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.”
