A Different Day At The Workshop

They chose as their venue Mount Pleasant Eco Park, because the site where the Otter Surfboards workshop is located is also, amongst other things, a certified wedding venue and hosts wedding ceremonies in the specially constructed amphitheatre on most weekends throughout the summer months.  A number of years ago James and Simon actually helped to construct the beautiful arched stage on which the ceremony took place!

Over the course of the week before their big day production of wooden surfboards slowed down here and we started to tidy and clean up the workshop in preparation for it to be transformed into a commercial kitchen on the Saturday.  Benedict Quinn’s catering team arrived in the morning with a large fridge, a gas range cooker and three barbeques, and proceeded to rearrange all of our surfboard shaping trestles and worktops before covering them in several layers of protective cling-film and setting to work.  For those of us who work here it was both wonderful and strange seeing our workshop being used in this way, with Darren and his sous chef preparing and plating up a hundred incredible meals beneath our racks of woodworking tools and surrounded by wooden surfboards.  The sun shone and, unusually considering the fact that the Eco Park sits on top of a hill by the sea, there was barely a breath of wind.

James and Liz were surrounded by family and friends, and it was lovely having a number of former workshoppers who are now good friends in attendance, including Steve, Ian and Luca.  Chris proved that barefoot is best when competing at tug o’ war, Mat scurried around shooting the Otter’s wedding photography and Al from Tiny Dog buckled himself hauling around a heavy camera rig filming – both Mat and Al trying their best to juggle documentary duties with being guests and enjoying themselves too.  It’s resulted in a slightly different subject matter for our journal this week, and if you placed an order over the weekend then please bear with us whilst we put the workshop “back to normal” and catch up with things after a weekend of love, laughter and letting our hair down.