Chapter: 7
Long Division
- Return of the Longboard
- Simon Anderson and his Mighty Thruster
- Surf and Destroy
- Terror from Below
- The Unsinkable Tom Carroll
- An Explosion of Talent
- Tom Curren's Mile of Style
- How to Turn a Circus into a Riot
- I Predict Waves in Your Future
- Cult of the Surf Photographer
- Video Killed the Surf Movie
- Waves for Sale
- Surf Boom Redux
- Terminally Hip
- Super-Sizing the World Tour
- Somebody Should Do Something
- Surfers vs Apartheid
- Make Room at the Top, Obrigado!
- The Last Big Wave
- Eddie Aikau's State of Grace
- A Beloved Rival
Eddie Aikau's State of Grace
Eddie Aikau, Waimea. Photo: Don James
Eddie (center) and brother Clyde Aikau, 1967. Photo: Tim McCullough
James Jones, Waimea, 1977. Photo: Dan Merkel
Eddie Aikau, mid-'70s. Photo: Dan Merkel
Aikau's best riding took place in those red-lining moments of descent, just after takeoff. A good big-wave surfer learns to hunker down and ride it out. Eddie was the only one who seemed to actually relax at this critical stage. Freefalling down the face, or half-eaten by whitewater, he looked calm—even serene.
In the 1970s, feature-length articles on big waves all but vanished from the surf press. The mandated Waimea Bay finale, a surf movie showstopper for over a decade, was replaced by the mandated Pipeline sequence. Nat Young, arbiter of all things cool during the early years of the shortboard revolution, said about big-wave surfing: “I’ve only done it once, on one wave, and I don’t wish to ever do i...
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