The crew was eventually rescued by the Coast Guard but Eddie Aikau was never seen again.

Eddie, in an attempt to get help, jumped into the water to paddle a surfboard to the island of Lanai. The Society had made an original style double-hulled canoe and set sail in March and almost instantly sprung a leak. The path of migration that brought human sacrifice and the art of choking out. In 1978 the Polynesian Voyaging Society attempted a thirty-day 2,500 mile journey following the ancient path of Polynesian migration between the Hawaiian islands and Tahiti. When he was not surfing he saved lives, working as a lifeguard between Hale’iwa and Sunset Beach. Beyond just surviving, he surfed Waimea uniquely and beautifully. But a few brave souls paddled out in the fifties and a few more followed them in the sixties. Twenty years earlier the thought of riding Waimea was not even a glimmer in the eye. At sixteen he dropped out of school, went to work for the Dole Pineapple Plantation, used his paycheck to buy his first surfboard and began surfing Waimea. He was born on Maui but moved, with his family, to Oahu when he was thirteen. Its namesake, Eddie Aikau, was a North Shore legend. The competition takes place in one day and the surfer who rides the four biggest waves wins. Once selected, they wait through the winter and if ocean forecasters see a window where the waves will be big enough and good enough the participants have twelve hours in which to get to the North Shore. Unlike any other surf competition, the twenty-eight participants and twenty-four alternates in the Eddie are chosen among their peers by their peers, the best big wave surfers in the world. It moved the next year to Waimea) which is not to say that Waimea has only exceeded forty feet from December to February eight times but simply that perfect conditions, giant and smooth, are not a given. It has only run eight times since its inauguration in 1984 (which happened to be at Sunset Beach three miles up the Kamehameha. The Eddie only runs when Waimea exceeds twenty feet of open ocean swell, which translates to forty foot waves in the bay. Waimea is host to one of the most fabled events in all of surfing. I was there in 2009/10 to see Greg Long take out all comers, writing in the award-nominated Welcome to Paradise, Now Go To Hell:

Eddie aikau surf contest 2021