17 . 01 . 19
In mid-October, the workshop was full of the noise and energy of the Koska kids; Flora, Ellie and Jolly. In the summer of 2015 their dad Marc joined us to make himself a 9’1” Wicket, and three years on it was a pleasure to welcome his three offspring into the workshop. Jolly was on the half term holidays of his GCSE year at school, Ellie is taking a year out between college and university, and Flora was enjoying those extended “reading week” holidays that you get in your second year at university. As siblings do, each wanted to differentiate their surfboard from the others somehow.
A couple of months before the course, during the summer, Jolly and Ellie visited us to look through the board rack here and pick out the surfboard model that they wanted to make and the timber lay-up of their board. Jolly asked for American red cedar rails so that they would be darker than the rest of the board – we don’t use American red cedar (all of our cedar being from woodlands here in the southwest) so ordered a couple of planks in, and Ellie wanted a fine pin line running down either side of the thin pale central stringer in her board. To do this, Marc sent us some strips of veneer that had been stained black that he had used in a strip-planked canoe build that he recently completed. These were included edge-on in the deck and bottom skin lay-ups and the final result looks tack-sharp and amazing. Flora was scuba diving in Central America over the summer, so had to trust the selection of her timber lay-up to her mum, who opted for our classic double pale strips sandwiched by three brown oak stringers. At the end of their week, we asked each of them to share with us a comment about the experience of spending a week in our workshop in close proximity to their siblings pouring their energies into crafting a wooden surfboard of their own.
