Joe Roper

On another overcast morning in Pacific Beach, Joe Roper is pouring resin on a damaged board, one among the hundreds of bruised and battered boards that line the walls of his repair shop. All of the boards in the shop have seen better days; all of them waiting their turn to have Joe perform his surgery and give a bill of good health to get back into the water where they belong. Joe’s shop is dusty, cluttered, unassuming, and has a lingering smell of chemicals – not unlike the owner.  
To find a local in Pacific Beach you’d have to look past the college kids, past the transient homeless, and far past the pale-looking tourists burying cigarette butts in the sand. To find a real Pacific Beach local, look for someone who is a little dusty and a bit unassuming. Like the boards in his shop, he’s been broken and scraped but is one of the few people around who can truthfully say that he’s been surfing Crystal Pier since ’69.
“Back in the day, this area was just a bunch of small communities. There weren’t signs that said ‘NO’ this or ‘NO’ that – we all knew how to respect our home.” All the local guys knew better than to trash the beach and there wasn’t tolerance for those who did. Surfing at Big Rock, La Jolla Reefs, Windansea and Pacific Beach, Joe surrounded himself with those who felt the same -- Francis Thompson, Skip Frye, Gary Cook, Mickey Madden and Hank Warner. The local guys were good guys but quickly became tough guys when the situation warranted it. Now it appears as if the hotels and bars have bullied the locals out of town, however that isn’t the whole truth. When asked, Joe will look you sternly in the eyes and say, “I will always surf Crystal Pier, even if it is polluted with riff-raff.”
What comes across as stubbornness in his voice, is really a coarse. The affliction in Joe’s tone stems from growing up with no money but wanting to surf all day.  By the age of 12 he was already fixing his own boards and in the seventh grade he glassed his first board. Before he made the move to San Diego Surf Shop and then on to PB Surf Shop, where they eventually put his name on the door, Joe got his start charging his friends five dollars to fix and glass their boards.  
It was, by no means, a glorious life - but that never mattered to Joe. He was working an arm’s length from Crystal Pier, learning skills from local shapers, helping people with broken boards, and making enough money to keep himself happy and surfing. Tiresome work and ambition coupled with tons of saved-up money eventually took him to Pipeline, where his “soul-surfer” style was recognized by a number of sponsors. Winning contests wasn’t Roper’s motivation for taking the trip to the North Shore. “My goal was always to surf big waves,” Roper said. “And I saved every penny just to do that.”
Although his love for Pipeline was as intense as the waves were, Joe always returned home to PB and went right back to the work of healing injured boards. Even if it was cold and closed out at home, it was still home. And since the opening of Joe Roper’s Custom Surfboard Repair over a decade ago, his feet have been rooted even deeper in the town he grew up in; Joe’s home is a short walk away from the shop, his kids are in school nearby, and according to Joe, there isn’t a shaper in town that doesn’t employ someone who has been through his shop. Despite the dings, scrapes and bruises of being one of the few who have been around the block, Joe Roper is in no need of repair.