Go with the Flow
Keoki Ching ’97 has parlayed a lifelong love of the sea into a successful surfboard-shaping business.
About 10 years ago—around the time he shaped his first surfboard—Keoki Ching ’97 learned what his middle name, Sun Tim, means in Chinese.
“It means ‘everything is flowing,’ ” his grandfather told him with a calm smile, moving his hands to suggest streaming water. So it may not be coincidence that when Ching talks about his work, you’ll often hear the word flow. “Perhaps I have unconsciously followed the name I was given,” says Ching. “Flow does seem like a theme since I left Carleton.”
There is flow in the way his life has drifted in unexpected directions since he graduated from Carleton. Flow in the smooth curves of the custom surfboards he shapes for a living, in the connections he fosters between people and the marine environment, in the curling blue waves he surfs every chance he gets.
Ching originally planned to attend medical school. He took the entrance exams and sent out applications. But when the responses came, he threw them away unopened. “I decided that wasn’t really for me,” he says. “I wasn’t getting up in the morning thinking, ‘I want to be a doctor.’ I wasn’t passionate about it.”
He was passionate about the ocean. Ching grew up on the tiny island of Guam and made frequent trips to Hawaii to visit extended family. His lawyer father was a sport fisherman and a swimming coach, so Ching spent his childhood around water. He started surfing at 12. “I can almost say I’m addicted to the ocean,” Ching says. “I need it for my mental and physical health. It’s so calming, so cleansing.”
So how did he wind up attending a college a thousand-some miles from the nearest seacoast? Believe it or not, Ching enrolled in Carleton for the adventure. “I think it’s important to experience the opposite extreme, just to appreciate where you are,” he says. “And after those 20-degrees-below-zero winters, I did appreciate the heat.”
The education went both ways, says Elizabeth Ciner, associate dean of the College and Ching’s adviser. “I learned a lot from Keoki about Hawaiian culture as well as the culture of Guam,” Ciner says. “He introduced me to a few stories about Hawaiian ghosts and little people called menehunes.”
Ching studied marine biology at Carleton. But during summers back in Hawaii and Guam, he got swept toward a different occupation when his father, who had shaped surfboards for fun, demonstrated the process. “I ended up making a few,” he says, “not knowing what I was doing.”
After graduation Ching moved to Honolulu and began hanging out with professional shapers, serving an unofficial apprenticeship. Gradually the shapers divulged their closely guarded techniques. Applying a “combination of art, form, and function” and using mostly hand tools, Ching says, they plane slabs of polyurethane foam to measurements as precise as a 32nd of an inch. Each custom board is designed to perfectly suit the surfer who will ride it.
Five years after selling his first surfboard, Ching has a full roster of clients willing to pay $2,000 or more for one of his boards. “A lot of the waves we ride could kill you, so you have to trust your shaper,” says Kainoa McGee, a professional surfer in Honolulu who has bought boards from Ching. “We make a really good team. I can just look [at one of his boards] and say, ‘Yeah, this board’s going to work.’ ”
Ching is also interested in ocean culture and ecology. He has worked as a state marine biologist, participated in a project to preserve traditional sailing techniques, and consulted on a surfboard exhibit at a renowned Honolulu museum.
When he’s not working, he heads—where else?—to the beach. In addition to Hawaii and Guam, he has surfed in Samoa, French Polynesia, New Zealand, Japan, France, Spain, Mexico, Indonesia, and Fiji.
Ching isn’t sure where his career will flow next. “I love shaping. I love that it keeps me close to the ocean, love that I have my own schedule, love that it lets me be creative,” he says. “But to meet all the demands for a custom-order business is a lot of work, and I don’t want to make it my main source of income for the next 50 years. So I’ve been thinking of going back to school.”
Hesitantly, he reveals that he is considering dentistry. “The dentists I know surf a lot,” Ching says, laughing.