sting, stinger

High performance surfboard design, invented in 1974 by Hawaiian surfer Ben Aipa. The stinger's main feature was a bifurcated outline; two-thirds of the way from the nose, the rails abruptly cut in about one inch toward the board's center strip, then continued down to the tail. "What the stinger does," proponent Mike Purpus wrote in 1977, "is allow an extremely active and expressive form of small-wave shredding."

The sting (Aipa's original name for the design; it immediately became better kno...