12 . 06 . 16
We’ve always been fascinated by those most ancient of Hawaiian finless wave sliding craft, alaias and olos. Without fins to hold them straight and steady, the bottom contours and rail profiles of these thin, flat, blades are key to ensuring that they hold into the face of the unbroken wave and generate speed and lift – and what speed! A few months ago, with summer approaching and the prospect of much more time spent playing in the sea in small surf taking up more of our thoughts, we began to bounce ideas around the workshop about how we could offer an alaia workshop: a one-off, annual event that can sit somewhere in-between our one-day make-your-own bellyboard and handplane workshop experiences, and our more involved, week-long, hollow wooden surfboard courses. The key to this was how to produce a blank with a deep enough concave. Following some head scratching and back-of-the box sketches we came up with a way to do it (a teaser image of our concave-contraption prompted a lot of questions and discussion when we posted it to instagram) and we set about producing a pair of poplar blanks with three teak accent stringers.
