Ellie Crowe bio information

I was born in Uitenhage, a small town in South Africa.
During the week I read books, and rode my bike.
On weekends my family loved to visit the ocean, about an hour's drive away.
When I was 15, my parents bought a beach house right on the ocean at Seaview, Port Elizabeth, and that's where I learned to love swimming, riding waves, and admiring the big waves.
I attended Terblanche Commercial College in Port Elizabeth. I wanted to be a journalist, or a teacher.
I taught in a South African mission school for a year and then left there to travel to Europe and work in Australia and New Guinea.

While in Australia, I met and married an American, Will, and we have 2 daughters, Juliet and Caroline, and a son, Adam.
We moved to Hawaii and have lived by the ocean ever since. I first saw Duke's photo at the Duke Kahanamoku Outrigger restaurant on Waikiki Beach, (The restaurant is named after Duke and has great photos of him.) I really loved his face - he looked so nice, and had such a great big welcoming smile. I started researching his story and learned how he struggled to achieve his goal as a great swimmer. It was so inspiring that I decided to write a book about him. I spoke to many Hawaiian big wave surfers to learn how it felt to ride waves like mountains. overlooking Freshwater Beach, where he showed the Australians what surfing was all about. He is depicted riding a surfboard - the rock looks a bit like a curved wave. It's great! The small museum there has the long surfboard Duke rode - it's insured for $1 million or more. This beach was near where I had once lived in Australia, before I knew about Duke, so it was really fun to visit it once I knew all about him and to speak to the surfers there who still really admired him after all these years. Here is a photo of the Duke statue at Waikiki Beach where Duke surfed.

Aloha ... Ellie