Clarence Maki taught me how to surf when I was eight-years old. That was in 1954, and I've been a life-long surfer ever since. This year (2024) on behalf of the Maki family, I self-published a book called Clarence "Mac" Maki: Pioneer Surf Photographer. He was a surf photographer for 52 years from 1953 to 2005, taking photos of surfers mainly in Waikiki. This year also marked my 70th surfing anniversary.

My first surfing lesson was at the surf break called Canoes, which is straight out from the Moana Hotel in Waikiki. Mac, the name he asked me and everyone else to call him, sat me down on the beach and explained exactly what we going to do and where were going. He also gave me a safety briefing, telling me that outrigger canoes would be surfing in the same area with us and that I needed to watch out for them. I learned later that Mac was a certified water safety instructor with the American Red Cross, and that he gave all of his first-time lessons a similar briefing on the beach.

When we paddled out for my first lesson, Mac's son, David, and I paddled tandem on one board, and Mac paddled on his board with his camera in a plastic waterproof housing. David and I went out to the lineup, where David pushed me into a wave. Mac was sitting on his board 50 yards inside of us, and he took a photo of me as I stood up for the first time. I still have that photo. Besides me standing, it shows David in the water behind me and a canoe taking off on another wave outside of David.

During my 70 years as a surfer, I've taught a lot of family and friends to surf, and I've always followed Mac's example of starting everyone with a briefing on the beach before we paddle out for their first lesson.

My heyday as a paipo rider was from 2005 to 2020, when I was a dedicated morning regular at Publics in Waikiki. I got started when I told a good friend of mine, Bud Scelsa, that I was going to retire from the Honolulu Fire Department at the end of 2005. Bud had been a totally committed paipo rider for years, and his favorite spot was the surf break called Publics. He loaned me one of his paipo boards and insisted that I surf with him at Publics. I did, and I loved it. When I retired, I put my surfboard in storage and surfed with Bud as often as I could until he died in 2013. Before Bud passed away, he made me four paipo boards, which I continued to ride at Publics until the COVID epidemic arrived in 2020.

On March 26, 2020, the Star-Advertiser published a quarantine proclamation from Governor David Ige that said, "All persons in the state must stay at home or in their place of residence." But the notice also included a list of activities that were permitted outside of our places of residence. One of these was "Outdoor activities, including ocean activities such as surfing and swimming, so long as social distancing requirements are maintained." This exception to the quarantine permitted surfing and resulted in some very crowded conditions in our surf breaks, including Publics. It got a little too crazy there for me competing for waves as a paipo rider, so I moved to other spots that weren't attracting the crowds and started surfing again on a surfboard.

Prior to my 15 years as a regular paipo rider at Publics, I was involved with paipo riding in the 1970s through the Sandy Beach Bodysurfing Championships. I was a lifeguard at Sandy Beach from 1970-1972, and in 1972 I was one of the founders of the bodysurfing contest. One of our events was paipo riding because paipo riders frequented a left at the east end of the beach. Besides being a contest director, I was also a judge, and I judged all the events, including the paipo riding.

When Tom Morey introduced his foam bodyboards about the same time that we started our contest, they were a huge success. He called them boogie boards, and after several years it was apparent that they had just about replaced paipo boards in our island lineups, so in 1976 we added a men's event for foam bodyboards. In 1978 we added a foam bodyboard event for women and dropped the paipo event.

I helped with the Sandy Beach Bodysurfing Championships from 1972 to 1989. During that period, I wrote my first three books on Hawaii's beaches, surf breaks, and shoreline place names, which included Beaches of the Big Island (1985). For one of my Big Island field trips in the early 1980s, I shipped my 1973 VW to the Big Island along with a paipo board I borrowed from Bud Scelsa. I wanted to be able to surf the island's waves without dealing with a longboard in my small VW.

One of the spots I surfed was called Drain Pipes, a surf break that fronted Harry K. Brown Park in Kalapana. Local surfers in the water told me I was the first paipo rider they had ever seen there, and I was probably the last. Lava flows in 1990 buried the park and entered the ocean, wiping out the surf break. They also filled neighboring Kaimu Bay with its famous coconut grove and black sand beach.

In all my travels to the neighbor islands over the years, I've never seen or heard of anyone else riding a paipo board anywhere.

Judging criteria for the paipo event in the Sandy Beach Bodysurfing Championships consisted of the following:

• Size of the wave
• Length of the ride and speed across the wall
• Position on the board: prone, kneeling or standing
• Combination of positions on the board
• Maneuvers, such as stalling, cutting back, and getting barreled and coming out
• Skill at riding the critical part of the wave

Keep in mind that we didn’t run the paipo event in the Sandy Beach shorebreak. We ran at the east side of the beach where there’s a small rocky point. That point generates a left that breaks further out from the beach and connects with the shorebreak as it nears shore.

Some of the outstanding paipo riders during the 1970s were Mercer Aikala, Primo Richard, Royal Richard, and Jerry Vasconcellos.

Yes. When you bodysurf, you are riding prone, lying flat on your stomach with your head up. When you ride a paipo board, you are doing the same thing, riding prone with your head up.

My style of bodysurfing has always been to ride with both arms outstretched in front of me. I use my arms to help me maneuver across the face of a wave. I use the same style when I'm riding a paipo board.

In the early 1980s, John Alford and a friend of his started Sandy Beach Surf Designs, a skim board manufacturing business. They made their boards out of foam and fiberglass instead of wood, and in 1985, they held their first contest exclusively for skim boards, the Sandy Beach Skim Boarding Championships.

John Alford is a friend of mine, so I asked him to make me a paipo board using one of his skim board blanks and to shape it like a Morey boogie board. That was my first paipo board, and I still have it.

I never made my own boards. As I mentioned earlier, Bud Scelsa made four boards for me before he passed away, and I only assisted him with some of the manual labor, like gluing and glassing the boards. Bud was a master craftsman when it came to working with wood, and he had all the tools for his craft. He used a jointer to make straight edges along a piece of wood's length and a planer to level the face of a piece of wood to the width he was after.

The first board he made for me was a duplicate of the boards he made for himself. Its dimensions are: 52" long, 24" wide at the nose, tapering to 22" in the tail, and ¼ inch thick. Bud only rode kneeling on his boards. He was a big guy, so he made them wide to support his weight, which was concentrated in the center of the board when he was in a kneeling position. I was the opposite. I only ride in a prone position, so I asked him if he could make me a second board shaped more like a surfboard, and he did, using redwood and pine. Its dimensions are: 62" long, 18" wide at the nose, tapering to 15" at the tail, and ¼ inch thick. It worked much better for my style of riding with my weight distributed over its 5' 2" length.

During those early years of 2000, I was researching and writing Hawaiian Surfing: Traditions from the Past, which the University of Hawaii Press published in 2011. I asked Bud if he would make me a third board using wiliwili and koa, two types of wood that Native Hawaiians used for their bodyboards and surfboards. At that time an invasive insect called the gall wasp was killing many of our wiliwili trees on Oahu, and a friend of mine had given me some wiliwili wood from trees that the wasps had killed. Bud had a friend who had a small saw mill, so we took the wood to him and he cut it into planks for us. I bought some koa wood from a commercial vender, and Bud made two more boards for me with wiliwili and koa. They are different lengths, 5' 2" and 5' 10," but both have the same surfboard shape as my second paipo board.

For me personally, riding paipo boards is all about the speed they generate across the face of a wave. The boards I ride are comparatively long and thin, and they take off like a rocket on long walls. I ride prone, so my entire body is only ¼ inch off the water. It's like supercharged bodysurfing.

On big south swells, Publics in Waikiki has exceptionally long lefts that are ideal for paipo boards. However, Publics is also an especially dangerous surf break because of the long, shallow reef that curves into shore, creating those waves. During the spring and summer low tides, the reef is often exposed with coral heads standing above the surface of the water. It's really challenging to negotiate that reef, and it's taken a toll on many surfers and their boards.

The opening shot in this surfing video shows me riding prone on a paipo board in 2012 at Publics: Publics surf spots -surfing.

In addition to Publics, the other surf breaks where I've ridden a paipo board are: North Shore: Day Star, Himalayas, Hultins, and Sunset; South Shore: Full Point (at Sandy Beach), China Walls, Kaikoo, Browns, Mansions, Cliffs, Right Handers, Lighthouse, Sandbars, Old Mans, No Place, Inside Castles, and Cunhas; East Shore: Kalama, Suicides, and Makapuu; West Shore: White Plains.

Paipo boards in general are thin and don't support the body weight of their rider in calm water. Foam bodyboards are just the opposite. They're thick and support the body weight of their rider in calm water. If you watch a paipo rider heading out to the lineup, you'll see that they're holding the board out in front of them like a kickboard in a swimming pool. If you watch a foam bodyboarder heading out to the lineup, you'll see that the rider is on top of their board, which also allows them to paddle with one or both arms.

The difference in buoyancy between a paipo board and a foam bodyboard means there's a different technique to catching a wave with a paipo. When you see the wave you want, you hold the board in front of you and kick with your fins. My friend, Bud Scelsa, liked to paddle with one arm to generate a little more speed on his takeoffs. As soon as you're on the wave, you slide up on the board into whatever position you want: prone, kneeling, or standing.

In your 2010 interview with paipo rider Stan Osserman, Stan pointed out that in most cases "a paipo requires a late takeoff." For beginners, late takeoffs often result in wipeouts, but experienced paipo riders will angle their late takeoffs in the direction they want to go if the wave's too steep.

Today, I'm an occasional paipo rider. One of my two sons is a bodyboarder, so when he visits from his home in Seattle and wants to get in the water, I keep him company on my paipo board. We usually go to Cliffs at Diamond Head or Old Mans in Waikiki. Sometimes I still go out on my own.

Occasionally, I get requests to ride my paipo board for various reasons. One of those requests was for a Department of Education production that was the first of their Kai Piha series of videos. It's called Kaahele Ma Waikiki, a "Tour of Waikiki" (https://vimeo.com/241956835). About midway through the video, I narrated a piece on paipo boards, which is followed by several shots of me riding waves at Publics.

In regard to the paipo board scene here in the islands, I don't see paipo riders very often in the places that I surf, but I know they're still around. The largest gatherings of paipo riders I've seen were for paddle outs in 2014 for Bud Scelsa and in 2021 for Harry Akisada.

In 2012 a surf historian found a 1903 postcard from Japan that showed several girls in swimwear-of-the-day with one of them holding a small board. The investigation of that postcard that followed revealed that the board was a bodyboard and that Japan had a traditional surf culture of its own called itago nori.

In 2013 I mentioned that discovery to Yusuke Motohashi, a friend of mine from Japan who is a surfer living in Hawaii. He asked me if I would narrate a video for him about this story, which I did. This is the link for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbFigfXH5Yg. For additional information about itago nori, see Nobbywood Surfboards online at http://nobbywoodsurfboards.com/index.html#id1.