … It’s my passion and we make a really good, well-rounded program. We provide incredible food. We also have yoga, snorkeling, hiking, empowerment kind of programming, art, art therapy. Surfing, obviously. All the Maui stuff.”

Two of her Seabury Hall classmates — Maren Lau and Allison Rowland — helped Tester with the development of Maui Surfer Girls: Lau at the beginning, Rowland more recently.

Lau worked for a large public relations firm in New York in 2001, but after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 she returned to Maui, where she reconnected with Tester.

“And me being in my kind of New York PR frame of mind was like, ‘Dustin, you must be one of the only women around, probably even globally, honestly, at that time running a women’s surf camp,’ “ Lau recalled last week during a phone call from her vacation in Greece.

The movie “Blue Crush” had just come out in 2002 and Lau had a thought to connect with the popularity of the film that was based on girls surfing on O’ahu’s North Shore. Lau attended Harvard University for her undergraduate degree and Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University for her masters.

“ ‘Blue Crush’ had sparked this huge interest, but it’s a movie and you are doing this in real life,” Lau remembers telling Tester. “And so we started doing PR for Maui Surfer Girls and we got into Time Magazine, into Seventeen Magazine.”

Lau thought to herself then, “I think that made a really big difference. And to see that was like, ‘Oh my gosh, … we just put this Maui business on the national map.’ ”

After Lau spent a couple years in business school, Tester and Lau teamed up again to develop a business plan that they presented to venture capitalists who were judges in a presentation for one of Lau’s classes. The venture capitalists loved the presentation and Tester had another boost to her unique business.

Lau now leads Meta, the tech company owned by Mark Zuckerberg, in Latin America. But she said she remains a “huge fan” of Maui Surfer Girls.

“I refer people all the time,” Lau said. “Anyone I know who goes to Maui, I’m like, ‘you need to go to a surf class with Maui Surfer Girls.’ Go support them.”

Tester said she had some slow years with little income. But now her business has now grown to where she is on solid ground, with 10 to 15 employees, depending on the season.

“I’m so glad I didn’t give up,” Tester said. “I wrote a chapter called the ‘Year 10: Dumpster Fire Edition’ because it was just like one thing after another, after another.”

In 2011, there was a head lice outbreak at one of her camps, she had a serious case of the flu at another camp and someone locked their keys in their car up at the summit of Haleakalā.

“And then I had credit card debt, so I was like, why am I doing this?” Tester said. “I pinched myself. Glad that I didn’t give up.”

Rowland recently went to a Maui Surfer Girls surf lesson with her sister and nieces and worked with Tester on executive leadership coaching to help solidify the company. Rowland holds a Doctorate in Education Leadership from Harvard University, a Master’s of Education from Stanford University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Williams College.

Rowland now works in management and leadership development, running her own company, Courageous Projects.

Rowland is working with Tester in leading Maui Surfer Girls in its 25th year, which involves “really maintaining the core of what is so strong in the organization and thinking about the coming years, how to continue to be of service to girls and women, both on island and those that come to visit, and really continuing to empower people through that work and thinking about how it makes sense to grow the business.”

As Tester pondered the growth of her groundbreaking business that has powered for more than two decades, she smiled when she peered out at the Pacific Ocean last week.

“Every day I come down and teach lessons,” Tester said, “I’m here for the people and the stoke. And I mean, this is my office. Look at this view.”