Two old friends get together to create a flashy Slater Designs twin-fin collab…
It ain’t a stretch to suggest that surfing’s genetic code, its great culture, has been weakened, maybe fatally maybe not, by the WSL’s VAL onslaught.
Just as the modern man is an invertebrate who frets over his Twitter posts and binge-watches television series with a tub of ice-cream balanced on his abdominal apron, the modern surfer has moved from sharpened surfboards to double-enders and from trekking through the Indonesian jungle to ride a wave that will tear his head off to wellness retreats with a surf-yoga component in dowdy sand-bottom rollers.
Akila Aipa, fifty this year, a former pro surfer from Hawaii and the son of the great surfer-shaper Ben Aipa, therefore, is not a man of this time.
He grew up with a front-row seat to the North Shore, with a famous, and famously loved Dad, chased contests briefly then settled into a life as a small-time shaper out of a factory near the Waialua Sugar Mill.
A rare soul connected to surfing’s cultural continuum.
Like Ben, Akila was doing it for the love, pretty much, and until recently, five hundred dollars would get you a version of the five-eight Kelly Slater used to beat hell out of Kerama last year, one of a seven-board quiver he’d made for his old friend.
As our tour correspondent reported, “Kelly leant back into a savage back foot heavy layback hook. It was the turn of the day. The turn of Kelly’s year. It lit a little candle of hope in the deep dark cave of Kelly’s retirement year.”
And as Kelly said at the time, “Akila…board is so lively and fun. I thought for sure it would be too low volume for me but it planes really well and just grabs speed from everywhere. Stoked. Unexpected. Can’t believe it took us this long to make a board.”
Akila appreciated the attention, a little spotlight on his three decades of shaving foam.
What he didn’t have, still doesn’t, was the manufacturing set-up to deal with the demand. He’d shaper a board, then outsource the rest of the production. His margins are tiny. Hundred bucks for a board on a good day.
So when I call on one of the last days of the Hawaiian winter to talk about his collaboration with Kelly on a twin-fin model for Slater Designs, it ain’t surprising to hear he’s been “walking the property” at a friend’s place that might serve as a new factory.
“Trying to make changes to grow,” he says. “What good is all that buzz if I can’t absorb it?”
Akila can talk but he doesn’t gush, another reason he’s not a man of this tremulous, pearl-clutching era.
I ask about the twin and he says, “Yeah, we’ve been poking around, we’ve been playing.”
I push a little.
Akila tells me Kelly has thickened, physically, ten pounds or so of muscle.
“Heavier than he’s ever been. Stronger and healthier than he’s ever been. He’s bulked up as a man. He’s learned to value that weight. And his equipment’s come along with that. He had a certain literage before and we have to come up with at least a litre or a litre-and-a-half. You can only push a sensitive board so far before you start babying it. He can ride a thicker board, lay into it and if he opens up and plays his power game, ooowee, fun shit!”
So for every ten pounds you add, your boards go up a litre?
Akila says yeah, warily, because he doesn’t want you to become obsessed by your supposed perfect literage number.
“It’s become this security blanket thing,” he says. “Know your numbers, your dimensions.”
Akila likes working with Kelly because, “He’s invested, man, he’s not afraid to try shit. You give him a wild board and he doesn’t rip it apart and discredit it.”
For Snapper, Akila has made Kelly three boards, a five-eight twin, a five-five and a five-ten.
“Is it going to be barrelling or running? That squash we did for Keramas was a five-eight, he came up two inches, which dialled in that extra litre. It was a natural volume gain just by going up in inches. We’re looking for a longer rail line so he can push it and hold it longer. The five-eight has a breaking point where it disengages. At J-Bay that could be a disadvantage. I want him to have the five-ten in case it’s five foot and there are faces to gouge. These days, everything’s so specialised and Kelly’s an out-of-the-box dude. The thing about surfing is its expression. When you’re performing, take the thing that gives you the freedom to perform and express. If we don’t know what brush he wants to paint with, provide all the brushes.”
Akila laughs.
“I don’t overthink this shit. Fun boards, fun designs are the most important thing. If you’re making five percent gains instead of rewriting the book each time, try not to overthink it. Live in the moment, let the designs evolve.”
How articulate is Kelly during the design process?
Akila shoots back. “What do you think?”
Well, I say, I imagine he would be rather finicky, sensitive to changes and able to communicate his findings in detail.
“He’s an articulate dude, right. If he’s open and wanting to give up his time he’ll go there. If it’s short and simple he’ll be short and simple. He won’t try and get intricate if it’s not working. If it’s wrong we’ll get to it right away.”
No pals during the design process either.
“Gotta be able to handle that good and bad and don’t take it personally,” says Akila. “We’ll drink a beer and golf and be friends and then, like this week, we’ll come to the table, put time in and work.”
Kelly, says Akila, is one of the, maybe…the…”deepest thinker and surfer on the planet. I don’t take that lightly. I don’t want to waste that time. I don’t want to take him in circles. It’s not a hamster wheel. Let’s nail shit. When he gives you something, you know there’s thought and a process behind it. Who doesn’t appreciate that? The designer has to be open, vulnerable and able to handle that and adjust to it. It’s a working relationship and it’s fun as shit.”
Akila hoots.
“It’s a body of work, man!”
The twin he and Kelly are working on, and which’ll slide into the Slater Designs range later this year, maybe summer 2020, isn’t the monster swallow, crescent-moon fin things you ride on chubby points and nurse along waves everywhere else.
Still, it is going to be a board most of us can shred a little on.
“Everything’s pretty subtle,” says Akila. “He knows and I know that it has to be replicated on scale, across all sizes and be as user-friendly as possible. As intricate thinkers as we are, we’re not so left-field to make a board surfer will struggle with. The consumer has to feel gains from it.”
Right now, it’s testing, hitting the factory, then testing some more in the North Shore wave park.
“We want to test it enough, make enough prototypes that if someone surfs it they’ll think it’s pretty fucking cool. If it’s not good and they don’t appreciate it, why would I want to do it? A lot of thought and input and research and R and D before we release it. We’re not making cookie batches here. We’re close to where we wanna be. I’m a nerd with this shit. If my name’s on it, I’m not going to release it in a hurry.”
The tech, whether it’s PU and epoxy, is yet to be decided. Akila wants the design to be perfected before anything else. He appreciates who he’s working with, however, and would be pretty thrilled to maybe develop tech using hemp resins.
Last time we spoke, a little less than a year ago, you could buy an Aipa for five-hundred dollars and if you lived in Australia, he’d give a flight attendant pal fifty bucks to deliver it to you.
A ridiculous price, you’d think. How does he do it etc.
Today, Akila charges seven-hundred dollars a board.
“I was cheap too long,” he says. “I’m blue-collar. People could afford my local prices. I’ve got some flack for putting the price up. What they’re not seeing are the changes I’m making to be better and the price reflects that. It allows me to own my own machine, a factory, have quality control. Here’s the thing, I’ve been shaping for thirty years. The price should reflect that. I was working by myself. Now I have a small staff, I gotta pay for that. My board didn’t pay for no machine, didn’t pay for shit! That’s what the price reflects. Better boards, a better brand.”
I ask Akila about his famous Dad, now almost seventy-eight, a former linebacker who didn’t start surfing seriously until he was twenty, but got good real fast, the inventor of the swallow tail, the stinger.
Ben caught a blood infection in hospital a while back. Beat him up bad.
“Dad, he’s slow,” says Akila. “He’s on a recovery path. He’s living simply with this wife. I’m just stoked my son has a grandpa.”
A sigh followed by a loud laugh.
“Every day above the ground is a good day. Any age. We’ll take it. I’m learning that.”
Here’ s a taster. Chapter one.
1
The Old Man’s Lament
July, 2016: Bob Hawke is midway through a harangue on the second principle of Machiavelli concerning Cruelty And Clemency And Whether It Is Better To Be Feared than Loved (“It’s bullshit!” he growls) when he stands, theatrically hoiks his jeans upwards, eyeballs me and says,
“Mate. I just gotta have a leak…”
What strange interpersonal dynamics we already have. After only four interviews spread over four Wednesday afternoons the country’s greatest living politician feels compelled to let the interviewer know he needs to toilet instead of excusing himself and briefly disappearing.
But this isn’t any ordinary politician. This isn’t any ordinary Australian.
“He always looked to Australians like the quintessential Aussie bloke and talked like the quintessential Aussie bloke,” Hawke’s loyal pal Kim Beazley had told me.
How quintessentially Australian?
When John F Kennedy was shot dead in 1963, Hawke was campaigning in the Victorian electorate of Corio, his first attempt at winning a seat in the Federal parliament.
His campaign manager came to him, breathless.
“Kennedy is dead!” he said.
Hawke’s face went white.
“Graham Kennedy is… dead?”
Hawke was the man who blew away the fog of prime ministerial power with a connection to the Australian people that was never severed over four elections. If Menzies was the suffocating conservative, Whitlam imperial, and if Fraser was shorn from the aristocratic grazing class to become a divisive brute, Hawke was the beer-inhaling rogue who also happened to be a Rhodes Scholar.
The world messianic gets thrown around a little easily when talk turns to Bob Hawke. But the trajectory of little Bobby Hawke is, literally, biblical.
When he was three he was serving as Jesus’ envoy to the invalids of Bordertown, South Australia, administering his father’s sermons when the congregationalist minister was indisposed.
His mother Ellie made her eight-year-old son sign a decree that he would never drink and predicted Bobby’s ascent to the prime ministership before he was born when her Bible kept falling open to Isaiah 9:6.
The passage reads: “For unto us child is born and the government shall be on your shoulders… His name is called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
As Hawke’s first attorney general and later foreign minister, Gareth Evans puts the mood of 1983 when Hawke assumed the ALP leadership, “We were in the presence of someone who a lot of people perceived as God.”
And here he is on a July afternoon in Sydney, a weak sun lighting up the channels and fjords of a face that has occupied Australian TV screens since the sixties, dying for a piss.
“Now,” says Hawke. “I do something very unusual.”
He looks at me. Grins.
“I’ll have a leak off my balcony.”
Hawke zombie-walks to the southern corner of a terrace, next to the man-sized sculpture of a baby eagle, the Chapungu, a Zimbabwean deity. Hawke loves the country, hates the dictator.
“Mugabe was one of the most awful men I’ve ever met,” he says. “He treated black me and white people alike. Like shit. He was a very, very unpleasant man. He was an awful man. It’s hard to describe how bad he was.”
The difficult soft-shoe shuffle in Skechers memory foam loafers (he’ll wear Swiss designer label Bally if he’s hitting the town) is a result of peripheral neuropathy, a disorder where malfunctioning nerves jumble the signal between brain, spine and, in Hawke’s case, his feet.
There’s a deadness to his “bloody feet” although, paradoxically, he still feels pain.
At public appearances Hawke moves either in a chair or supported by his wife of twenty-one years (and lover for over forty) Blanche d’Alpuget. The perception of fragility is deceptive. Hawke’s mind is sharp, his body a little stooped but still as lean as a greyhound. Inconvenienced, but not on death’s door.
I wrestle briefly with the ethics of watching an eighty-six-year-old man unholster. While watching would signal a perversion and an unholy breach of privacy to some, others might demand the journalist examine every inch of every moment, however intrusive.
I take a middle road.
A swing of the head to capture a split-second of Bob Hawke crisply rocking back on his heels, a clear parabola disappearing off the fourth-storey to the jungle of plants below.
He zips, swings around and shuffles back to our interview.
“Better?”
“Yeah. But I’ve got the old man’s lament,” says Hawke. “Did I mention that?”
Hawke rocks from side to side, one clumsy foot to the other and sings,
“Jiggle, jiggle, dance and dance, the last drop is always in your pants!”
He sits laughing, picks up the cigar, swipes a match.
Am I familiar with Winston Churchill’s famous put-downs?
“So many marvellous cracks,” says Hawke. “Lady Astor and he were at at a party and she said to Winston…”
Hawke turns mimic.
“Winston, you’re drunk!”
“Yes, but when I wake in the morning, I will be sober. You are ugly and there’ll be no change in the morning…
“He was down at Chequers (the British prime minister’s country retreat) on a weekend,” chortles Hawke, “and he was in the toilet having a shit and his private secretary came up to him and said, this public servant, Sir William Andrews, had arrived and wanted to see him. He said, ‘Tell him one shit at a time is enough!”
The adman, entrepreneur and horse-owner, John Singleton, famously switched sides to run the ALP’s advertising in the 1987 election at Hawke’s behest. The friendship bloomed. Singo’s seventieth birthday gift to Hawke of a quarter-share in a promising mare in 1999 netted him over a million dollars.
Hawke, he says, “is a massively intellectual knockabout. It’s a weird combination. To be able to go on the world stage and discuss any subject at a top level with the President of America, the leaders of Russia, China, change the whole face of Australia. At the same time able to drink 20, 30 beers with you, this is before he went off the beer, and have a gregarious attitude towards men and women, love cricket, and football, and racing, and betting, and sit in the cabinet meetings with a form on his lap. Just, as though they’ve got him mixed up when they were making him. They didn’t know whether to make him in the public bar or the Prime Minister’s lodge.
‘So they give him a bit of both.”
Almost like a proper surf gossip web thingy.
Sharks!
Fuck this mind control slater bs
Did you just coin a new term – the Vulnerable Designer or VD for short?
Seriously – great read.
Every time I hear someone ask how many liters a board is I want to punch them.
Started reading this and I immediately knew this wasn’t written by Chas. Well done Derek Reilly
Akila aipa sounds for sure like a down to earth grass roots legend and his boards look sick but we all know all kelly needs is to ride Merricks again.
Haha.
C u in another 5 months.
Please make it a twin keel and name it the Clam Drag.
Welcome to the club Kelly.
Aipa is obviously a down to earth cratsman and I wish him all the best
Though with Kelly involved it’s hard to think it’s not all just lipstick, at the end of the day…
Are you Shane Beschen?
I really meant “lipstick on a pig”
But Aipa soumds like a decent bloke so I didn’t want to insult his boards…
There’s something so wrong about bragging that you voted.
Maybe come back later folks, in a few months even, coz this just happened:
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Oh I’m good then
now surf it in a heat…
I got half way thru but bailed and went over to read th alyssa Caio breakup story
Read all of that one.
Ciao Iburnie
deep, yet shallow
Call me old fashioned
But I’m way more interested in Alyssas vajayjay than some Peter pan wannabe
On the bright side, he’ll only need to rent a prius to camp in at Margs this year.
So many options now
it flows alright
Akila’s rails give me a boner.
“Just as the modern man is an invertebrate who frets over his Twitter posts and binge-watches television series with a tub of ice-cream balanced on his abdominal apron, the modern surfer has moved from sharpened surfboards to double-enders and from trekking through the Indonesian jungle to ride a wave that will tear his head off to wellness retreats with a surf-yoga component in dowdy sand-bottom rollers.“
Thank you.
that was the best para this year.
I’m not on Twitter only binge surf COMPS and don’t eat ice cream
Dont do yoga and been told I’m not well.
Am I pre modern?
I think the actual term was “you sick bastard”
Dowdy, fucking amazing!
Why the need to copy and paste into the comments?
Were you the fkn piece of shit that used to highlight paragraphs and write comments in the margin of library books?
I wish I’d had the cash to get one last year. Mind you, it would’ve just sat under the house, rotting.
Back in the water soon.
Hope it all goes well Akila!
What I’ve observed recently is that there is a massive gaping hole in the market for board transport between Hawaii – Australia, should the potential clients exist. Relying on one’s own, or an acquaintance’s air ticket is frequently not an option.
If there’s such a massive gaping hole then how are you shipping all those tons of Hurluley merch every day?
PS when is your Forbes interview coming out? I have my notepad ready to eagerly scribble down some bizniz notes.
Waiting to get closer to a public float for maximum impact.
Need to manufacture a couple of faintly scurrilous but charmingly roguish ‘scandals’ to endear me to the general trader.
Sales must be going so well at the moment that you don’t even have to advertise anymore…
Sales are so off the chart you can’t even see them.
New ranges coming soon.
I’ve upped my credit card limit in anticipation!
What about just sailing them over in a small tub strung out and attached by legropes to also catch all the floating plastic??
This is why you are an innovative genius.
I also think a paddle race to drag them back-n-forth might also save the planet and create a new athletic tradition.
yep back and forth across the pacific – expand to indian and atlantic – who needs the Olympics!! I’m sure if I spent months just paddling around at sea my wife and family be much happier in general. Could even drag the odd baby dolphin around to protect it and train up a pod of orcas to rid the seas of the shark scurge – opportunities endless really
Endless.
I’ll probably join you, re wife/ kids.
JJF will get envious at our bountiful freedom and come paddle alongside us, as will Nicky ‘Nick’ Nick Nick Carralls.
Knew a guy who worked airlines. He basically imported a motorcycle in spare parts. More or less the whole thing except the frame. Not a small bike either. The airline got a bit persnickety about a wheel, because it didn’t fit in the crew luggage nicely, but all the other bits slid through.
Wow. That was a good read.
Nice change from Derek’s usual surf clip Yellllp.