Journal
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
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...
What a week it’s been; this time last week a coach load of surfers, including three-times world surfing champion Tom Curren, big wave surfers...
Last Saturday, Michael woke up with no idea what he would be doing for the next week; a few months previously his wife had told him that she was planning something for his upcoming fortieth birthday and that he needed to book the week of October 5th off work, however that was as much as she told him. By mid-morning on Saturday he couldn’t handle the suspense any longer and asked just what they would be doing the next day. He’d half...
Ben Cook has been a friend of ours for a good few years now, and we often meet up to ride waves with him when we head to surf spots on the coastline...
Our Annual Gathering of Makers is our chance to say thank you; an opportunity for us to invite everyone who has supported us these past few years by...
Following an exhaustive period of research and development (which you can translate as us making a surfboard and riding it as often as we could...
After August delivered us a mixed bag of weather and waves (to put a positive spin on it), the first Sunday of September at least dawned sunny and...
Tealing We’d like to introduce all of you to The Coaster, the latest addition to our range and a surfboard that we’ve been struggling to keep under wraps these past few months because we’ve been so excited to talk about it. The first Coaster that we built over the course of spring was also the first surfboard that we've made entirely using English poplar, a light, straight grained and strong timber. As soon as we got it back from the...
The British summer holidays are bellyboard season; that time of year when old plywood boards are pulled out of the backs of sheds and garages, dusted...
July was a good and busy month for wooden surfboard workshops here at Otter, and at the very end of the month we welcomed Marc Koska to the...
Last Saturday, James and Liz became Mr and Mrs Otter. Hooray!
In the mid-nineties, an ex-pat Aussie lifeguard residing in Hawaii named Andy Cochran started to develop a new type of swim fin. His aim was to...
Last weekend we joined the wonderful team from Surfers Against Sewage at Somersault Festival in North Devon for a weekend of mud, music and making. We’d been invited along to run a series of bodysurfing handplane making workshops over the three days of the festival as part of SAS’s programme of events, and James was also presenting a daily talk for their Ocean Lectures series alongside speakers including big wave surfer Andrew...
For many families, school summer holidays involve going away somewhere and spending a week or so together making memories and enjoying each others...
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...
It's often been said when trying to describe the sensation of getting barrelled that "time slows down in the tube". We think that time slows down...
