WAIALUA – Surfers worldwide have acknowledged the likely death of a celebrated Hawai‘i big-wave surfer who went missing on Oahu’s North Shore late last month.

Alec “Ace Cool” Cooke, 59, was last seen on October 27 just before he went surfing during a massive swell near Waimea Bay.

His friends said it wasn’t unusual for the big wave rider to take off surfing at night.

“He paddles out with a big glow stick on his back and he’s got a light and basically he goes out at nighttime in big surf,” longtime friend Rich Jensen, told CBS affiliate KGMB in Honolulu. “Because nobody else is out there, so I guess he’s got it all to himself.”

His girlfriend reported him missing the following morning when he didn’t return to his Waialua home after his surf.

A Coast Guard spokesman said: “As with any missing persons search we saturated the area in an attempt to locate Mr Cooke, but pending further developments, we have decided to suspend the active search.”

Emergency responders found a surfboard near the Waimea River which was confirmed as belonging to Cooke.

The Coast Guard said it used fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters and jet skis to search about 23,000 square kilometres of the Pacific Ocean for Cooke.

Cooke made a name for himself chasing big waves in the 1970s and 80s. That included tow-in surfing and even jumping out of a helicopter into a monster wave off Kaena Point where an elite group of surfers paddle into some of the world’s most dangerous waves and attempt to ride them back to shore.

Cooke was reportedly one of the biggest risk-takers of them all, a longtime surfer with a stuntman’s sense of adventure – and an apparent out-sized ego.

“I didn’t want to be a member of the big-wave riders club,” Cooke once said. “I wanted to be chairman of the board.”

Cooke left his home around 4pm on the last day he was seen to catch 25 to 30-foot waves off the famous north shore of the Hawaiian island of Oahu and never returned.

His truck was found parked near the beach, his dog and keys still inside. Only his surfboard was missing.

Though Cooke had largely aged out of the spotlight, he was a celebrity of big-wave riding’s revival in the 1980s.

At the time, Kaena Point was the “final frontier in big wave surfing,” writer Matt Warshaw says in the Encyclopaedia of Surfing. The waves there got as high as 50 feet.

Cooke was a Boston-born, Hawaii-raised surfing stalwart who got his first board at the age of six. He body-surfed competitively in his teens and early 20s, then set his sights on bigger waves.

“He told me he wanted to be known as the Evil Knievel of surfing,” said surfing photographer Warren Bolster. “My admonishments to tone it down fell on deaf ears.”

Like most daredevils in dangerous sports big wave surfers don’t claim to have a death wish. But Cooke acknowledged death as a possibility.

Once after being pinned down for two minutes under a by a 30-foot wave he later told a surfing magazine reporter he was at peace down there: “It was like a cross between the womb and the grave.”

- PNC sources