Tom Wegener Visit

A couple of weeks ago, we saw an event pop up for our local Finisterre store over the hill at their HQ in St Agnes. They were hosting an evening with Tom Wegener and friends, so we immediately booked tickets. This was an evening not to be missed!

For those of you who don’t know who Tom is, he has been at the forefront of wooden surfboard making for over two decades and has a longer and deeper history of surfing longboards to the highest level as well as making and featuring in some of the surfing worlds most popular ‘alternative’ surf films, most notably and memorably for me, Thomas Campbell’s ‘Sprout’ from 2004.

When I first discovered the world of wooden surfboards in 2008, you didn’t need to look far until you found Tom’s work. He had been on a journey of discovery within the surfing world, starting when he fell in love with some old balsa longboards because of their extra weight and feel of glide in the water. He then went on to dig deep into the history of wooden surfboards, taking templates from ancient Hawaiian shapes so he could replicate them and begin to experience some of the history of surfing first hand. As a result of this exploration, he discovered the use of paulownia timber (thanks to Paul Joske) and pioneered the riding of alaias through the 2000’s after moving to Australia and working with prominent (and incredibly talented) local surfers like Dave Rastovich. At the end of 2008 he was announced as Surfer Magazine’s ‘2009 Shaper of the Year’, which was no mean feat for a subculture trailblazer.

This is when his work coincided with my own journey and I interviewed Tom for my dissertation “Green Surfboards – The Sustainable Side of Surfing”, which I wrote alongside the making of my first two woden surfboards as part of my final year of my degree. This was the time when I felt the huge pull into the world of making and surfing wooden surfboards, ultimately leading to a lifetime of pursuit and the creation of Otter Surfboards in 2010.

15 years on and Tom is still pioneering and making wooden surfboards over in Noosa, Australia and, with his wife Margie, hosts the Noosa International Surf Film Festival.

So when I found out he was going to be in the UK, I reached out to see if there was any chance he could squeeze a workshop visit into his schedule.

He was staying with a friend of ours, Sally Parkin (of Original Surfboards) and they were more than happy to plan a trip to us. Tom has long been a fan of the culture and history of bellyboard riding here in the UK, so that coupled with his love of woden surfboards meant we had an awful lot to talk about!

Initially, I was nervous to meet Tom, having idolised him since those early years and wondered if he would actually gain anything from visiting our workshop, but he was so humble and inquisitive, that it was such a pleasure to have some time with him in person after all these years. We talked about some of the intricacies of the making of hollow wooden boards as well as the feeling of riding them, which he says to this day he still tries to chase because hollow wooden boards are his favourite surfboards to ride thanks to their momentum and glide. Music to my ears and something that, to this day, can be hard to convince people of when the rest of the industry is focussed more and more on super light weight surfboards made from cheaper and cheaper materials…

When it was time to say goodbye, we hugged and we both said that had our lives and geography fallen differently, we may well have been really close friends. Still, you never know what the future holds and hopefully it won’t be the last we see of Tom and Margie.

Thanks for the inspiration through those early years Tom, you’re a hero!

You can check out Tom’s Website here.