"Hawaii's New Breed," by Dick Graham, ran in the May 1967 issue of Surfing magazine, when Aipa was 24. The version has been edited and shortened.


I really admire Joe Kitchens from Hawaii and Dewey Weber. I would describe my style of surfing as always moving and just really trying to work the wave.


I always study it first. Some days when it’s big I don’t go out, because I don’t think I should. I feel you definitely need training to ride big waves. Training, and good judgment, and you have to have a lot of hair, too. For me, that all comes from putting a lot of hours in the water, keeping yourself in good shape, and having wave knowledge.

I think somebody, someday will ride Kaena Point. It’s possible. Sometimes a wave can be really big, but not hairy. It can be just a big washtub of a wave, like Outside Pipeline. It’s really big, but it doesn’t get hairy until it hits inside. As for Kaena Point, that thing breaks so far out that it looks slow, but if somebody gets on the wave—I don’t know. We looked at it this year and it was about forty feet.


In big surf, I'm thinking of the up-and-coming guys—Jeff Hakman and Eddie Aikau. Today the guy who is really showing a lot of talent is Eddie Aikau, and a lot of people will agree with me. He is the most aggressive big wave rider around.


On a late afternoon at Haleiwa, I was coming down a big wave, turned, and found myself inside the tube. All of a sudden the whole thing came down on me and I hit the bottom. On the way up, my board hit me on the head. I lost consciousness and I didn't remember anything until I woke up in a hospital and found out that I had 22 stitches in my head, and a cracked skull. Harold Holley pulled me out of the water. It’s okay now, and I don't think it changed my attitude toward surfing, because I went back to Haleiwa two weeks later and rode it again at the same size.


My job, shaping, doesn’t interfere with my surfing. Neither does my wife, she’s very understanding. I try to work it out so that I surf in the mornings and come in about noon and start work. This way I can get in over twenty hours a week of surfing.


Whoever wins a contest is just lucky that day. There are a lot of good guys who enter meets and don’t even place. Even though I still enter contests—they’re a joke.

"Pop Quiz: Ben Aipa," by Devon Howard, ran in the May 1999 issue of Longboard magazine. This version has been slightly edited and shortened.

I was born in Honolulu but raised on Kauai in the sugar plantation area. Then we moved back over to Honolulu and I became active in sports like football, powerlifting, and competitive swimming. In my senior year of high school, I got a lot of scholarship offers to major colleges for football but I didn’t go. Instead, I got involved in semi-pro ball here in Hawaii. Into the third or fourth year of that, I hurt my ankle really bad. At age 25 it kept me from playing the way I wanted to, and I didn’t want to coach. So, a friend of mine said, "Hey, let’s go surf." We went down to Waikiki, I rented a board, and that was it. I caught my first wave, stood up on the first try, and was hooked from then on.

Who influenced your surfing in the early years?

There were so many good local surfers at that time. But one that really stands out in my mind was named Joe Kitchens, who now runs a shop on Kauai called Progressive Expressions. His surfing inspired me—but not him as a person, not at first, because we had gotten into a fight. Then a year or two later I saw him in the water and apologized. We made up and as it turned out he was the person who got me interested in shaping surfboards. Later on, as I progressed in my surfing and shaping, I started making annual trips to the Mainland. On one of those early visits, I met Donald Takayama in Hermosa Beach and we hit it off. It’s funny that I didn’t know him before, because we’re both from the South Shore. In time Donald started Surfing’s New Image down in Solana Beach and we started building boards together.

Before the stinger, I developed the swallowtail with kids like Larry Bertlemann. His surfing was so far ahead of board design at that point that I had to come up with something new. I was so lucky to work with this kid because he was doing crazy skateboard type maneuvers. The swallow helped his surfing a lot but I thought we could do even better, take things further. So one afternoon I went back to the shop to make Larry a new board, and after I drew the outline I accidentally dropped the template onto the blank and saw the idea for the sting tail. I could tell that, by remove part of the board that wasn’t needed, it would push the pivot point further up and shorten the turning radius. The word "sting" comes from when I gave Larry the board two days later—he was stinging the wave, just taking it apart on that board.

What got you back into shaping longboards In the early ’80s?

When I started to bring back the longboard shape here in Hawaii I was targeting the guys from the ’70s because they were the ones getting married and had less time to surf and weren’t in the best shape for shortboarding. They needed a board that could catch waves. Also, what helped some of these guys get back into longboarding was that I ruled a longboard as being anything eight-foot or over, and that made it easier for them to accept. Eight-feet didn’t sound as big as nine or ten feet.

How did your own surfing at that time influence your boards?

They've been together, tight, the whole way through. Never separate. All my design thoughts came from surfing, from my own and from watching other guys. And not just good surfers, but the average surfer. I watch them and try to figure out how I could make a better board for them that would work well for the way they surf.

At 59 you’re In better shape than guys half your ago. How'd that come about?

Exercise! You have to train. Surfing alone won’t take care of it. There’s no real secret. I just do a lot of aerobic exercise and calisthenics.

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