Journal
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
Summing up all of the steps and processes involved in one of our week-long wooden surfboard workshop courses can be a challenge - how does one go from a pile of pieces on a Monday mornning to a finished wooden surfboard by Friday afternoon? At the end of August we were joined by Andrew and Gareth, and Andrew set up an action-camera in the corner of the workshop above his trestles to make a time-lapse recording of his experience. Several...
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...
Surf wax is as necessary when surfing as the surfboard itself, but it’s also a small, consumable product that is often overlooked. Most surf...
June, July and August have been busy months so far here in the workshop, with “business as usual” colliding with the culmination of various...
Allow us to introduce Ally. Ally is one of James’ best friends, and the latest member of the team here at Otter Surfboards. For his 30th birthday,...
Easkey Britton, PhD, is a pioneering Irish surfer with a fascinating story: an academic and world travelling professional surfer, amongst other achievements she helped to sow the seeds of a female-led surf culture in Iran and regularly surfs the enormous waves of Mullaghmore near her home in Donegal, Ireland. A couple of years ago we were delighted to receive an e-mail from Easkey with photos of her appearing in the Irish press holding our...
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...
Last Friday we were lucky enough to host the UK premiere of The Plastic Project’s film Dispatches From a Plastic Planet at our annual Boards, BBQ...
Last week, Joe and Mat joined us for our June wooden surfboard workshop week. They’re identical twin brothers, and back in January they had a big...
The summer solstice is fast approaching, and with it our annual “all are welcome” open-workshop evening of Boards, BBQ and Beers on the evening...
A couple of weeks ago we were lucky enough to be featured on Kate Humble's new series of Back to the Land, which has been shown on BBC Two over the past three weeks. It all wrapped up last Thursday with a visit to some of the folks featured on series one and we were flattered to be involved this time around. If you'd like to see our show (Episode 6), find it here. And if you'd like to skip ahead to our segment, move the slider along to...
Yesterday, on Saturday the 19th of May, HRH Prince Harry married Ms Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle. Amongst the wedding gifts they received was a...
The Benefits of Making Most of us work with our hands every single day. But because the majority of developed economies are now based on...
It was our Chris' birthday last week but despite him having the day off, he came in to the workshop anyway. Why? Because the surf in the little bay...
Sometimes, and completely coincidentally, we have an “International Week” here at the workshop when all of the participants on a wooden surfboard...
All of the people who walk through the big blue workshop doors here are multifaceted; everybody has more than one interest, and the same goes for us here. We all surf, but we all also pursue other passions and projects. James runs, and at the end of last year, having never run a marathon before, he signed up to run three in three days. A little more actually. Along a particularly steep and unforgiving stretch of the Dorset coast path. Some of...
We’ve written before at the close of a workshop week about how, over the course of these five-days, the learning flows both ways. It’s rare that...
Riding a wave on a longboard is far from a passive activity; the size and weight of the surfboard means that the surfer must be dynamic and move...
Take a scroll through social media, and if you didn't know any better then you could perhaps be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that women's...
