THE CAPTAIN

“This is the Gunston 1972. The beach just parted like the Red Sea. How’s this brown oke walking on the beach? It blew people away that a brown oke could walk on the beach. Us guys, we were blown away that it was Eddie Aikau! And he surfed and he came out and he was sitting on the wall alone, just looking at the waves. And I came up to him and said, ‘good day Eddie. I’m Mike would you like to come surfing with us down the coast?’ And he said he’d love to. So we took Eddie down to Green Point because we knew it would be uncrowded. And we just surfed our brains out the whole day.

“He’d come down to breakfast and everyone would just gasp. it was unheralded for a dark oke to be in those hotels in those days. It was a scandal. So before things got out of hand, Darryl and Lynne Holmes took him in to stay with them. And if they weren’t surfing the event, we would go surfing down the coast. And because of that he actually had a really good time here. And he proved it when we got to Hawaii. Eddie came looking for us. And he came to Rocky Point and he just shouted: ‘Hey Larmont! Larmont! Where you?!’ And the locals in the house jumped out the windows, out the doors, they just ran for cover. They thought they were gonna get fucked up. And he says, ‘I’ll pick you up at 6 o’ clock, we’ll go to Luau and you’ll meet the family.’ And he left. And the guys started coming out of the bushes and saying, ‘was that Eddie Aikau?’ And I said, yes. And they said, ‘who did he want to fuck up?’ I said no, he invited us to a Luau. ‘A Luau! That’s the greatest honour a Hawaiian can offer you!’

“So he came and picked us up, it was still light, and we met the family. He said, ‘This is your family.’ His mom was tall