07/15/2026
Eddy would go.....
He won the contest named for his dead brother. On his dead brother's board.
Waimea Bay, 1986. The best big-wave riders alive sat waiting in the lineup, and Clyde Aikau paddled past all of them, a hundred feet deeper than anyone dared to sit.
He was following two sea turtles.
To understand that, you have to start in a graveyard. The Aikau family were caretakers of a Chinese cemetery in Pauoa Valley, above downtown Honolulu, and they lived on its grounds. Six kids. The youngest was Clyde. His big brother Eddie taught him to surf in Waikiki.
By the 1970s the two brothers were guarding Waimea Bay together. "All we had was a twelve-foot surfboard, big fins, and a lifebuoy," Clyde remembered. More than 500 rescues. Not one life lost. In 1973, Clyde won the Duke Kahanamoku Invitational at Waimea, beating a world-class field that included Eddie himself.
Then came March 16, 1978.
The voyaging canoe Hokule'a left for Tahiti at 6:30 in the evening with Eddie aboard. Five hours out, in the Molokai Channel, she capsized. Sixteen people clung to the overturned hulls through the night. At 10:30 the next morning, Eddie took a surfboard and paddled for help, oranges and a strobe light strung around his neck.
A few hundred feet out, he slipped off his life jacket. It was slowing him down.
The crew was rescued that night. Eddie was NEVER seen again.
What followed was the largest air-sea search in Hawaiian history. Six days. The family chartered their own helicopter. And then it fell to Clyde, 28 years old, to stand in front of reporters and end the search for his own brother. He asked one thing of anyone heading out on the water: "Just look in the ocean, that's all."
He was, in his own words, totally bust up. He couldn't ride big waves for years. The whole family moved back to the graveyard, just to stay close to each other.
Most people spend the rest of their lives avoiding the thing that took someone they love. Clyde paddled back into it. A contest had been created in Eddie's memory, one so demanding it only runs when open-ocean swells push 40-foot faces into Waimea Bay. In 1986, Clyde entered it on a board he borrowed from Eddie.
"These turtles popped up and looked at me... it was like, Bradda Clyde, follow me," he said. So he followed them past the entire lineup, and the biggest waves of the day came straight to him. He won his brother's contest on his brother's board. Of that board, he said: "I borrowed it for the Bay, and it was magic for me." And he always said one of those turtles was Eddie.
He wasn't done. In 1995 he sailed aboard the Hokule'a, 29 days across open ocean, the kind of voyage Eddie never got to finish. "It was a voyage to complete Eddie's voyage," he said. And when it was over: "I feel like I brought Eddie home."
At 66, he surfed The Eddie one final time, the oldest man ever in the field. He wiped out on his first wave and hurt his shoulder. He paddled back out anyway. Between contests he ran his Waikiki beach service and worked for the Department of Education, helping homeless kids get enrolled in school.
Clyde Aikau died on May 3, 2025, at his home in Waimanalo, after a long fight with pancreatic cancer. He was 75. One more day, and it would have been Eddie's birthday.
He gave 47 years to keeping his brother's name alive. The name kept him alive too.
You've seen the sticker. On trucks in Kalihi, on toolboxes, on the bumper of an uncle who never once explained it. Eddie Would Go. Clyde is the reason it never faded.
Seven months after Clyde died, surfers gathered at Waimea Bay to open the contest season. A man paddled out to lead the blessing circle and speak for his father. It was Ha'a Aikau. Clyde's son.
The Eddie has run just eleven times in four decades. The bay decides when. And whenever it breaks again, there will be an Aikau on the invitation list, because there has always been an Aikau in the water.
Eddie gave Hawaii his life. Clyde gave Hawaii everything that came after. One brother became the legend. The other spent his whole life making sure we never let him go.
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