Journal
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
At a low enough latitude, which for surfers here in the UK means the north of Scotland and the Outer Hebrides, on the summer equinox when the sun barely sets it can be just possible to surf right through the night. Surf photographer and film maker Lewis Arnold took a crew far north this time last year to try and do that, but he wanted to do more than just surf through the small hours; he wanted to explore how surfers can still surf and travel...
The first wooden surfboard that James made has just celebrated its tenth birthday, and it’s still going strong! Whiz is a 5’10” classic twin...
I’ve spent a fair chunk of my adult life now at sea on wooden vessels – be they surfboards or sail boats. Holding the line of a 5'5, 8kg...
Over the course of the last year we’ve been developing a range of three flat-water exploration stand-up paddleboards. We spent this summer refining...
Surfing is often referred to as “The Sport of Kings” thanks to its ancient history as the preferred pastime of Hawaiian kings and queens, but it...
It feels somewhat counterintuitive to drive away from Cornwall and head up to London in the middle of August, but last weekend that's exactly what we did when James and Liz set off for Seven Dials to run our annual make-your-own handplane workshop at Finisterre's flagship store. The workshop was part of Spotlight 2017, a one-day festival that sees Seven Dials in London's West End (just above Covent Garden) transformed into a traffic-free hub of...
When a person says that they intend to take a blowtorch to their freshly finished wooden surfboard before it goes off to be laminated, you could...
Late last spring we were visited by Chris, Rob and Matt, who were travelling the length of the British Isles documenting makers, producers and...
We’ve always been fascinated by those most ancient of Hawaiian finless wave sliding craft, alaias and olos. Without fins to hold them straight...
James first met Hannah and Justin Floyd at last year’s DO Lectures in West Wales, where they were part of the team of volunteers helping the event to run smoothly. Hannah and Justin are from Buckfastleigh in Devon, a town that was once the centre of a thriving woolen industry but which has since declined as demand for the coarse wool of upland hill sheep to make carpets has fallen when the local factory closed. Much of that wool is now...
Living out of the back of a van seems to have become incredibly en-vogue in recent years. A sure sign of that is when a parody film, such as the...
We’ve had a rather unusual surfboard stored in the workshop for the past year or so; it’s a twelve feet long replica of a Tom Blake style...
A few weeks before Claire arrived in the UK from California, a large package arrived at the Otter Workshop addressed to her. When we opened it...
This weekend the annual Boardmasters Festival returns to Newquay (7th-11th). The Boardmasters has been running in one guise or another since...
"A man who makes things with his hands is a laborer. A man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman. But a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist." It was incredibly flattering when we read this quote in the short introduction to a movie project that we've just got involved with. And this is one project that we're getting awfully excited about! A few weeks ago we were approached by the...
We were delighted to welcome 10xEuropean Longboard Champion Ben Skinner into the workshop this week to get started designing a wooden big wave gun...
We headed up to the big smoke yesterday to set up our Storyboard exhibition at the Patagonia store in Covent Garden. It took a little longer than...
Early last year this project began with excited talks from Tom Clarke, the head Gardener from Trelissick, who'd recently felled a storm damaged tree...
