Imua Ohana / Your Hosts
The people you’ll spend the week with
You’re not just booking a service — you’re becoming a part of the Imua Ohana. A family with real history behind it, building something meaningful.
Professional surfer · Hawaiian waterman
He surfs at a level most people watch on a screen. He teaches like someone who wants you to get it, not someone who wants you to be impressed.
Shayden is Hawaiian, island-raised, and has spent his life in this ocean. That is not a marketing line — it is the reason the retreat works. Local knowledge is not a list of spots; it is knowing which sandbar shifted last month, which corner holds a west swell, and which lineup will be kind to a visitor on a Tuesday morning in April.
What guests remember, though, is the temperament. Calm leadership. Deep ocean knowledge. A grounded spirit. He does not shout from the beach. He tells you the one thing worth fixing today, and then he sits with you until you fix it.
He is also a father and a partner, building a life centered around love, growth, and opportunity — and building it here, with his family, on purpose.
How Shayden coaches
Not a list. The single change that unlocks the most for you today — then repetition until it’s yours.
Filmed daily, reviewed nightly. Feeling and footage rarely agree, and the gap is where progress lives.
Break selection is coaching. Put a surfer on the right wave and half the instruction becomes unnecessary.
Mother · Surfer · Hall of Fame artist · Founder
Proud mother. Surfer. Hall of Fame artist. Founder of Imua Moms.
Three Hawaiʻi state titles, and still competing. She surfs, she freedives, and she has spent her whole life reading this coastline — which is why she can tell a nervous first-timer exactly what they need to hear.
During COVID she noticed how little support existed for mothers who still wanted to surf, compete, and create. That observation became a movement about family, healing and empowerment — and eventually became Imua Ohana.
Imua Moms →Her biophilic work is built on the idea that people are healthier in the presence of the living world, and that a painting can carry some of that indoors. The same instinct that reads a wave reads a canvas.
See the work →
The ohana
Our kids are the reason any of this exists. Not a complication we worked around — the whole point.
We came from cycles we decided would end with us. Generational curses, broken and buried. The ocean is how we did it, and how we keep doing it: imua, always forward, every single day.
So we do it for them. So they get to be part of all of it — healthy, free, alive with the sea, growing up knowing the water the way we do. They gave us everything. This is what we built with it.
“Have a look into the lives of Shayden Pacarro & Danielle Zirk as we surf the oceans and carve out our lives — we take you on our journey raising two children, chasing dreams, doing it as a team.” The sessions, the house, the kids, and the flat days too. If you want to know what a week here really looks like before you book, start here.
Also on the channel
Danielle in conversation with mothers who never stopped — surfing, competing, creating and raising kids at the same time.
Latest episode · Brisa Hennessy
Work with Shayden directly
A day on the island with a local: the best breaks for the conditions, plus the food and places you’d never find yourself.
One-on-one, filmed and reviewed. For surfers who already know what they want to fix.
Go home with real footage of yourself surfing Hawaiʻi, shot properly rather than from a phone on the sand.
The Seven Day Surf Retreat
Six retreats a year, three to five guests each. From $2,500 per person, all in.
