Edition Eight Feature
Words by: James Otter
Location: Cornwall, England, UK
Photo Credit: ©Alun Callender @aluncallenderphoto

Otter Surfboards has been putting sustainability and community front and centre since 2010. And its founder still gets a thrill in his workshops as he tutors people through the steps of making a hollow wooden surfboard, reliving those first ripples of excitement every time.

Otter Surfboards – nominative determinism?

Well, my name is James Otter and our company designs and makes wooden surfboards, so yes! All of the timber we use is from the South West of England. Cedar from Wiltshire and poplar from Somerset.

What makes your boards unique?

Our hollow wooden surfboards all have an internal framework. We make two ‘skins’ out of the timber and then fix our framework onto the bottom skin. We then build the rails up in thin strips of the cedar or poplar and place the upper skin on top. That makes up a roughed-out hollow wooden surfboard ‘blank’, which we then shape to the finished form.

The boards are then taken to another company that does the finishing. It’s a fairly standard surfboard finish of fibreglass and a bio-based epoxy resin, which makes them really long-lasting. I have boards out there that are over 10 years old and still going strong. Because of the inherent strength within the wooden blank, we can use about a third of the amount of finish that a normal surfboard needs. That’s quite good because that’s the nastiest of all the materials that we use.