Ode to Ted Heople

Attention to detail, that’s what I got to say about these boards . . . an artistic touch of balance and color.

Whenever I get out a blank it always feels like a mixture of both canvas and clay.

I love the aboriginal design on this board made for in Hawaii—the outlines echo a hybrid style Mini Simmons that allows for more performance oriented surfing with hints of the Simmons dynamics build in.

Ted Heople was said to be born on a boat in the middle of the Ocean. It is also said he was born with a beard and he chewed his own umbilical cord off . . . I’ll let him tell the rest of the story here cause it’s one of the most well written bios I have read on a shaper.

“Ted Heople was born on a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He says he could swim before he could walk. (Most would say he still doesn’t walk all that well.) It is also said he was born with a beard and he chewed his own umbilical cord off. His father, Stigandr Heople was a one-legged Scandanavian fisherman with a overt whittling fetish. His mother was a Tahitian pearl diver with huge lungs.

While his father was jailed in Oahu for giving a house cat a lit cigar, Ted had the good fortune of mingling with some of surfing’s earliest heroes. Which was great until the Duke gave him the first “Hawaiian Donut” in history. After that, Ted kept to himself and expended a lot of effort to get away from surfers, whom he referred to as, “Codswallops, all of ‘em.”

Ted had always made his own surfboards. In his constant travel he was both on the cutting edge of design and off-target. Because of his exposure to vastly different cultures he was able to absorb design theory from many places as well as many diseases that kept him hallucinating and designing really stupid surfboards.

After decades of travel, surfing and STDs, Ted returned to his adopted home of Hawaii. He took a job as a sander at Dick Brewer’s original Hanapepe Surfboards. Oddly enough, the fumes from sanding and the LSD actually straightened out Ted’s twisted psyche. He went back to school to study nursing, but as the first male nurse in history, Ted couldn’t handle the constant ridicule. Plus the morphine made him forgetful.

Eventually he was making enough money by simply shaping boards and running an international drug smuggling ring. He was offered a partnership in Lightening Bolt but fell asleep under a coconut tree and was knocked unconscious by a falling nut. He was then approached to partner in a new license for Quiksilver Board Shorts. He told Hackman he was a “fag” and Hackman ran him over with his car.

When Ted got out of the hospital, fate had played a fantastic trick on him. He was getting free morphine in the hospital the whole year and a half, and all of his friends were now dead or in jail. “Ha ha. Serves them right. Dicks,” he was quoted in Tracks magazine as saying.

Now Ted drinks all day and yells at the guys who make money for him. He still surfs really well for a fat smelly old douchebag. And he can shape, glass and sand like nobody’s business. Just don’t try to photograph him. He will kick you right in the nuts.”

More info on Ted Heople & The Surf Boards here.