Looking back, when I fell in love with surfing I suppose it was somewhat inevitable that I’d end up crafting surfboards out of wood. These days I’m lucky enough to be living by the ocean in Cornwall, making wooden surfboards full-time and sharing the making experience with many of the surfers who buy my boards.

People from ocean-going cultures all over the world have been riding waves on wooden surfboards for well over a thousand years; it is only in the last 70 years or so, since the proliferation of plastic foams, resins and fibreglass following World War II, that wood has been replaced as the material of choice. Foam can be shaped quickly and easily (more so than wood) and when wrapped in resin-soaked fibreglass, it creates a light and relatively strong surfboard. When surfing exploded in popularity in the 1950s, these new materials allowed surfboard shapers of the time to meet the demand for boards. Almost overnight, wooden surfboards fell out of fashion and out of the collective consciousness. Up until that point, however, every surfboard had been made from wood, using either a solid piece of timber (Olos and Alaias in ancient Polynesian culture, or surfboards made from redwood known as “planks” in California throughout the 1920s and 1930s) or a hollow skin-on-frame construction. This later type, pioneered by legendary waterman Tom Blake in 1929, had an internal framework (like the skeleton of a fish) covered with thin planks or sheets of wood and resulted in surfboards that were much lighter than their solid counterparts. It is this construction technique that inspires the way that I make my wooden surfboards.