Stingers. I loved 'em. And yes I know Ben Aipa called it a "sting," not a "stinger," and we've been saying it wrong for 40 years, but that's the wonderful thing about the English language—if it's wrong for long enough, it's right. I had five or six stingers, beginning around 1976, all shaped by Pat Ryan of ET Surfboards. One was magic, the best board I had that entire decade; two or three were excellent; one was a dog. Way better hit-to-miss ratio than the twin-fins I owned in the years that followed, 95% of which rode like skateboards with the trucks on backwards.

During its brief heyday, the stinger was the fastest, quickest-turning small-wave machine around. The video above kind of makes the point, but not really, because I didn't put any shots of guys from the same era riding their non-sting roundpins or diamond-tails or whatever. The stinger A-team—Bertlemann, Buttons, Liddell, Dane and Mark Richards—were tap-dancing on fools right up until MR ran out of his Newcastle glassing room with that first chunky red-yellow-orange twin-fin and plunged it like a shiv through the heart of the stinger. Aipa's design went from 60 to zero in about six weeks.

 that he got the idea for the sting from watching a hydrofoil race across Honolulu harbor, which sounds very eureka, like Newton figuring out gravity after the apple hit his head. But he had a different take in 1992, during a magazine interview.

You invented the stinger design. How did that happen?

 This is true—by accident the [Masonite] template fell on to the rail and cut the planshape! I'd already cut out the outline.

Instead of tossing the blank, Aipa, clever man, flipped it over, made an identical cut in the opposite rail, re-templated the back third of the board, and hey ho! That just might work!

Second, the Buttons-Liddell SURFER cover shot, with flaming stingers, pre-surf, Kaisers, summer of '76. Here's the 

 1960 to 2012. Find a more joyous Page One shot than this and I will eat my trifocals.


Third, my heat against Larry Bertlemann in the 1977 Katin Pro-Am. I was riding a stinger. Larry wasn't. Actually I was riding Dennis Jarvis' stinger, because the one I brought was the aforementioned dog, and Dennis was kind enough to lend me his—and oh, this board was a marvel, it lifted my game from the minute I set foot on it, lots of twang off the bottom, sharp off the top, so much speed through the sections, look at my Johnny Winter hair whipping around behind my head like a flag in a hurricane! As I beat Larry Bertlemann! In the shittiest Southern California winter storm surf imaginable. Victory at sea, probably 12 foot at 7 seconds, the north-to-south current running along the beach like the Rio Grande, and the great Afro-haired Hawaiian god of high-performance surfing never would have 

 at the waves this day, much less gone out, if the contest wasn't on—Larry, the poor bastard, drifted 300 yards up the beach trying to paddle out while I spun around and rode two near-shore closeouts, while also drifting south, then got out and ran back directly in front of the judging stand, paddled out and wowed 'em with another foamy closeout, took the win while Larry ended up scoreless, somewhere up around River Jetties. Look it up!

OH LARRY! WHERE IS THY STING?

Subscribe or Login

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint

Videos