Journal
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
It's fairly common for visitors to the Otter Workshop to comment on James' lack of footwear. For most of the year, in the workshop, on the beach and everywhere in-between, he doesn't wear shoes. This isn't particularly unusual amongst the surf community, however James is rare in that, being his own boss, he's able to carry his barefooted lifestyle across into all of the other areas of his day-to-day life. There are occasions when he does have to...
Surfboards vary in appearance as much as the human beings that use them; many become a vehicle for expression both in the way that they are ridden...
Over Christmas and the New Year James and Liz finally headed off on their slightly belated honeymoon, trading the wind and rain of the northern...
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...
Our first “Make Your Own” workshop week of 2016 has just finished up, and it was a great way to kick off this year’s series of courses. We...
We’re excited to share with you this week the news that, this spring, we’ll be heading up to Surf Snowdonia in North Wales to run a week-long “Make Your Own” wooden surfboard course. We’ve put together a package with the team at Surf Snowdonia that includes five nights bed and breakfast, staying in the wooden camping pods on the shoreline of their lagoon and eating in their onsite restaurant, with five one-hour sessions on the wave...
Abandon all hope of glory Let it fall from your hand, Float through grit And settle to the sand. Swim on comrades The Closeout is...
The roof of our workshop has been a bit noisier than usual this past week. That’s because when it wasn’t drilling down with rain, we could hear...
As the New Year begins, it’s nice to take a moment to reflect upon everything that happened over the past twelve months. We think that applies to...
Well, Christmas Eve has well and truly crept up on us again following a flurry of activity throughout December. We’d like to wish all of you a very...
The festive season sees almost everyone taking a few days off to spend time with family and friends, and for many of us that means lighting the fire in the morning and keeping it crackling all day as we spend quality time at home with our loved ones. Keeping the fire going requires having a well-stocked log store, and most importantly the correct tool to split logs down into fire-sized lumps or kindling. That tool is an axe: the...
Our final workshop of 2015 has just wrapped up, and it was a great week to finish the year on. Every single one of the “Make-Your-Own” wooden...
Commit your all to everything that you do. Commit to doing the best work that you can, so that you can stand by it. Commit to doing right by...
Wastage is something that we avoid at all costs, and that is a sentiment shared by our friends over at Riz Boardshorts, who produce beautiful printed...
Next weekend, we’re loading up the van and driving up to London for a rather special event. We’ve been invited by the team behind the Do Lectures...
Ordinarily, the people who join us to build their own wooden surfboard over the course of a workshop week have a fairly similar understanding of the intricacies of surfboard design; they all own surfboards and, to some extent, have picked them up, examined them and know the various features and their functions. Last week we had two people in the workshop with us who sit on the extreme ends of that spectrum of surfboard design knowledge and it...
In the first week of November last year, just as the temperatures really dropped and winter announced its arrival, we took a few days off to head...
365 days;12 months; four seasons; one year. We all need a bit of help organising our time and remembering important dates and events, be it a...
For the past couple of years, our friends over the hill at Finisterre have been working on developing a wetsuit designed specifically for surfing...
