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Da Eddie is ON!!!
12/11/09 - After a five year wait, conditions for the Quicksilver Eddie Aikau Surf Contest were finally good enough for Eddie to go! Held in the monster breaks off Waimea Bay December 8, 2009, on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, the whole thing was quite a site to behold, with contest director and former winner Keoni Downing declaring the '09 swell as good as it's been in 40 years! Actually, the Eddie only occurs when waves are 20 ft+ (40 ft+ faces!) and rideable, and that's only been seven times since the contest began in 1984! With Triple Crown action at Haleiwa, Sunset, and Pipeline virtually guarantee'd every year, the Eddie Aikau has run, on average, only about once every three-and-a-half years, so when this thing occurs, you definitely wanna be there to experience the magic of it all!
The buzz and electricity in the air was amazing and palpable, everyone's energy tachometer readings bursting through the roof! With a salty mist clouding the entire valley, it lent a heavenly vapor that seemed to add to the days' almost mythical aura and feel, with a cool, invigorating crispness and faint taste of salt on the lips. You just knew something special was happening, as if history were being carved-out before your very eyes! The hubbub was all on the tiny figures out in the water, barely visible to the naked eye, somewhere a hundred yards or so out from the Northeastern tip of the bay, and a couple of hundred yards from where most of the crowd had been gathering, on the sandy shores of Waimea Beach Park.
Me, I'm so evil, I tell you. I kept waiting and hoping for a giant wave to wash-up on the shore. NO, not to sweep folks in, mind you - that'd be a horrific travesty I wouldn't wish upon anyone and not something I'd be joking about at all. Rather, every 45 minutes or so, a couple of waves would reach all the way to the mouth of the river, flooding the whole crowd of people fronting the area in inches deep, but highway-wide sections of seawater! I especially loved watching the folks laying out on blankets! Evil, I tell you! Even my good friend Jeff Benik got caught one about as good as any bright-eyed, bushy-tailed tourist crowding the bay:
Benik o'deah, catching da 40 ft. wave! Dropped-in a little late, but still, that's not what you're gonna tell the next girl you meet at the bar...
Jeff, Kumi, and I left Hawaii Kai at about ten after six in the morning, and even then, we knew it'd still be a challenge finding somewhere to park and a good roost to view the action. By the time we hit Kualoa Park, we stopped for a restroom break and were greeted by a gorgeous sunrise, along with a lone fisherman hoping for da beeeg one:
Kualoa Beach Park. Hmmm...
Lizard fish? Fugu? Moray eel?
C'MON NOW!!! There ain't no fish at Kualoa Beach Park!
Right.....???
Uh... Guess again!!!
25, 30 lbs maybe? That's a whole lotta pan-fry and sashimi, lemme tell ya! I'll be here next week!
By the time we turned the Kahuku corner, we were actually pleasantly surprised. I mean, it wasn't as crowded as we thought it might be, and we got all the way to Foodland and Shark's Cove before the traffic made us turn around to look for a parking space, which we found next to Foodland for about ten bucks. By 7:45am, the three of us made our way on-foot for about five minutes to the bay, where traffic was snarling, with police stationed on sidewalks and on-lookers only inches away from vehicles, including giant trucks like this:
On the beach, we didn't really have a great angle at the action, since every square foot of the entire beach-front was taken. And I do mean that quite literally, as people were camped-out in trees, on hills, on rocks - next time, I'm coming with a 10-foot ladder! Or maybe two 10 ft. ladders and a scaffolding - that's about how high these folks climbed, perched on metal structures across Kam Hwy. See the salt in the air?
The contest was already well under-way, with sets breaking waaay out past the point, and continuing all the way to the beach in some nasty shorebreak action.
As for the rock everyone jumps from, on the left side of the bay? Normally accessible from dry sand, the famous outcrop, standing at least 25, maybe 30 feet high, was getting absolutely dwarfed in whitewater! Today, it sat a good 30 feet from the nearest dry sand, and the waves crashing upon its walls shot up in the air at least double its own height, engulfing the entirety of it all like a 5-foot dinghy in an open-ocean storm! The scenes everywhere along the coast were absolutely amazing!
All I know is, the whole beach was dreaming of being the owner of that gorgeous ocean-front home, the one sitting right at the point of Waimea Bay. You can't get better seats than from their backyard, and a select number of guests were having quite the memorable occasion there, indeed!
A lot of the big-name contest surfers were also competing in this invitation-only event, along with crazy big-wave terrors who don't necessarily have a name and former superstars who may have passed their primes, but are forever etched in the annals of North Shore lore, and who can still hang with the best of 'em. Remember Michael Ho? He and brother Derek were big-time back in the day!
One of the younger studs who's already made a name for himself for huge air's and hard-charging into the craziest sets is local boy Jamie O'Brien. Or is he a local-boy transplant?
Then there's Kauai-bred Andy Irons, just about the only guy this past decade who could give Kelly Slater any competition at all. He's kinda been going through some personal stuff recently and seems to have lost a little bit of his edge, but being Andy Irons, he'll always be a force to be reckoned with, no matter what. The talent is there, for sure, but that's not all you need to beat the best out on the North Shore! Not sure who the guy on the right is, but that's him on the left:
But even if Andy gets his stuff together and gets focused, I really don't think he, nor anyone else, for that matter, can overtake the King - Kelly Slater! Not now, not in the past, not even for the foreseeable future! When Slater came back from retirement a few years ago, he never skipped a beat, taking-up where he left-off and looking as good as ever! His nine ASP world titles are more than double that of anyone else, and imagine if he never stayed out of competition those few years back???
Here at the Eddie, he was ahead for almost the entire contest, pulling-off an early wave that I thought would easily assure him a first-place victory. After enduring a crazy free-fall on the first drop, he disappeared from sight (from my vantage point), and then came shooting out onto the massive face while the crowd went wild! Here's the wave, and Kelly out there somewhere, except hidden behind the also-massive middle breaks:
On that first drop, the crowd was more like wooow - gasping for breath and in shock that he was still on his feet! But as he continued, on the same wave, through the middle break and then all the way into the shorebreak, cheers and adulation quickly grew to hysteric levels!
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I'd be smiling, too, after a death-defying wave like that!
To get a better view of the sheer size of some of these waves, I lifted a picture from Kirby Fukunaga's awesome site, Go-Naminori.com, a huge conglomeration of different pro and up-and-coming surfers from Japan and Hawaii. Not sure if he lifted it from another site or if he took it himself, but with his equipment, and all the excellent shots he posts on his site, I wouldn't be surprised if it was his:
Insane, I tell you. And who the heck is this Greg Long guy??? I didn't think anyone had a chance of topping Slaters' 98-point ride, but opportunity struck later in the day, when the conditions improved even more and the biggest sets of the contest freight-trained in from way outside the horizon! Not only did up-and-coming big wave rider Greg Long score a perfect 100 to edge past him and actually claim the 2009 Quicksilver Eddie Aikau contest for himself, but another new-comer, Ramon Navarro from Chile, also scored a 100, along with the Monster Drop Award for the day, to boot! Wish I was there to see that one!
Next year, I hope to have a giant telephoto lens to capture the moments better, along with the HD video camera that I still haven't purchased yet! My Christmas wish list is getting so expensive!!!
DREAM BIG EVERYONE!!! Anything's attainable once you make the commitment!
Peace, love, and perfect barrel's to you all!!!
Aloha and take care till next time!
Aku
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Comments:
Dan B (1/19/10) - Hey Aku, Great Closer Look! I really appreciate how you are able to give us mainlanders the local insight into island events. This piece should be in a major publication. Give Mrs. Aku a hello from us desert dwellers. Mahalos!
Aku (1/19/10) - Too kind, Dann-O, too kind! Thanks a bunch - I'm still not satisfied, though. Just wish I could do this full-time, and put out more and better pages!
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