He won’t try and get intricate if it’s not working. If it’s short and simple he’ll be short and simple. If he’s open and wanting to give up his time he’ll go there. Well, I say, I imagine he would be rather finicky, sensitive to changes and able to communicate his findings in detail.
How articulate is Kelly during the design process? Live in the moment, let the designs evolve.” If you’re making five percent gains instead of rewriting the book each time, try not to overthink it. Fun boards, fun designs are the most important thing. If we don’t know what brush he wants to paint with, provide all the brushes.” When you’re performing, take the thing that gives you the freedom to perform and express. The thing about surfing is its expression. These days, everything’s so specialised and Kelly’s an out-of-the-box dude. I want him to have the five-ten in case it’s five foot and there are faces to gouge. The five-eight has a breaking point where it disengages. We’re looking for a longer rail line so he can push it and hold it longer. It was a natural volume gain just by going up in inches. “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. You give him a wild board and he doesn’t rip it apart and discredit it.”įor Snapper, Akila has made Kelly three boards, a five-eight twin, a five-five and a five-ten. “Know your numbers, your dimensions.”Īkila likes working with Kelly because, “He’s invested, man, he’s not afraid to try shit. “It’s become this security blanket thing,” he says. So for every ten pounds you add, your boards go up a litre?Īkila says yeah, warily, because he doesn’t want you to become obsessed by your supposed perfect literage number. He can ride a thicker board, lay into it and if he opens up and plays his power game, ooowee, fun shit!” You can only push a sensitive board so far before you start babying it. He had a certain literage before and we have to come up with at least a litre or a litre-and-a-half. And his equipment’s come along with that. Stronger and healthier than he’s ever been. I ask about the twin and he says, “Yeah, we’ve been poking around, we’ve been playing.”Īkila tells me Kelly has thickened, physically, ten pounds or so of muscle. “What good is all that buzz if I can’t absorb it?”Īkila can talk but he doesn’t gush, another reason he’s not a man of this tremulous, pearl-clutching era. “Trying to make changes to grow,” he says. 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. He’d shaper a board, then outsource the rest of the production. What he didn’t have, still doesn’t, was the manufacturing set-up to deal with the demand. Can’t believe it took us this long to make a board.”Īkila appreciated the attention, a little spotlight on his three decades of shaving foam. I thought for sure it would be too low volume for me but it planes really well and just grabs speed from everywhere.
It lit a little candle of hope in the deep dark cave of Kelly’s retirement year.”Īnd as Kelly said at the time, “Akila…board is so lively and fun. 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.Īs our tour correspondent reported, “Kelly leant back into a savage back foot heavy layback hook. 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.Ī rare soul connected to surfing’s cultural continuum.
#AKILA AIPA SURFBOARDS PRO#
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.Īkila 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. 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. Two old friends get together to create a flashy Slater Designs twin-fin collab…
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