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The most remarkable day of Luke Shepardson’s life started in traffic. So much traffic. An unmoving, unending line of cars tracing the wild blue coast of the North Shore of Oahu.
Crowds had been flocking there all night and all morning, their vehicles jamming up the typically sleepy two-lane road that gets you in and out of these parts. Infrastructure-wise, Waimea Bay isn’t exactly meant to host one of the world’s most-storied sporting events. But every once in a while, when the waves are just right, it does. The famed Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational is the rarest of rare surf contests, one that defies human scheduling and relies instead on the whims of nature. It requires exceptionally specific conditions: Waves in Waimea Bay must reliably reach an awesome, gut-churning height of 40 feet minimum. Even though the contest—named in honor of the legendary Native Hawaiian lifeguard and big-wave surfer Eddie Aikau—has been going since 1985, this was only its 10th run.
The chosen few who are invited to compete will drop everything and fly in from Australia and Tahiti, Brazil and Portugal. So when word got out in January that the contest was on, the world’s best surfers began racing to Waimea.
Luke was racing there too. He had to get to work, lifeguarding at the Eddie. His boss called him at 6:30 that morning to tell Luke he was needed on the beach, stat. The drive from his house usually takes all of five minutes. Now he was stalled a half mile away, not getting anywhere anytime soon.
Having grown up here, Luke knew full well the commotion that the Eddie could bring, but he’d never seen anything like this. As he sat idling in his beat-up 2001 Toyota Highlander, he thought about everything that was hanging on him. Up here on the North Shore, good, stable jobs can be hard to come by.
And Luke needed his good, stable job. He was 27 years old, with two small children. His girlfriend, Natalia, was already working three gigs. But no matter how much they hustled, rent always seemed to be due, groceries got pricier, the gas tank needed filling, and the medical bills piled up.
He couldn’t be late. Not today.
His family was with him, so Luke made a split-second decision. He kissed Natalia and told her to take the wheel. Said bye to their kids in the back seat. Then he hopped out and took off running for Waimea.
Even on an ordinary day, surfing is imbued with the mystical, every wave hinging on chance and elemental collision—a storm in Japan will create a swell thousands of miles away in Hawaii. But the waves produced during the Eddie are perhaps the most sacred on earth. To be invited to ride them means being one of the 40 most-esteemed surfers in the world, as chosen by a committee of your peers. The Eddie forges champions: Kelly Slater, John John Florence, and Bruce Irons have all won in the past. On the beach and along the cliffs that line Waimea Bay, some 50,000 spectators would soon squeeze together for a chance to see greatness, to witness ineffable bravery, and to take part in the grand human tradition of watching some guys (and a few women) do truly crazy shit.
Once his feet touched the sand, Luke started picking his way through a mass of tightly packed bodies just to get to his station at the lifeguard tower. When he had finally worked past the throng, the bay opened before him and the undulating ocean revealed itself for the first time that day.
Holy shit, he thought. It’s huge.
He’d barely had time to contemplate the immensity of the waves before one of them crashed onto shore, lifting a log and pinning a young woman underneath. It took 10 people to rescue her. Furious waves rolled in, one after the other, knocking spectators off their feet and sucking in bags and phones, towels and sandals. The crowd started screaming about a baby being swept up, so another lifeguard booked it, returning with what turned out to be a small dog. All morning long, the beach thrummed with nonstop chaos.
As Luke tended to the mayhem, he kept a close eye on the clock. Busy as the day was, he had arranged with his bosses to take two breaks from his lifeguard duties—which required him to cash in some hard-earned vacation hours.
At 11:30 a.m., it was time.
He retreated inside the lifeguard stand, where he slipped out of his work uniform and into his white competition jersey. He was surprised when he started to get a little teary-eyed. Competing in the Eddie was his lifelong dream, this North Shore kid who first got into the ocean at three days old and onto a surfboard at seven months. He grabbed his board and ran down to hug his family, who had arrived to watch.
Then Luke got on his 10-foot gun and paddled out into the raging sea.
Forces had been conspiring for over 2 million years to create that special day. On the island now called Oahu, primordial volcanoes spewed molten magma, slowly constructing a verdant mountain range. Over time, the water carved through those mountains, forming a river valley. Sea levels fell and rose with the ice ages, eventually drowning the low land at the mouth of that river valley, creating the one-of-one crescent that is Waimea Bay, where, in 1957, big-wave surfing was born.
Waimea is uniquely positioned to the northwest, where it apprehends swell energy from winter storms that roil throughout the Pacific. When that energy meets the shallow ocean floor, it alchemizes into those tremendous hollow tubes that contain the possibility of transcendence—and the possibility of death. The powerful riptide can render even the strongest swimmers helpless. For a surfer, wiping out can mean getting dragged across a bed of sharp coral. The violence underwater regularly cracks ribs, tears shoulders from sockets, and breaks backs, as the force of the ocean rag-dolls surfers beneath the waves, sometimes for a minute at a time.
As both a surfer and lifeguard, Luke knows what the ocean is capable of. Just a week before the Eddie, one of his childhood best friends, Kala Grace, had an almost-fatal accident at nearby Pipeline. Luke saw Kala dragged out of the ocean, concussed and bleeding, and it was Luke who put the oxygen mask on his friend’s face. Throughout the frenzy, what everyone remembers is Luke remaining calm and focused.
Luke, by the way, is known as “Casual Luke.” In Hawaii. Which is like being called “Neurotic Matt” on the island of Manhattan. The nickname came to be after a really good day out in the water, when Luke was just shredding wave after wave. The surfer Mason Ho told Luke that he was “casually causing casualties.” But any of Luke’s friends will tell you that it stuck because he’s especially humble and chill. For this reason, sometimes they also call him “Laid-Back Luke.”
When Luke became a lifeguard four years ago, the fact that he’d been surfing these waters since childhood gave him an advantage. Conversely, he says that lifeguarding has since made him a better surfer. “I’m more aware of all the other parts of everything else going on around me,” Luke says. “Before, when I was just surfing, I was focused solely on myself.”
On the North Shore, all lifeguards—and plenty of surfers—are following in the formidable footsteps of Eddie Aikau, the Native Hawaiian who, in 1967, became the area’s first lifeguard. Aikau had dropped out of high school to surf by day and work at the local Dole cannery by night. When Eddie wasn’t surfing, he was lifeguarding. As the legend goes, he saved more than 500 people, never letting a single person drown.
In 1978, while taking part in a canoe trip reenacting the ancient Polynesian migration between the Hawaiian and Tahitian islands, tragedy struck one night when his group’s boat capsized. Eddie mounted his surfboard and paddled out into the pitch-black Pacific for help. His companions were soon rescued. Eddie, just 31, was never seen again.
To honor his brother, Clyde Aikau founded the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational in 1985. The last time they held it, in 2016, Luke wasn’t invited. But he paddled out and caught a few waves before and after the competition just to prove that he could do it. He strained his shoulder so bad that morning that he landed himself in the hospital—but later that afternoon, he was back out there.
Luke had already long been a quiet fixture of the local surf scene. Liam McNamara, brother of big-wave pioneer Garrett McNamara, had taken Luke under his wing when he was a child and showed huge promise. He would cover Luke’s surf trips and contests all over the world. Liam says he saw something special in the kid. “He had the attitude that even though he probably wasn’t the most talented, he wasn’t going to back down to anyone who was more talented than him,” Liam tells me. There were days at Waimea where the waves were so brutal that even Kelly Slater couldn’t make it out past the break. But Luke somehow could.
Luke’s peers came to include some of the world’s greatest surfers. He had earned their respect and then, in 2017, he earned something else: an invitation to compete in the Eddie the next time those insane, mythical waves ever materialized.
Luke floated off the side of his board, waiting for his first wave of the day.
He was eyeing one, but then watched as big-wave champion Billy Kemper snagged it. Fine, Luke thought, he can have it. Instead, Luke caught the next one and the one after that in quick succession, probably the biggest waves he’d ridden since he started surfing Waimea as a teenager.
When he got out of the water 45 minutes later, Luke made his way back to the lifeguard stand and resumed his duties. An excited coworker told him that he was crushing it on the scorecards. Really? Luke thought. Fuck. Okay. Yeah, whatever.
Soon, he slipped back into the distractions of his day job, helping his competitors by bandaging their cuts and tending to sprains. All the better to keep his mind busy. Before Luke paddled out for his next heat, Clyde told him that if he got a 9.5, he could clinch it. It was down to him and a handful of other guys, John John and Billy Kemper among them. Whoever could nab the biggest and most beautiful wave next would walk away the champion.
Winning the Eddie was suddenly a very real possibility. And for someone like Luke, a win could be life-changing.
Luke’s parents split when he was four, and he grew up in a working-class household, raised by his mom, Mary. She juggled jobs as a hairdresser, massage therapist, and house cleaner, and the family shuttled between different rental houses every year. Luke’s dad, Mark, was priced out of paradise, living in camps he set up outdoors.
Luke dropped out of high school at 15, earned his GED, and taught surf lessons while he tried to make it as a pro. He was traveling the world, hitting competition after competition, without much luck. When he was 22, life made a choice for him. Natalia was pregnant.
So he got a job as an electrician. It was good money that, over the years, would get even better. The available electrician gigs just happened to be stationed at the prison.
He would arrive at 4 a.m. every day and get locked inside until 2:30 p.m. His days mostly consisted of pulling out wires from malfunctioning doors while prisoners heckled him. It was miserable, and he realized something watching his more-senior coworkers who made five times what he did: “If you’re not happy, I’d rather be broke and happy.”
Then one day, Luke missed a really good swell. “I was locked in the prison, sweating my ass off,” he says. “Like, Fuck. This fucking sucks.” After that, he never showed up again.
That’s when Luke got hired as a lifeguard. He would be spending his days outdoors by his beloved ocean, but the job was hazardous and paid way less than what he was making as an electrician. Until 2020, Luke and Natalia and their first child were squeezed into a two-bedroom unit with his mom and brother.
The dreams that Luke had been harboring in those days were modest ones, the dreams that you tend to have when your life is settled and people are depending on you. They didn’t involve winning a legendary surf contest that you couldn’t even count on happening.
As Luke got back in the water for his final heat, he pushed what Clyde had told him as far out of his head as he could. A few minutes after settling into the lineup, the biggest and most beautiful wave appeared as a glimmer on the horizon and rolled right up to him.
I guess I gotta go, Luke thought.
The wave roared out of the water, impossibly sized, a prehistoric beast emerging from the abyss. Luke turned his gun toward the shore and paddled hard. He leaped up just before the wave crested and elegantly glided down the face: essentially, a free fall from a four-story building.
Luke disappeared into the tube for a heart-stopping moment, then another, then another. Please let me get out of this, he thought. An avalanche of white water exploded. Suddenly, the wave spit him out unscathed. He threw up his arms to claim the ride and tumbled into the water.
Afterward, as he was floating there in the brief calm, something a little weird—something a little magical—happened. A sea turtle suddenly surfaced in front of him. The two creatures stared at each other, transfixed. Luke felt himself getting chills.
Then the turtle returned to the depths of the ocean and Luke returned to shore.
Soon, he was lined up on the beach as the judges announced the knocked-out contestants, one by one. Luke’s family and friends rushed down to the staging area, growing anxious, then hopeful, with each name that was called. Improbably, it was soon down to John John Florence—the defending champ, the prodigy, the world’s greatest surfer—and Luke.
Then they called John John…for second place. A lifeguard—a lifeguard who was on duty, no less, and not a professional on the circuit—had beaten the world’s greatest surfers in the greatest surf contest there is.
Luke started crying. Natalia started crying. His whole family started crying. His bros started crying. They hoisted him up on their shoulders and covered him in beer and handed him his prize of $10,000 and 350,000 Hawaiian Airlines miles.
Then Luke excused himself to go back to the lifeguard tower, where he finished his shift, staying until the crowds had left and the sun had set. At home that night, he ate pizza and watched The Lion King with his kids, then went to bed early.
The champion rustles around his fridge, bleary-eyed and looking for breakfast. Bagels. Cream cheese. A little smoked salmon. He’s slim and unassuming, with a permanent tan and an even more permanent case of shirtlessness. He walks like someone who’s perfectly content not to be noticed. His shaggy hair and sparse goatee make him a dead ringer for the actor Pedro Pascal. Everyone says it now, but he first heard it years ago, from a security guard at an MMA fight he was attending. “What are you talking about?” Luke remembers saying. “ You calling me old? You telling me I look like a 50-year-old man?’’
When Luke has something to say, he usually punctuates his thoughts with an easy, involuntary laugh. You can tell it pains him a bit, all the talking.
Natalia, petite and model gorgeous, makes coffee. The baby, Wild, babbles in his high chair, wearing a T-shirt that says “Aloha Dudes” and waving around a drooly bite of toast. A skinny black-and-white mutt named Nala scampers in excited circles below, waiting for scraps to fall. Haven, 4, is conked out in the bedroom.
Between Luke’s lifeguarding and Natalia’s shifts as a wedding caterer, wedding coordinator, and at a shave ice stand, this is their only day off every week. They’re tired, partially because they possess the genial low-grade weariness that comes with being parents to two children under five, and partially because they’ve been spending their nights looking for a new apartment. They currently live at the top of a hairpin hill, all four of them sharing a one-bedroom unit in the back of a larger house. Their decor is mostly: toys. Dinosaurs and bouncy balls and scooters. Luke doesn’t have an Eddie trophy to display, but the Hawaiian Lifeguard Association made him a custom wooden surfboard to celebrate the win…only they engraved it with the wrong date. (Luke doesn’t mind.)
Luke and Natalia recently got a 60-day notice to vacate because their landlord’s daughter is moving back in. Finding an affordable new place on the North Shore is not easy when studios with hot plates are going for $3,000 a month. They were thinking about finally trying to buy, and then skyrocketing interest rates yanked that dream out of reach. “People are like, ‘We would love to rent to you,’ ” Luke says. “But then they’re like, ‘Oh, you must have money now.’ ” Next thing Luke and Natalia know, they’re getting quoted $4,000 a month.
“That’s the only shitty thing: Everybody thinks that he’s got this huge cash cow,” Natalia adds. She and Luke think the mix-up has to do with everyone seeing Luke hold up a big check with 350,000 written in the box, not realizing the figure was airline miles, not dollars.
But the Eddie win has helped relieve the constant, everyday stressors of being broke. “It always took a really big toll on him,” Natalia says. “He tried not to show it to us. Luke has a great poker face, even when everything is going to shit around him.”
The morning after Luke won the Eddie, his phone started blowing up. In an instant, the beautiful, anonymous ordinariness of their life had been torpedoed. Press flocked to the North Shore. The mayor of Honolulu visited and gave him a plaque declaring that January 25 would be known, in perpetuity, as Luke Shepardson Day. Tourists chased him down for selfies and handshakes as he worked. Suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of Luke: He filmed ads for Bank of Hawaii and a local Kia dealership (he got a new Kia out of that one). Off-days that were once dedicated to seeing friends and family were now devoted to various attendant responsibilities. The musician Jack Johnson, a fellow North Shore local who made it big, sensed what he was going through and reached out to Luke, offering his help.
“The first week was like, ‘Fuck, I just want this to be over and done with.’ I don’t like the cameras, I don’t like the attention,” Luke says. He would pull on a hoodie and sunglasses and try to get as far away as possible from everyone on the beach. Now, he’s more sanguine about it. Might as well enjoy the ride.
Still. Most athletes, when they reach the pinnacle, do not immediately dream of descending back into obscurity. Most people are not content with simply trying to keep on keeping on, uneaten by ambition. Luke feels blessed, to be sure. Before the Eddie, he was waking up at 4 a.m., when the stock market would open in New York, to try to make a few extra bucks day-trading, without much success. His $10,000 prize mostly went toward paying a medical bill that had gone into collections. In years past, winning the Eddie was more financially lucrative. Quiksilver used to sponsor the contest, with a grand prize of $75,000. Somehow Luke’s Venmo handle got out after his win, and he received close to that amount in donations.
He could finally put some money into savings. Breathe a little. Luke gave his old truck to his dad and got himself a new Tacoma, which all the surfer guys around here drive. Natalia ditched her lemon that would leak and turn off unexpectedly midway down the hill for the free Kia.
There were other useful perks. In 2021, Luke tweaked his back lifting a six-foot-four, 400-pound guy out of the water. Which means that not only did he surf the Eddie while working, he surfed the Eddie with a bad back.
He recently got platelet-rich plasma injections at the injury site, which speeds up the healing process. Luke had been trying and trying to get approval for insurance coverage for months, without much luck. But when he finally had a call with a doctor, it turned out his Eddie win was good for something else.
“The doctor was like, ‘I know the city. They won’t approve it, but I’ll do it for free,’ ” Luke recalls. “And I was like, ‘Oh, sick.’ ”
Haven awakens from his slumber and stumbles out of the bedroom. The kid is so shy at first that he asks me my name with his face buried in the couch cushions. In a matter of minutes, he warms up enough to commandeer the conversation.
“Did you know my brother loves surfing?” Haven asks me.
“Your brother, Wild?” I reply, incredulous. “But he’s a baby! When does he go surfing?”
“My dad took him surfing,” Haven says with a shrug, focusing his attention on a container of Play-Doh.
Luke, too, was raised this way, improbably surfing before he could walk. As a kid, he’d sleep with his arms wrapped around a surfboard. He remembers staring out at the ocean, watching all these surfers he admired riding monsters. He thought to himself, How am I ever going to do it? Everyone in Hawaii surfs big waves. I have to surf big waves.
His Eddie win may have been big news to the rest of the world, but those who surf in these parts always knew what Luke was capable of.
“He’s always been that quiet guy that just paddles out,” says John John Florence, “then, all of a sudden, he’s on one of the best waves.”
Luke thinks he’s a horrible competition surfer. Gets too inside his own head. His theory is that he won the Eddie in the first place because he was working all day and couldn’t think about it too much.“I always overthink it, stress out, get anxious, make stupid mistakes,” Luke says. “I’d just trip over my own feet.”
Back when he secured his lifeguarding job and Haven was born, Luke decided that his contest days were over. This was more than fine by him. For starters, the waves on the competition route kind of suck. Plus, all the money had drained out of pro surfing. Titans like Billabong and Quiksilver struggled after the 2008 financial crisis. Only the top guys—the John Johns and Kelly Slaters—were getting sponsorship deals in the millions, while everyone else lived contest to contest and paycheck to paycheck. “It was always the dream and then it kind of wasn’t the dream….” Luke says, trailing off. “Seeing it firsthand go from everyone’s being paid to nobody’s being paid.”
One time, not long after Haven was born, Liam McNamara offered to pay for Luke’s entrance fee in a local contest, but Luke turned him down, saying that he couldn’t take off from his day job.
“I think he still feels he’s not a pro surfer,” Liam tells me. “But he just won the biggest professional surfing competition in the history of the sport. For him not to be considered a pro surfer is just crazy.”
Once breakfast is finished, we all pile into the new Tacoma and start cruising down the hill to the coast. Though the North Shore is just an hour north of Honolulu, it might as well be a different country. Luke rarely goes, preferring to stay in what he calls “the North Shore bubble.”
This bubble, where Luke was raised, is its own Eden. Ancient green mountains with a halo of clouds on one side, a coast lined with bucket-list surf spots on the other. Waimea, yes, and Pipeline and Rockpiles and Chun’s Reef. Wild chickens roam the parking lots and outdoor restaurants, crowing at all hours. Carefree, unsupervised kids pedal their bikes to the beach. If the North Shore had an official shoe, it would be the flip-flop, which is about as formal as it gets. In every situation I find myself in over the course of a week, I am the most-dressed person present. (I’m wearing jorts.) Everyone knows everyone and has known everyone since way, way back. As Luke’s mom put it after the Eddie: I changed first- and second-place’s diapers.
But the North Shore is Eden, until it’s not. In recent years, the cost of living exploded, ignited by inflation and the pandemic, until the median home price hit $1 million. Rich folks swept in from the mainland. A house that once housed a local Hawaiian family of 10 is now owned by a celebrity or tech CEO who drops in a couple of weeks a year. Food is so expensive that most people drive down to the Costco in Honolulu. Meth addiction runs rampant under the surface.
For Luke, this contest win means more than just extra cash for groceries. It means that there is hope that he can preserve a disappearing way of life for his family, in a place where it’s getting harder and harder to do just that. I meet Luke’s dad, Mark, one evening on Sunset Beach, right around sunset. Mark is leathery, wearing camo swim trunks and a homemade shell necklace, with a tattoo of an intertwined shark and dolphin on his leg. He could be a character in a tropical Bruce Springsteen song.
He used to surf too. Loved it so much that, at 19, he flew from California to Hawaii with $50 in his pocket to start a new life—arriving, as chance would have it, on the same day that Eddie Aikau disappeared forever. Mark ended up giving up big-wave surfing after a gnarly near-death accident, shortly after meeting Luke’s mother. He was saved by a lifeguard.
“He was one of them that never was unhappy in the water,” Mark tells me about Luke. “He’s more merman than human.” A UFO enthusiast, Mark believes it was an early sighting here that father and son had together that rendered Luke preternaturally chill.
I ask Mark what he wants for his son.
“I hope he can live a happy, calm, healthy life with his beautiful woman and his beautiful sons. And that he gets to save a lot of people,” he says. “I hope he gets to be the first one to win two Eddies in a row, is what I really hope.”
Luke has no plans of entering another contest besides the Eddie. Instead, he’s been daydreaming about what it would be like to buy a house. Maybe even another house that he can rent out. He wants to pass the test at work that will allow him to operate the Jet Ski, which means an automatic pay bump. Planting a garden with some avocado trees and orange trees sounds pretty nice too.
He fulfilled his childhood dreams, even if he didn’t take the most direct route. In a way, isn’t that more satisfying? To have a dream and to shelve that dream because life gets in the way. To think that it’s too late, only to have life surprise you.
Luke has surfed waves in Tahiti and Fiji, chased swells in Japan and Chile. But he wants to stay on the North Shore forever. He wants his kids to be able to stay here, and maybe even their kids. “It’s better to struggle in paradise,” Luke tells me, “than to be unhappy and rich somewhere else.”
As Luke drives us to the beach, he realizes he’s forgotten something. He has an event that night—the Marines want to honor him—but he has yet to book a babysitter.
“You can watch us, Auntie!” Haven proposes to me. “Because tomorrow you’re coming back to Hawaii to watch us?”
I assure Haven that I will return someday.
“And stay here?”
Luke’s winning has permanently tied him to the story of the island. In fact, when Clyde Aikau won the Eddie in ’86, two sea turtles guided him toward his waves. Clyde can’t let that cosmic coincidence between him and Luke go: “The turtle was actually showing Luke, ‘You’re the one, you’re the one.’ I don’t know if it’s appropriate to say that Luke was the chosen one. But he actually was the chosen one.”
Luke’s win means something to the people around here, especially the people who love and miss Eddie. “It was the first time we’ve had someone like that, who actually lived here and didn’t follow the circuit,” Linda Ipsen, Eddie’s former wife tells me. “He really has the spirit of Eddie.”
At the beach, Haven gets zipped into a small burgundy wetsuit. Natalia and I relax on the sand with Wild, as Luke and Haven paddle out on the same board, catching wave after wave.
“I love watching them surf,” Natalia says, staring out at the water, “seeing how much Haven totally trusts his dad.”
When Haven and Luke emerge, Wild keeps trying to toddle into the shore break.
“Brother wants to catch a wave,” Luke tells Haven.
No way, I think. No way.
And then Luke takes his 14-month-old baby, plops him onto his board, and together they catch a wave.
After surfing, Dad and his two boys get in the impossible blue-green water. The sun glints off the surface in a way that should only be possible in a postcard. Luke holds Wild, who splashes his chubby arms. Haven floats happily nearby. As I sit on the sand watching, I realize what’s really extraordinary about Luke.
Most other people, if they accomplished what he did, would want more. They would be greedier for fame. Maybe a little bitter that it didn’t all happen sooner. They would have tried to get far, far away from where they are. Isn’t that the most human of human impulses? To look at what you have right in front of you and to think that it could all be so much better?
But Casual Luke has it figured out. He recognizes that here on the North Shore, where he’s always been, he has everything he could possibly want or need. He wants to hold onto the life he’s built. A beautiful family. A job that fills his days with purpose. An endless supply of perfect waves.
Gabriella Paiella is a GQ staff writer.
A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 2023 issue of GQ with the title “Casual Luke Rides the Big Wave”
