A giant swell combined with a lot of wind and lump to create truly challenging and treacherous conditions for the 24 invited surfers. On this day, Waimea was as big and mean as it gets. They called the contest at around 8 a.m., and from there, the tens of thousands of spectators (and even more watching online) were treated to a gladiator pit of a surf contest. There was some skepticism that this would be another false alarm, but those who woke up at Waimea Bay that morning had no doubt that the energy was there. The call for a contest on the 25th came three days before the end of the waiting period. “I've lived here my whole life and I've never seen it like that.” The #brockswell, people were calling it, and there was something to it This Eddie happened on the heels of "No Go" call a few weeks before on February 11, when tens of thousands of spectators flooded Waimea Bay from the land side only to be sent home when the forecast swell failed to materialize. “I was riding my bike down here this morning in the dark, and just the energy of how many people were parked all the way down the street,” Jon Jon Florence said. Two days after that, Quiksilver put up the Yellow Light and then the Green Light for the running of a contest that is only held when Waimea is at its biggest and meanest. A few days after his death, the North Shore was hit with a giant swell combined with ferocious winds that closed Kam Highway for 11 miles and did significant damage to homes all along the North Shore. Brock was known for his courage in big surf, his love of big surf, his love of fear and adrenaline, and for his total comfort in a heaving ocean. In December of 2015, Brock was diagnosed with fourth stage liver cancer, and his soul left this earth just two months later on the morning of February 18. "My $50,000 mistake,” Brock called it, as victory in that contest went to Keone Downing-but the legend went to Brock. Little cemented his legend at the 1990 running of the Eddie by taking off on a giant wave he didn’t make, and pulling into a barrel that he just slipped on in the end. One such swell came just eight days after the sad, untimely death of Brock Little, one of Waimea’s best surfers, and a California-born Hawaiian resident and big-wave pioneer. "The Eddie," then, is only made possible by the most extreme, story-worthy swells, based on the idea that "Eddie would go." Eddie's spirit is present at every competition, but this year was joined by that of another legend. His fated expedition to Tahiti was aboard the Hokule'a, which OluKai supports through its Ama OluKai Foundation. Eddie Aikau is a member of OluKai 'Ohana in life and in death. For most of the Pacific, the energy can be attributed to a meteorological phenomenon called El Niño, which kicked up giant surf from Jaws on Maui to Mavericks in California and back to Oahu, where a giant swell swept into Waimea Bay on February 25 and dared 24 of the world’s best surfers to go steep and deep. The Eddie Goes Big, and Some Say Brock's Spirit Was Behind It Waimea Bay roared for the ninth running of the Quiksilver in Memory of Eddie Aikau, aka "The Eddie." The winter of 2015/2016 will go down in history as one of the wildest in the history of big-wave surfing.
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