Boardrack Briefing (Ep.13): The 9’6” Pier Wooden Surfboard

Video copy:

Hey everyone! Welcome to the board rack briefing with me James Otter of Otter surfboards. Today I’m going to talk to you about our biggest longboard the nine foot six Pier. It’s nine foot six long, it’s 22 and seven eighths inches wide and three and a quarter inches thick and finishes around the 78 litre mark. So there is an awful lot of volume in this board.

It’s based on kind of the traditional boards of the 60s and early 70s It’s got its wide points slightly further back of centre and that tapers ever so gradually towards the nose. Then you’ve got some subtle hips towards the tail that come back to a nice wide square tail, relatively low rocker line and all of those elements combined to make this a board that is great for locking into trim. So the idea of this board is to utilise the energy and the strength in smaller waves to be able to serve in a really traditional way. So this board is meant for walking and for hanging out on the nose.

So let me talk you through that. The template up here with this fairly wide nose and a concave that runs through this front third, gives you a nice platform to adjust on the nose and just slows you up a little bit. That concave, create some turbulence here just to slow things up a little bit. So when you’re up on the nose, you’ve got complete control of the board. It’s not going to race away ahead of the wave. When you come to the middle, we’ve got this belly or roll in the middle. And what that allows you to do is when you’ve got your when you’re in the middle of the board, you’ve got your feet kind of planted, you can still adjust exactly where you are in trim before you make that progress up towards the nose. It’s a little bit slippier than a flat bottom board might be and that roll transitions then through to a V through the fin section.

And that coupled with this nice wide platform gives you a space to roll from rail to rail. So when you do need to change direction, you get your weight back over that thin pivot nicely and you can swing the rest of the board around in front of you.

We find it’s best in ways from kind of one to four feet high because of all of those elements. And it was kind of it’s a board that was designed very much with that traditional long border in mind. So somebody really likes to walk up and down and make the most of those, those tiny days.

You’ll see from the rocker line that that combines as well. So it’s a relaxed rocker line, a little bit of kick in the tail which will help with those turns when you get back over the fin and a tiny bit of lift in the nose and that just makes sure that you’re not going to steam ahead when you do get up to the front it does give you that little stall that volume as well. The thickness is brought right out to those rails. So you’ve got these nice long rails that are going to engage with the way when you when you fit in that little curl.

This board here was made by Matt on one of our workshops so if you’d like to get hold of one of these, you can do what he did: Join us for five days making your own, or you can ask us to custom make one for you.

Thanks for watching!