"Waterman: Darrick Doerner Seeks Perfection in the Danger Zone," by San Francisco sportswriter Bruce Jenkins, ran in the September 1990 issue of SURFER.

Pops Aikau passed away in late October 1989. He had withstood the pain of untold tragedy—the death of one son, then another, and the passing of his beloved wife. Finally, his own life gave out. Darrick Doerner had seen Pops just a few days before the end and remembers him saying, “Big surf coming. Two weeks from now.”

On November 2, right on cue, it happened.

Pops was to be buried in Honolulu that day, and Doerner was prepared: He had a specially-made lei of flowers from the rich maile vine to present as an offering from the Hui O He’e Nalu. But around 2:00 that morning, he was awakened by the sound of pounding surf outside his house at Backyards. As he stepped out for a firsthand look, Doerner saw nothing but whitewater—and he knew: It would be Waimea at dawn.

Now, you won’t find too many people surfing 30' Waimea Bay before the sun comes up. The place is just too formidable; it requires thought and study. Nobody in his right mind would charge out there on dawn patrol like an excited freshman running down to Third Point Malibu. But Doerner knows the Bay as few have: Every time it gets big, he’s up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep—and he’s first one out the next morning.

“I was amping,” he recalls. “Around 4:00 AM, I got in my car and drove down there. I’d called Mark Foo the night before and told him to be ready. I dropped over to his place and honked my horn . . . made all kinds of noise: ‘Foo-Dog!’ Nothing. No lights. So I drove back, parked up on the hill and waited.”

With a dozen leis around his neck, Doerner watched a 30' closeout set greet the morning's first light. He checked his watch. Just 10 minutes later another closeout set arrived, breaking completely across the Bay. Whitewater was pushing up past the beach, into the river and onto the grass—and as Eddie Aikau always said, you don’t surf Waimea under those conditions. Nevertheless, minutes later Doerner was walking toward the point ready to go out.

“I was blind,” he says. “Either I pull it off, or I get slaughtered.”

Doerner waited 20 minutes for a lull and hit the water, flowers still draped around him: “I didn’t fool around, I headed straight out the middle. And I remember the incredible quiet as I paddled out during that lull. This was what I’d spent most of my life preparing for; all the training, all the paddling, running on the beach—all for that day.”

Up on the hillside he spotted his friend Michael Ho making a gesture that said, “No way.” A few other cars had arrived. It was around 6:40, and Doerner was heading toward the lineup, alone: “My heart was just pounding, and the flowers were starting to slow me down. All of a sudden, I heard five-or-six horns going off. They could see a set coming on the horizon. I paddled over a solid 30' wave, then two more, just scratching to get over. Then it was quiet again.”

Breathing a little easier, Doerner worked his way over to the take-off zone. He saw a gigantic turtle, “big as my car.” He saw the moon in one direction, the rising sun in another.

He cast aside the flowers, which looked gorgeous in the fresh, new light. The ritual, spontaneous and appropriate, was finished.

“I rode a dozen big waves with nobody out. No one around. It was the peak of my life, without a doubt. I wound up surfing the whole day—30 waves, 40, maybe even 50, at 20-25'. I lost count. About a week later Clyde came down, and I told him the story about Pops predicting the swell, about the flowers, everything. He had to sit down. He started crying."

Ask any contemporary big-wave riders about the most impressive surfing they’ve seen at Waimea over the last 10 years, and they’re bound to mention Doerner. He might have the deepest, most committed relationship with the place since Eddie Aikau himself.

Darrick Doerner was born February 17, 1957, and raised in Fresno, a mid-valley California city known mostly for its Holiday Inn sophistication. The separation of his parents put him on the move for a number of years. Before he was 15, Doerner had lived in Texas, Maine, North Carolina, even France for two years (his mother is French, thus the unusual spelling of his first name. “Dah-REEK,” he says, smiling). The mention of school brings bleak memories: “Bad neighborhoods, bad kids, scrapes, Ds and Fs.”

The basic law in Doerner's family was he couldn’t make his own decisions until he turned 16. The time came, he made a decision and went to Hawaii. He’s been there ever since.

The real catalyst in his surfing development was his father, Vic, a one-time lifeguard. Vic started surfing the Ventura-Santa Barbara area around 1940, with some of the sport’s pioneers: “Yeah, I remember a spot we used to surf called Three Mile,” says Vic. “They call it Rincon now.” Before long, Santa Monica surfers such as Peter Cole, Buzzy Trent and Rick Grigg would be making excursions to Malibu, riding the glorious point waves in relative solitude. And they would all congregate at the fabled Ventura Overhead when the waves got big.

“I’ve always felt when a man goes out there and rides a wave, it builds his confidence,” Vic adds. “For anything in life. Nothing else can raise your self-esteem that high. Even if you make a mistake and the wave busts you, it doesn’t matter! That’s part of the education, too.”

So while other kids would be catching hell for surfing, Darrick had it made. Vic would actually watch him from the deck of their house in Malibu, shooting film, and ringing a bell to warn Darrick of oncoming sets.

“I sold the Malibu house and moved over here [Kona, Hawaii] about 23 years ago,” says Vic, now 64, still active as a deep-sea diver and cyclist. “I remember Darrick was living with his mother in North Carolina when he turned 16, and he came over here for a short visit. He went back home for maybe five, six weeks. Then he came right back, saying he wanted to finish high school here. I knew that was BS. He wanted to surf. I’ve seen other young men do the same thing. They’ll beg, borrow or steal to live in Hawaii, and that’s what Darrick did.”

Doerner spent about a year-and-a-half on the Big Island, befriending David Kahanamoku, a descendant of Duke’s, and blending well into the local scene: “David and I came to the North Shore in the Fall of ’75, right at Log Cabins,” says Doerner, “and every time Waimea broke we were on it. We were little kids then, sitting right next to Eddie Aikau. I dug it. The Hawaiians charged, and I fit right in with ’em. I charged too.”

Because of that, Doerner got plenty of help: “Jim Soutar [now the North Shore’s head lifeguard] showed me around Sunset. He’s been surfing it 25 or 30 years, and he knows the place inside-out. But Tiger Espere was the one who taught me to have no fear. He would go on anything. Whenever I was in the lineup, he’d be screaming, ‘Go, bruddah! Go, bruddah!’ That’s how it used to be. And when someone like Tiger tells you to go, you’re gonna go. Otherwise you sit there all winter thinking, ‘I shoulda gone on that wave.’”

Doerner became a North Shore lifeguard in the Spring of ’76. Before moving into the prime lookout towers at Sunset and Waimea, he worked with Butch Van Artsdalen at Haleiwa. Everyone knew about Butch’s drinking. They knew he was wasting away. But everyone also knew Butch had ridden Pipeline when all but about eight people in the world were terrified of the place. He rode it calmly, artistically, even comically—spinning around to look back in the tube one moment, riding on his butt the next. One story has him taking off on 15 consecutive 12' close-outs at Haleiwa, power-turning right into the lip of each one, just for the sake of getting outrageously thrashed. People cut Butch a lot of slack.

“One day a friend of Butch’s died, and they had a funeral at Haleiwa,” Doerner recalls. “That was the last day Butchie was sober. Two weeks later we buried him. The doctors had told him, ‘If you do it again, you’re history,’ because he didn’t have any insides left. They were all rotten. But his friends were over there partying under the tree, and Butch just couldn’t help himself. Two hours later he was back into it, with that milk carton full of vodka-tonic. That was it. Butchie didn't come to work after that. He died up at Wahiawa. His insides just gave way.”

Van Artsdalen’s lifestyle wasn’t so unusual on the North Shore. Today, although people like Ken Bradshaw and Mike Stewart set the disciplined example, hundreds of others still like their beer, their weed, their cocaine. Doerner has been through that, and he's reached the point where he actively avoids the drug scene.

“I really respect guys like Bradshaw,” Doerner remarks. “He’s never gotten high, never been drunk; he’s never fallen, like a lot of us have. In a way, he’s almost out of touch. I’m pretty straight now, but I’ve been known to go off. I’ve shown up at places at 2:00 in the morning just [contorts his mouth drunkenly] . . . .

“Couple years ago I sucked all kinds of beers. Work eight hours in the hot sun, man; six beers . . . gone. Wake up and do it again the next day. I did that for five-or-six years, a six-pack every day. North Shore, man. North 

. Now maybe I’ll have a beer on the weekends. But I stay away from the dust. That’s my advice to everyone. Doesn’t matter who you are, you can’t control it.”

It seems wherever watermen are performing at the highest level around the North Shore, Doerner's there. “He's definitely one of the 10 fittest guys on the North Shore,” says longtime surf-contest judge Jack Shipley. Doerner entered the Fourth of July paddling contest from Waimea to Sunset one year, just for the fun of it, and wound up winning. He sailboards the Sunset-Backyards area at 15'—think about that for a minute—with buddies Richard Schmidt, Paul Dunn, Charlie Smith and Clyde Aikau, and there are huge callouses on his hands from the strain. As a lifeguard, he’s saved countless lives. His surfing, of course, speaks for itself.

“Darrick has all the attributes,” says Rick Grigg. “He’s wiry, built like a cheetah—light, but extremely strong. His muscles are like steel wires. He’s perfectly suited for big-wave riding because you don’t want to be too big. You need paddling ability, explosive strength, high agility—and, of course, you have to be fearless. Maybe crazy [laughter]. Darrick probably qualifies in all those categories.”

Derek Hynd caused a stir on the North Shore three winters ago with his interpretation of big-waveriders’ motivation. Bradshaw, he said, did it for the machismo; Foo for the glory. Both men took great exception to that. But Hynd said Doerner did it for “the cool,” and Doerner didn’t mind at all; “It 

cool. I’ve felt that from the first day I watched Eddie at the Bay. Even if he’d had white skin you could tell he was Hawaiian, because he had ultimate Hawaiian style. Take off and drop in, lay out this big bottom turn, disappear into mountains of whitewater, pop out, throw his hair back . . . that was Eddie. He surfed bowlegged. Bully style. Hawaiian all the way.

“It’s still cool out there, especially when it’s just the five of us—myself, Kenny, Brock, Roger and Foo. Occasionally you’ll see Tony Roy, Tommy Nellis, Dennis Pang, Bobby Owens, Keone Downing. They’re all into it. Michael Ho and Johnny-Boy, too. Sometimes Kenny’ll get a little uptight, and I’ll throw some shit at him. Like, ‘Okay, Kenny, now, 

. Okay . . . no, no. Back off, back off . . . 

 [laughter] Kenny’s a little off in his timing sometimes.” Doerner reserves a special respect for Peter Cole, the ageless one in the white T-shirt, knee-paddling into that certain wave he’s been waiting for. “Now, that’s what I want to be. I’m gonna be out there knee-paddling, and the young kids better respect me. Peter gets scared the way I get scared. He doesn’t like people because they make him wipe out. So when you see Peter you get everybody out of his way. Then he’ll go and have a beautiful wave. He’s so happy, and he’ll thank everybody on his way back out."

What people don’t realize, according to Doerner, is there’s no room for amateurs at a place like Sunset. The consequence is just too great. “Waimea’s a heavy deal, but Sunset won’t let you go. It just sucks you back into the whitewater and throws you through Boneyards; you hit bottom, jump back up, and it throws you right back down. And you know there’re five or six more waves coming. Sunset just scares the shit outta me. You’re a little bit inside, you paddle hard for a wave, miss it, then there’s a 15' set feathering on the outside, and you ain’t gonna get there. Scariest thing in the world.”

For several years, when Sunset and Waimea are borderline out-of-control, Doerner has tucked a swim fin inside the back of his vest as a safeguard. He’s bailed out a lot of struggling surfers by offering them that fin—including Brock Little last November—and he’s bailed himself out, too: “Stick that thing on and you’re gone. Right into the whitewater, right up to the beach. So fast. Without a fin you’ve got a lot of kickin’ to do, man."

Occasionally Doerner wears a leash, but he didn’t even acknowledge them until the late eighties. When 33 world-class surfers paddled out into all-time Waimea Bay for the 1990 Quiksilver-Eddie Aikau Memorial contest, he was the only one not wearing a cord.

“Cords slow you down wherever you are. I have a box full of ’em, but most of the time I shine it. Used to be ability defined the lineup: If you weren't ready to swim in, you weren’t out there. Simple as that. Remember the days when you looked out for the other guys' board? Guys swimming in and running up the beach? Just the natural order of things. Allows the other people to catch a few waves. Now you’ve got a wave-hog problem. You’ve got guys bein’ all piggy-wiggy out there.

“People say, ‘Oh, but cords help if you make a mistake.’ No. That’s wrong. To me, guys who wear leashes aren’t 100% into it. Guys like me and Roger, Peter Cole, Billy Sickler and David Kahanamoku, we don’t go out there figuring we’re gonna make mistakes. I’m not gonna make one. I’m gonna ride four hours without losing this board.”

Four hours at 25' Waimea without a mistake. All day at Waimea without a mistake. You begin to understand why this guy is just a little bit ahead of the rest. People are still talking about a wave Doerner rode on Super Bowl Sunday, January 31, 1988: The surf was 3' in the morning and 15' at 1:00 in the afternoon. By 4:00 PM, Doerner, Bradshaw and Little were paddling over 25'+ sets. The whole affair had a strong out-of-control feel, with far too many closeout waves moving through—but Doerner positioned himself in the vortex of a wave pushing 30'. “Kenny was around there somewhere,” says Doerner. “He said he could’ve had it, but realized I’d picked it up outside. And when I went over the edge, they all wrote me off. They all said, ‘That’s it for Darrick.’”

But Doerner handled it. Caught some air on the way down, but reconnected, hit bottom, turned the corner and finally got blasted by a closeout section. Peter Cole later said it was “the most impressive ride I’ve seen in the past 10 years.”

People are still talking, too, about Doerner's performance on November 2, the day of Pops Aikau’s funeral . . . and they don’t even know about the flowers, the closeout sets, and his presunrise surfing. That’s because he surfed the place all day long—as he said, 30,40 or 50 rides. He came in just once, when he saw his good friend Kahanamoku crawling up the beach, both hands in the sand, one foot up in the air. A collision with another board had broken David’s leg in two places, and Doerner helped get him to the hospital. Not only that, Doerner gave a huge assist to Brock Little—who was out of breath and in big trouble—by handing him the trusty swim fin. “I’m not sure Brock would have gotten in without it,” says Doerner. “It would have taken another three tries around the Bay.”

Mark Foo, after surfing Makalia that morning, made it to Waimea by early afternoon. There he found Doerner, just riding and riding and riding:

“Darrick told me he rode some of the best waves of his life that day,” says Foo, and that means something—the guy has taken off on waves most mortals can’t even imagine. By the end of the day he commanded so much respect, Dick Brewer gave him three new guns. He was super-human out there.”

In his excellent article "The Legend of Eddie Aikau," Nick Carroll quotes Clyde Aikau about a November day in 1967 when Eddie came into his own at the Bay. The waves were a consistent 25', some bigger: “Everyone was out that day; George Downing, Felipe Pomar, Greg Noll. And Eddie was just this Hawaiian guy nobody knew, who paddled out there and totally dominated. It’s incredible how one day can change your entire life.”

“That’s exactly it,” Doerner says now of his November 2 performance. “That one day changed my life. It was the culmination of everything I’ve done in surfing. That’s me out there; that’s what I’m about. I never feel closer to myself than when it’s 25-30'. It’s meditation. I get back on land, I stub my toe, I trip, all that stuff. In the big waves—really big waves—all the elements come together. There’s no fear. Out there it’s just . . . perfect."

"I NEVER FEEL CLOSER TO MYSELF THAN WHEN IT'S 30-FOOT," BRUCE JENKINS PROFILE ON DARRICK DOERNER (1990)

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