The quotes below are from Nick Carroll's Darrick Doerner profile, which ran in the October 1990 issue of Surfing magazine.


When I graduated [from high school], it was 1974. Me and David Kahanamoku went to the same school on the Big Island. We came straight here. Applied for the lifeguard job—and I’m still here. There wasn’t much room for a little guy like me in the tower, you know, so I used to walk around, watch the waves. Eddie [Aikau] would come to work in the morning, paddle out and surf all day, and we’d end up doing most of the rescues and stuff. Then Eddie would come back in, walk over to his car, put his board on and drive away. So we used to run the beach.


It took me a little while. I had an eight-foot Brewer I bought second-hand for $150. It was too big for Sunset, so I had to surf Waimea. I worked into it very slowly, with David Kahanamoku, who knew the lineup from his father, who learned it from Flippy Hoffman and Pat Curren. David had guts. And he moved me into the right spot; him and Eddie.


My boards are all 9'6". Anything bigger tends to get in the way. I want to fit into the wave. I know the lineup and I know the ledge. Sit two feet inside the ledge and you can catch anything. Sit two feet on the other side, it doesn't matter what you got, what size board, you can't catch it. You want to come in from behind; lay the turn out, go up high, come back down, drag around the corner, then play with it. It’s like a religious trip. I’ve never been at peace with myself more than being out at Waimea Bay when it’s twenty-five-to-thirty feet.


I saw Brock Little catch the biggest wave of my life. I saw Mark Foo catch the biggest wave of my life. They say that 

 wave was bigger than theirs. But how can I say? I couldn’t see my wave. It was a blur. Twenty-five feet, thirty feet, it's all the same. It's just—

. Anything bigger, I don't think the human body can get down the face.


I made one bad mistake out there [Waimea]. I went for the first wave of a set and missed it, and it was thirty feet. Even before I turned around, I knew. I heard car horns, I heard people yelling on the point, I felt this surge in my heart and started hyperventilating, paddling directly into the channel—because I figured I should get as far as I could over there—bailed. Never saw my board again. I was down for easily 50-plus seconds. My ears popped. I tried to come back up, it sent me back down. I finally made it to the top after the second wave had passed me. I went in. No questions asked. I went in. That was the worst one.

Doerner was 34 when 20th Century Fox hired him to do the climatic wipeout scene in 1991's Point Break. Ben Marcus asked Doerner about the experience for his 2005 book Surf's Up.

The producers came to Hawaii and were auditioning [surfers] in Town. Mark Foo and Ken Bradshaw and all these guys drove in to audition, and I didn’t know about it because I was lifeguarding. Well, Patrick Swayze whipped out that picture of me [surfing Waimea] from Super Bowl Sunday and he said, "Hey I want to meet this guy." So they tracked me down and we had a rendezvous at Chun’s Reef. I paddled out and there he was in the lineup. I said, "Howzit, I’m Darrick."

He said, "I’m Patrick Swayze, and I want you to die for me."

I said, "I don’t die for anyone." And boom, I got the job.

Point Break was hard because they didn’t know what they wanted. There was no storyboard so I had to wipe out over and over again. Six times I did it, broke a bunch of boards, and perforated my eardrum. They tried to dye my hair blond and it came out pink and orange and it burned my scalp and people were laughing at me. I went over to Makaha side one time and Mel Pu’u tried to chase me out of the water because he didn’t think I was me.

Then the producers left [Hawaii], then came back and said, "We want you to do an Iron Cross when you take off."

So we did the whole thing again. Now keep in mind: I didn’t have any Water Safety hovering around on skis, and no one was blocking for me. It was just me out there in a wetsuit with orange hair. The bruddahs in the water didn’t care that I was shooting a Hollywood movie. The pecking order was in place and I had to hustle for waves with the rest of them and it was hard to focus on what I needed to do.

So finally I called Laird and I say, "Hey I want you to be a friend and be out in the water with me when I have to do this." You know? Because I wasn’t sleeping so good, knowing I had to jump off a four-story building again. Laird said he’d do it and he didn’t ask for a dollar.

The day came and Laird played traffic cop for me and that helped, but I still had to go through the pecking order. When my turn came Laird said, "Okay, everyone just stop," and I pulled that one really cool Iron Cross at the top, then jumped and got down the face. It was like, 

 barrel ride. I bodysurfed right into a giant right barrel and it was really cool. I was looking out of this giant barrel, across Waimea Bay, and I could see the cliff and the cars and people and the hills. I popped up and I could hear all these car horns honking and people were hooting and screaming and someone yelling, "That’s a wrap!”’

In a short interview published in the April 1996 issue of SURFER, Doerner talked about his choice to give up Waimea Bay in favor of tow-surfing uncrowded North Shore outer reefs.

Thanksgiving day. The surf is big. Me and Buzzy Kerbox jump on the ski to go surfing. Sunset is Third Reef. No way. So we jet down to the Bay. We come around the corner and I say to myself; 'This is Waimea. I used to surf here." Seventy- five guys in the water. Maybe a hundred. I drive inside to see what was up. Half the guys I didn't know. The other half were too grumpy to say hello. Tense. Very tense. Forget about it. I love the Bay. I'd love to surf the Bay, but I'll either get killed, get dropped in on, or get in a fight. I haven't surfed the Bay in five years.

The quotes below are from Matt George's "In God's Hands: My Breakfast with Darrick Doerner," which ran in the June 1996 issue of Surfing magazine.

ON THE NOTION THAT TOW-SURFING HAS NO "SOUL."


Bullshit. I've been surfing 35 years. No soul? Bullshit! Hey man, if you're going to catch a locomotive, you're not going to do it on a bicycle. Like Flippy Hoffman said, the ocean was made for pistons.


Think of being on a wave twice the size of Waimea, five times longer than Waimea, the wall is a mile long stretching out in front of you. You're on a short maneuverable surfboard and you've got all the speed you need to make the wave. Twenty-five bottom turns, 25 top turns. Close your eyes and mind-surf that, man. It's all about sustaining and prolonging the experience. Twenty giant long waves a day. Two-minute rides. The waves are big enough to talk about on the same scale as mountains. Sheer lines, fall lines, cornices to drop over, the wind at the top of those things is about 50 MPH. It's like the Superdome out there.


You need a good friend on the other end of that line who you know is willing to risk his life for you if you get in trouble. That, and the will to put yourself in God's hands."

[Photos: Don King, Michael Grosswendt, Dooma]

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