Review the item:
Chelsea had to paddle past a school of jellyfish,
kick a small sand shark in the nose, and
untangle seaweed from her surfboard before she
reached her favorite point break.
When you list grammatical items, you must use parallel structure. Here, to paddle, kick, and untangle are all infinitives, so the list is parallel.
When you list two or more infinitives, you can drop the to after the first one.