How Clyde Aikau spoke to the ocean, celebrated his brother's memory and big-wave surfing

San Francisco Chronicle​

09-05-2025

I had as much respect for Clyde Aikau as any athlete I ever met. Just the thought of him, and what he represented, brought home the true spirit of big-wave surfing. When he died in his native Hawaii last weekend, at 75, it was time to appreciate a career unbroken by tragedy, corporate invasion and the knowledge that on those craziest days on Oahu's North Shore, he might not be returning to land.
Clyde spoke to the ocean on such days, and in his mind, the ocean spoke back. It had already taken the life of his brother, Eddie, leaving the younger Clyde to deal with the consequences. In time, through his grief, he helped create a big-wave contest in Eddie's name — an event of such soaring magnificence, it elevated the legacies of both men into the highest echelon.
In the meantime, 'Eddie would go' became a catchphrase not just for surfing, but for walks of life throughout the world.
On March 16, 1978, Eddie was part of a 16-man crew aboard the Hokule'a, a 60-foot twin-hulled sailing canoe launching a 2,500-mile journey from Honolulu to Tahiti. The trip would take some 30 days, navigated without instruments — 'the old way,' as its creators mused, replicating Polynesian voyages some 1,200 years in the past.
Well trained as a North Shore lifeguard and always one to prepare for the worst, Eddie brought along a special big-wave surfboard — but no one had any idea how terrifying this trip would become. A fierce storm raged in darkness over the Molokai Channel, known for its life-threatening treachery under stormy conditions.
In the days before highly sophisticated forecasting, there was no feasible preparation for the giant waves and fierce winds that capsized the canoe that night. Some 20 miles from the island of Lanai, the crew was now chilled and helpless, clinging to the craft with no food, communication or hopes to be spotted. That's when Eddie grabbed his board and jumped into the maelstrom, determined to reach the coastline and trigger a rescue mission.
The crew members survived, rescued nearly a full day later after a passing airplane spotted one of their last remaining flares. A desperate, lengthy search fetched only his surfboard. Eddie was never seen again.
'Eddie was one hell of a waterman,' his good friend and fellow big-wave surfer Peter Cole told me some years later. 'But I don't think anyone was going to survive in the Molokai Channel that night. Not with 30-foot seas, intensely strong winds and a current taking him farther from shore. You just don't come back from that.'
Immersed in sorrow, Clyde couldn't shake the notion that his brother was somehow alive — but the reality cast him into retreat. 'I didn't come to the North Shore for five years,' he said in my interview for 'North,' Brown Cannon's recently published coffee-table book. 'I was just a wreck. I didn't even want to surf, anywhere, so I windsurfed every single day from sunrise to sunset. And thank God I did, because heaven knows what I would have done — jumped off the cliff or something. Because me and Eddie were the closest of the closest.'
They had grown up with three other brothers and a sister outside Honolulu — 'real poor,' as Clyde said, on the property of a Chinese graveyard, acres of which the family cleaned by hand. Eddie was always the best surfer, the best slack-key guitar player, the most comfortable around the girls, and eventually the man selected to be the North Shore's first lifeguard (1967). Clyde had a severe handicap, speaking with a stutter well into his adulthood, but he overcame that, eventually becoming proficient in all of Eddie's pastimes, especially when it came to riding the giant surf of Waimea Bay.
'I had no problem taking number two spot to Eddie,' he told author Leslie Wilcox in 2009. 'Because he was a hero, a Hawaiian hero. I was just fine behind, right behind him.'
It was Clyde's idea, along with George Downing, a born-and-raised Hawaiian who pioneered big-wave performance in the 1940s, to create the Eddie Aikau Invitational, launched in 1985 at Sunset Beach before finding a permanent home at Waimea the following winter.
'The Eddie,' as the event came to be called, grew into surfing's greatest contest. Nothing else comes close. It's not about money, or even winning, merely being invited into Waimea's grand theater, witnessed by some 50,000 spectators in a natural amphitheater along the beach and hillsides. There are no scoreboards or clumsy intervention from sponsors (if they even exist), just a same-day notice — 'Get out here, it's on!' — and a bunch of men and women thrilled beyond words as they compete in two separate one-hour heats throughout the day.
Maui's Kai Lenny, an all-around waterman without equal — foiling, stand-up paddling, windsurfing, tow-ins, you name it — found himself a changed man after competing in the last two Eddies. 'I've never been part of an event like that,' he said after finishing fifth in 2023. 'People say they feel like Eddie's looking down, smiling, and it really does feel that way. I feel like the love I have for surfing has never been stronger.'
Among those who remember Greg Noll and the other hardy souls who pioneered Waimea Bay in the late 1950s, it is generally agreed that Eddie and Jose Angel, the San Francisco-raised waterman who died on a black-coral diving expedition off Maui in 1976, were the most fearless surfers ever to challenge the Bay at maxed-out, 50-foot-plus sized waves.
(Noll called Angel 'the gutsiest surfer there ever was,' recalling that he wouldn't just wait for the biggest wave, he'd occasionally leap off his board into a full somersault, assuring him the worst possible wipeout, and come up laughing.)
In the spirit of those two legends, Clyde renewed his relationship with the North Shore's distant outer reefs as the Aikau contest took shape. He'd ride them alone, in the days without leashes, safety vests or watercraft assistance, because he felt at home out there, supremely prepared for The Eddie's Waimea debut 1986.
The place looked especially dangerous that morning. A number of surfers sounded as if they'd prefer some other day. But that's when the iconic Mark Foo (who died at Mavericks in 1994) looked straight into a camera and said, 'Eddie would go.' A slogan was born, and 24 surfers flat-out went.
In a story often told over the years, Clyde noticed a couple of turtles in the water as he paddled out. That wasn't so unusual, except they kept following him, all the way out to the lineup and beyond, to a spot Clyde believed would be special. 'It was the spirit of Eddie and Jose,' Clyde said, and you didn't have to believe him, but in a field of historically big-name talent — Foo, Ken Bradshaw, Roger Erickson, Brock Little (then just 18), Tony Moniz — the winner was Clyde, so overwhelmed by emotion that he was unable to speak.
As the years went on, with younger surfers dominating the media's attention, Clyde didn't just show up. He placed fifth in 1990, 10th in 2001 and eighth in 2002. And yet, none of that compared to his performance in February of 2016.
The man was 66 years old, and a wave of anxiety swept over the crowd as he took a titanic wipeout on his very first wave, nearing ripping the right shoulder of its socket. Minutes later he banged his right knee on his board on another wipeout. Heading to the beach, he scraped his left forearm on the reef and developed a cramp on his left thigh. I was watching from a viewpoint above the east-side rocks, and the beaten-down Clyde was draped over his board sideways, as if clinging for dear life. More than a few people said they were in tears as he was helped up the beach.
A couple of hours later, wait a minute — Clyde's going back out for his second heat! Paddling with one arm. Catching one last wave, for Eddie. For himself. For thousands of people getting the 'chicken skin' shivers.
'That's what people mean when they're talking about this contest,' said Santa Cruz surfer Peter Mel, an annual invitee. 'Right there.'
Clyde nearly lost his life two years ago when, on a work trip to Las Vegas, he collapsed after dinner and was rushed to a hospital, where he underwent emergency open-heart surgery for an aneurysm in his aortic valve. It was known during his recovery that he wasn't doing well, and the Aikau family revealed that his death came 'after a long, hard-fought battle with pancreatic cancer.'
Survived by his wife Eleni, his son Ha'a, his sister Myra and a large extended ohana of nieces and nephews, he was said to have died peacefully at his home in Waimanalo on Oahu's windward side. His was a life of privacy of humility, but friends knew there was much to tell.
'Not a lot of people realize that aside from operating beach concessions and a surf school for many years in Waikiki, he worked with the Department of Education for underprivileged and unhoused kids in Hawaii, making sure they had food, school supplies and transportation,' said retired North Shore lifeguard Mark Cunningham, a longtime mainstay of the surf community.
'He was so touched by people who deserved a better fate in life. Clyde Aikau was the essence of a loving, caring Hawaiian.'