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](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/f1hjpcr4/production/1f405f8ad45ac8a74dbee4d0c22931c487d91fc7-1280x720.jpg?w=640&h=360&q=65&auto=format)
Eddie Aikau, Waimea. Photo: Don James
![Eddie (center) and brother Clyde Aikau, 1967. Photo: Tim McCullough](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/f1hjpcr4/production/5e86e3ba774cbdfa8bcc271bab84f1645457e180-1280x796.jpg?rect=0,38,1280,720&w=640&h=360&q=65&auto=format)
Eddie (center) and brother Clyde Aikau, 1967. Photo: Tim McCullough
![James Jones, Waimea, 1977. Photo: Dan Merkel](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/f1hjpcr4/production/4588527c0b6163909f261d166ca88aef55f38437-1280x720.jpg?w=640&h=360&q=65&auto=format)
James Jones, Waimea, 1977. Photo: Dan Merkel
![Eddie Aikau, mid-'70s. Photo: Dan Merkel](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/f1hjpcr4/production/52a572fcce46735080de8122216be401495ef08f-1280x720.jpg?w=640&h=360&q=65&auto=format)
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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