Board-rack Briefing (Ep.11): The 6’8” Riser Wooden Surfboard

Video Transcription:

“Hey everyone welcome to the board rack briefing with me James Otter of Otter surfboards. Today I’m going to talk you through our riser model. This is a step-up gun type board so if you’re used to your short boards and you want something for some meatier surf, this is the kind of board for you.

It’s six foot eight inches long. It is 20 and a half inches wide, and it’s two and a half inches thick, and it carries about 38 litres of volume throughout it. You’ll notice that the wide point is slightly forward of centre, so it’s up under your chest. So that’s all about that paddling speed. So when you’re in bigger surf and you want to move around the lineup, or get into waves early, you’re going to have that speed when you dig in and get your paddling moving, and it pulls in to this rounded pin template as a back end here. And that’s all about hold, Stability and control, it gives you an awful lot of confidence when the surf is bigger.

We tend to use this board in anything from kind of three foot up to I don’t know up to a head and a half double overhead and in fact, this is Chris who works for us. This is his board and he’s had it out in surf even bigger than that. It’s his kind of Winter board and so he rides this in a really wide range of conditions but mainly in fairly chunky surf. He often rides it as a quad we designed it as a quad. The conversation with Chris thinking if you had a board of people with serious waves how would it look? So you normally ride it as a quad but when it’s a bit smaller, he often throws the back fins out and just uses it as a twin fin because he really loves the looseness that you get from that but really when the surf gets bigger I’m encouraging the riders a quad for that, that hold and speed we have also made it as a thruster. So if it’s more of that performance end of stuff that you want to go I’d head you towards the thruster as well and give you that ability to turn a bit more easily.

You’ll notice that it pulls in and tapers quite nicely out towards the nose it’s actually got a little bit of V in the nose so that when the waves do get fairly steep and fairly critical, you can set that rail nice and early, and then it runs through to a concave through the middle here. So you can get that rail to engage in those steep waves nicely. So it will sit with that concave on the bottom. It’ll sit and let that rail grab into the water nicely and give you that control and it runs into a fairly shallow double concave through the things which means once you’re on that rail, it’s just pulling that water through the fin and generating lift through the intersection.

The rocker line if we take a little look at that you’ll notice is actually it’s fairly shallow really through this midsection, which is again all about that paddling speed and ability. Once you’re up or up on the board. It’s going to get moving nice and quickly, but it’s got a nice consistent lift through the front end here. To get you out of any trouble if you’re in quite steep waves or if you’re taking a late drop, it can handle that quite nicely. And then it’s got this nice curve through the fin section, which allows manoeuvrability off the tail really nicely because it brings the front end of the board up and out of the water.

Like I say this one here actually belongs to our Chris, but you are welcome to join us on a five day workshop to come and make your own one of these or you can commission us to make one for you. I think I’ve given you all the information about the riser, but if you have any questions feel free to get in touch or if you want more information, there’s some links below. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next time.”

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