Journal
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
“It has taken seven years to write and it’s only 27,000 words long but I have finally finished the thirteenth book that will have my name on it. It tells the story of the week I spent making the board, and the narrative of that journey is intertwined with the story of the path I have carved for myself while running this company (Unbound). It is the story of a writer who became an accidental entrepreneur who had to become a writer again to...
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...
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...
June, July and August have been busy months so far here in the workshop, with “business as usual” colliding with the culmination of various...
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...
Sometimes, and completely coincidentally, we have an “International Week” here at the workshop when all of the participants on a wooden surfboard course have travelled to join us from outside of the UK. This was the case a couple of weeks ago, when we hosted Lukas from Switzerland and Sebastien, who had made the short hop over the channel from Brittany in northwest France, for a week of making.
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...
Everybody who joins us to make their own surfboard has an interesting story; Tim’s is one that none of us could quite get our heads around though.
Attending a course to make a wooden surfboard is, for many of our customers, the culmination of many months or even years of day-dreaming and either...
The community of surfers who have passed through our workshop over the years is a beautifully broad spectrum representing the 21st Century surfer....
Spending a week making a wooden surfboard here at Otter is, for most people, going to be a step away from their day-to-day. The differences between this and a day job ranges from adjusting to spending a week focusing on learning to quite simply spending a week on your feet doing manual work. These adjustments can be challenging, but the reward on Friday afternoon is (we think) well worth it. You can get a good idea of the processes that go...
Our August Bank Holiday workshop had a little bit of everything in it, and as such was a fantastic representation of what makes our “Make Your...
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...
Chris and Rikke drove from Denmark to make their own surfboards with us last week. They took their time and made a road trip out of it, spending some...
The week of June 19th-23rd was the ideal time to be in Cornwall as the southwest basked in a heatwave that included the hottest June day since 1976,...
Mike and Peter travelled from Guernsey to join us at the workshop the week before last; it was the last week of Peter’s school Easter holidays, and Mike had taken a week off work to spend some quality time with his eldest son shaping a pair of boards and surfing or swimming in the sea.
Ordinarily, it’s only James who keeps a pencil tucked behind his ear. This past week though, all three workshoppers arrived with the same habit; a...
One of the questions that we always ask anybody who joins us to make their own wooden surfboard, is where they think they’ll have their first...
A couple of Saturdays ago we packed the workshop into the back of the van and drove half an hour up the coast to Watergate Bay Hotel for our first...
