Splinters

Wooden surfboards are at the root of many countries traditional wave riding cultures, and this is certainly the case for Papua New Guinea.  Here, "splinter" surfboards have been used for generations to ride the waves that break over the reefs and black sand beaches, the boards being carved from indigenous trees or pieces of old canoes.  At the end of last month the multi-award winning documentary film Splinters toured the UK with several screenings in the South West and London, including one just down the road from me in Porthtowan which I was quick to get tickets for.  Andrew Abel, President of the Surfing Association of Papua New Guinea and a star of the film, was on hand and I was lucky enough to catch up with him after the screening to ask him some questions about wooden surfboard riding and it's place in the surf culture of PNG to feature on the Otter Surfboards journal that I curate.  This piece went out on the Otter Surfboards site last week but, for those of you who may not have seen it, here it is for you to enjoy.

What exactly is a splinter and where did they get their name from?

Splinters is a name given to the traditional boards that the local kids belly board or surf on around PNG...the local equivalent pidgin word is “palang”.  A Splinter can be cut out from an old canoe or cut from a tree trunk and shaped according to the eye of the carver, be it a young kid or his father or uncle...these days with the introduction of modern surfboards donated by the SAPNG and purchased by local surfers from visiting surfing tourists, Splinters are being carved to nearly identical dimensions as fibreglass boards, with fins fashioned from timber or plastic and leg ropes out of twine and tyre inner-tubes.

How did surfing on wooden boards develop in PNG?

Surfing on Palang wooden boards in PNG developed hundreds of years ago and has been passed down from father to son until the present day.  Over the past 27 years I have, in my role as the president of SAPNG, introduced modern boards but at the same time respected the craft of the resource custodians still carving and surfing their own hand carved Palang or Splinters as it is unique and something that must be continued and protected from dying out.  These surfboards are very much part of our PNG surfing culture.

Are they still used or seen regularly?

Yes, Palang boards or Splinters are still being ridden prone all around PNG, and more so being surfed standing up in the surf clubs in Vanimo, Sandaun Province, Tupira Surf Club, Bogia District, Madang province, New Ireland Province and in Wewak, East Sepik Province.

What are they made from and how are they made?The Palang or Splinters are made from light weight timber from the jungles along the coastline....the boards are cut out and shaped using axes and bush knives or machetes.

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Are splinters/wooden surfboards a valued part of PNG's surf culture and historical development?

Yes absolutely, and myself and SAPNG take great pride in them and work hard to ensure that this important part of our surfing culture is carried on for generations to come. We are instilling in the traditional resource custodian host communities that we work with (in partnership in developing the surfing and surf tourism industry of PNG under our SAPNG model and policies) that this is unique to PNG and an added attraction and show piece of the evolution of the growing surfing culture of PNG.  I have, in my role as President of SAPNG, been approached by the PNG National Museum to develop an exhibition within the museum to celebrate our surfing culture and evolution. In addition, whilst I was in California presenting the Splinters movie I was asked to do Q&A at the San Clemente Surfing History Musuem and the Director of the Museum asked if I/SAPNG would be able to donate a genuine Splinters carved board to sit in their collection of historic surfboards alongside surfboards ridden by the likes of Duke Kahanamoku.

I am currently working on this and at the right time I will be taking two Splinters, that are sun bleached and worn from years of surfing, to be presented to the History of Surfing Museum in California so that SAPNG has a place amongst the surfing nations of the world.  I hope also to be able to present a Splinters surfboard to a national collection in the UK.

Would you like to see a return to using native (and less toxic?) resources for surfboard materials in PNG?I think it is inevitable that all our young local surfers in all of ourSAPNG established surf clubs will want to step up to modern day fibreglass boards as they all want to surf better and compete against their peers and other clubs. However, the art of carving a Palang or a Splinter only requires an axe and machete/bush knife without the need for any toxic materials like resin to make such a unique board, therefore I can see the traditional boards still being used by the younger grommies coming through the ranks until they are old enough and proficient enough to step up to a modern shortboard. 

In having said that, as part of staging our national surfing titles, the SAPNG will at all events ensure that we have an "expression session" style event where all competing surfers from the respective clubs will have an opportunity to have their best surfers compete on traditional Palang/Splinter boards, on the same waves and under the same ISA competition surfing rules as they do on modern day boards.  

In actual fact, as we are working towards staging our inaugural Mens WQS and Womens WCT in PNG in partnership with ASP Australasia, one of the events planned will pitch local PNG surfers against the visiting WQS and WCT surfing on Palang surfboards, on their home turf.  This will be the ultimate challenge for the PNG surfers who are experts in surfing these Palang/ Splinters to show off their skills against some of the world's best in the same waves and surfing conditions.

For me personally, as the President and Co Founder of SAPNG as we mark 27 years since foundation, it will be the most exciting moment seeing the kids that we have been nurturing being given the opportunity to stand tall and represent SAPNG and PNG on our traditional boards and show the surfing world how it is done.  For the families and clans of these young PNG surfers, it will be something to be proud of and remember for generations to come!

I would like to thank Andrew Abel and the Surfing Association of Papua New Guinea (SAPNG) for taking the time to talk wooden surfboards with me and for providing me with such a wonderful set of images to accompany his answers. 

All images courtesy of and copyright SAPNG.

You can find and follow SAPNG on facebook if you're interested in finding out more about this intriguing surf destination.

Paipo-a-Go-Go

Me, a big baked bean and some deep-winter wedges.

What with it having been a long weekend here in the UK and many other countries, I should really have written this post a week ago so that the classic long weekend of DIY hammering and sawing could be channeled into producing one of these wonderful little surf craft.  But I've just moved house and spent the last few weeks without internet access, so now the challenge is for you to make one of these in two days instead of three next weekend…

But just what is it?

Dan Crockett on an Otter paipo.

When Captain James Cook dropped anchor in a Hawaiian bay in 1778 he witnessed many of the locals riding waves lying down on wooden boards.  These basic wave riding craft are called paipos (pronounced pipe-oh) and the name is derived from the Hawaiian "Pae Po'o" which means "to surf headfirst".  Generally around 3 feet long, the paipo is the little brother of larger finless Hawaiian designs such as the alaia and olo, the alaia having experienced a resurrection of sorts over the past decade in alternative surf-craft circles.  Travellers to and from the Hawaiian islands at the turn of the last century exported the paipo and it was adapted at various coastal locations around the world, becoming known most commonly as a "bellyboard".  In the 1970's Tom Morey introduced the boogie board and foam bodyboards instantly overshadowed the traditional paipo, with just a few small pockets of traditionalists keeping the flame burning - mostly in Hawaii.

I made my paipo a few years ago, and it's the sort of board that sits in my quiver waiting for a time when I've surfed enough good waves on my regular stick to make heading out on something a little different not seem like much of a risk to my monthly wave-count.  I managed to get hold of a 3'6" long paulownia kitchen worktop off-cut from a friend (the same wood that the majority of alaias are made from) and wondered for a while what I could make with it.  The worktop was made from a number of planks of varying widths, all glued together.  I cut these apart, trimmed them to uniform widths and then glued them back together with thin strips of a random hardwood (that I had some strips of lying around my workshop) sandwiched in between them.  I planed down the hardwood stringers and then drew out a template for my paipo.  It looked like a giant baked bean.  Once I'd cut out the shape of the board I shaped the rails using a small block plane (turned down at the tail, up at the nose and 50/50 through the middle section) with the board clamped against a workbench.  Because I have a bit of a thing for not wasting off-cuts I cut a band to go around nose on the deck, using the same template, and once it was glued in place I routed a groove into it to act as a hand-grip.  The whole thing was sanded smooth and then had a few coats of linseed oil to seal it before being taken for a splash in the sea.  All up it was a fun way to spend some time and I came out the other side with a new surfboard, of sorts.  It takes the bare minimum of tools (a pencil, saw, a few sash-cramps, glue, a block plane and abrasive paper) if you want to try making one yourself.  Essentially it's just a wooden bodyboard which makes it the ideal choice for shorebreaks, but it's also great just to run in with for a quick half hour in summer to catch a few waves and ride some whitewater back towards the beach.  It depends how seriously you take your surfing, I guess.  If you're open to different ways of experiencing waves though then I would definitely recommend sliding in on a few head first.

Ride anything: wave-wise and board-wise.

Check out the stoke that the crew at The Paipo Society have for these things, and keep your eyes peeled for the next Approaching Lines Slyder Cup event - celebrating finless surfing in all of it's many forms.

Volume Control

Surfboards are incredibly complicated works of craftsmanship, of that there is no doubt.  They're three dimensional shapes comprised of varying and complex parabolic curves which are meant to carry a human being across the face of a curved fluid surface and change direction on a whim.  They have to provide optimum hydrodynamic performance in a range of conditions.  We’re all different, our surfboards are all different, and the waves that we surf are all different, every single last one of them.

So why, when it comes to measuring the dimensions of these non-comformist sculptures, do we still revert to the incredibly basic dimensional equation of length x width x thickness?  Is there not more to it than that?

This week I had a piece published by The Inertia which examines the language of surfboard design and presents an argument for adding a fourth dimension onto the scribbled pencil statistics that straddle the stringer of our surfboards: volume.  The piece features incredibly insightful contributions on the topic from the coaches at the Surf Simply resort in Costa Rica and from Nick Blair of Joistik Surfboards in Sydney, Australia, for which I'm incredibly grateful.

If you've got even a passing interest in how your surfboard works and the thought processes and design principles that went into it, then hopefully you will find this article of some interest.  As far as I'm concerned, the more that we all know about our surfboards, the better.

Click here to check it out.  I hope that you like it.

We've Got Roots.

A 1970's early twin-fin from Hawaii with a Union Jack spray job on the bottom on display at the Museum of British Surfing.

An old hardwood alaia and olo next to one of the earliest bellyboards (from Jersey) in the museum's collection. 

 The man who made it all happen, Pete Robinson at the end of the museum's hugely successful opening night.

Tucked in the back corner is an amazing wicker bellyboard with a lightning bolt logo sprayed on from this years World Bellyboard Championships and a cardboard cored, see-through surfboard designed by Mike Sheldrake and previously displayed at the V&A.

On the Good Friday the highly anticipated Museum of British Surfing opened it's doors.  Founded back in 2003 by Pete Robinson, the museum is a charity that has unearthed a huge amount of British surfing artifacts and memorabilia and amassed what's believed to be the largest and most historically significant collection of surfboards in Europe.  I first saw an exhibition put on by Pete in Brighton back in 2004 and walking through the doors on the Thursday evening before the grand opening for a special preview event (I tagged along as a guest of my friends at Finisterre), Pete's achievement in pulling it all together into a permanent museum blew me away.
The man has relentlessly researched the history of surfing in this country and recently discovered a letter in the Bishop Museum in Hawaii describing how two Hawaiian Princes and their English guardian went surfing in Bridlington in Yorkshire in September of 1890, a good 30 years before the first British surfing event was thought to have occurred.  Throughout the Victorian age many Hawaiian nobility were sent to Britain to be educated and the Islands have a strong and historic connection with Britain (just check out the Hawaiian flag) and it seems that many of these young Hawaiians surfed here during their visits.  This then grew with the development of bellyboarding through the early part of the 20th Century, Jim Dix and Pip Staffieri's hollow Waikiki paddleboards in the 1930's and then the arrival of stand-up surfing via visiting lifeguards in the South West and Channel Islands in the 1950's.  From there surfing bedded into the culture of coastal communities in the South West and around the country and there's enough history to fill a couple of books, and now thankfully, a museum.


The museum will hold annual exhibitions (it's inaugural exhibition is "The Art of Surf") and rotate the boards on display (they currently only have a quarter of their vast collection hanging from the walls and ceiling) and is well and truly worth a visit.  Pete Robinson deserves a medal for his dedication, belief and effort, and for donating his personal collection to the museum's permanent collection.
The museum is in Braunton, Devon, just off Caen Street in an old railway building.  If you live West of Bristol or ever come West of Bristol then, detour or not, you ought to go take a look.   

After the launch party I camped with the guys and girls from Finisterre and we woke up on Good Friday to zero degrees and a frost, which is frustrating when you're next to a van full of warm jackets!  The guys were holding a pop-up shop event in the room adjoining the museum over the Easter Weekend as one of the Museum's supporters.

Quiver Me Timbers

Cornish photographer Karl Mackie took this photo of his Australian friend Tim Crabtree when they had a Cornish summer staycation in 2011, when rather than going off on a trip they stayed put at home and shaped a stack of boards each.

A shipment of fresh joistiks upon arrival in Cornwall after the long journey from Australia, about to be divvied out to some excited surfers.

On most of the rare occasions that I end up in an ice cream parlour I get vanilla ice cream. My friends used to call me Mr Plain when I did this, but I disagreed. Vanilla's a flavour after all; plain ice cream would just be milk flavour. It wasn't that I only ever chose vanilla ice cream, it's just that vanilla was my go-to flavour. I'd tried other flavours but preferred vanilla, and every now and then if I felt like something different then I'd have that instead and mix it up a bit. I'd claim that exactly the same thing applies to surfboards.

If you only ever surfed the same surfboard then there's no doubt that in one way or another you'd be restricting your surfing. If your board was ideally suited to your local surf spot then the chances are that if you went to a different spot, either home or abroad, your surfboard wouldn't be the best horse for that course. And what about when the surf is ankle-slappingly small? Or terrifyingly huge? Then what? Your 6'2" x 18 1/2" x 2 1/4" squash tail probably wouldn't be doing you any favours; you'd be grovelling and flapping around in the small stuff and paddling yourself into a too-little too-late air drop straight to oblivion when it got big. Surfing the same surfboard all the time isn't as good as surfing the same surfboard most of the time and surfing other boards every now and then when the conditions call for it.

That's why I think it's worthwhile, over time, collecting a few different surfboards to give you a range of options. You might choose a fully functional but minimal travel quiver with a small wave weapon, a standard shortboard and a semi-gun for when it starts to intimidate (because if you go away for a surf trip with just one surfboard then in reality you're probably kidding yourself and you're going on a holiday but you might sneak a surf in, unless you're travelling really light), or you could set yourself up for every eventuality at home. You might want to try out all of the different feelings that you can get from riding waves by getting your hands on every weird and wonderful wave riding vehicle or fad that you can. It depends on a a variety of factors.

Former ASP world champion (1982 & 1984) Tom Carrol once claimed that he couldn't tell the difference between a squash tail, a square tail and a swallow tail when he was surfing and defied most surfers to be able to notice a difference. So unless you're a tour chasing professional who doesn't have to pay for their sticks and snaps them within the first week, there seems little point in getting a stack of for all intents and purposes identical boards with a 16th of an inch added here or shaved off there. Having a couple of different boards to cater for a variety of circumstances, from tiny summer beachbreak surf or a trip to peak season Indo, would surely be a bit wiser and allow you to surf to the very best of your ability with confidence in what's under your feet, whatever the Ocean throws at you. Horses for courses, even if you do choose vanilla most of the time.

At least, that's the excuse that I use for being so cash poor and surfboard rich.

When I joined my friends from Surfing Dubai for an exploratory trip down the Arabian Peninsula we piled every single surfboard under the sun into the back of Scott's enormous truck (Scott's not particularly pint sized, that Chevrolet is truly massive) - everything from hand planes through shortboards, an alaia, a 70's single fin and a stand-up paddle board - planning for every eventuality and not leaving a whole lot of space for camping gear.

My friend Harry from Surf Simply: 6’0 x 185 lbs, then from left to right:

- 6’1 x 18 3/4 x 2 1/4, 28.5 liters

Round pin, single concave, thruster

Step-up

- 6’0 x 19 x 2 3/8, 27 liters

Round Diamond, single to double

5 boxes, quad fins set inboard

Standard shortie

- 5’10 x 19 3/4 x 2 3/8, 29 liters

Double wing pin, single to double

5 boxes, quad fins on rail

Small wave ripper

- 5’10 x 21 1/4 x 2 5/8, lots of liters

Big swallow, Flat to Vee

Keel fin twin

When my friend Alex spent the winter of 2010 on the North Shore of Oahu he called in some Hawaii contacts and was put up by a friend of a friend who was a pillar of the North Shore surfing community. How's the ceiling of the guy's living room?

The contents of my stable, Autumn 2011. Cash poor, surfboard rich and totally ok with it.

Buy, Use, Discar......Reuse?

Back to base early, with less surfboard than I'd set out with. Mozambique 2011

A pretty weak image this week I'm afraid, sorry about that but it's there to illustrate a point not make your eyes smile.

It's a sad fact that most of us decorate our lives with a whole lot of crap that we don't really need, and then when we're done with it we store it away never to be used again or we throw it in the bin. What a waste. But there's an alternative:

REDUCE, REPAIR, REUSE, RECYCLE

Now I'm no saint when it comes to all this, but I'm trying my best. Luckily this photo of my sour "surf cut short" self does illustrate kind of well the point that I want to make.

REDUCE: First up, don't by what you don't need. Simple huh? But how many people buy stuff like clothes to follow fashion and then end up with more than they need? Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia has, in a beautifully inspired and completely crazy business move, instructed all of the sales staff in Patagonia stores to ask customers "Do you really need this?" He claims that their product is made to last so you don't need a brand new jacket every year. Anything that anybody makes costs the planet more life than it can give back. Doesn't matter how sustainable or "green" it is, it has a negative impact on the environment, so please reduce you impact.

REPAIR: 6'2" x 18 1/4 x 2 3/16ths Clayton shaped for Kelly Slater.

I found this board in the second hand racks of a surf shop in Jeffreys Bay, South Africa three years ago. The story goes that this board was shaped for Kelly Slater for the J-Bay contest by Clayton Nyanaber the ZA Quiksilver shaper. I doubt that Slater ever surfed it; I imagine he gets given a stack of shiny new sticks at every contest, picks them up and looks them all over then grabs his trusty Merrick and paddles out. The "Kelly" boards are then distributed to the local Quiky sponsored surfers and this one bloke had changed board sponsors so was having to sell off his entire quiver. It cost me £100 and is one of the best boards I've ever crabbed along a wave on. The first thing I had to do was peel all of the big red Quiksilver stickers off it so that when I ran down the beach with it people didn't expect me to rip. It's got a contest weight, super light, glass job on it for speed over strength and I swear every time I duck dived it I could feel my thumbs squidging the deck in so it was a snap waiting to happen, and snap it did in Mozambique in August this year. I don't snap a lot of boards; either I'm pretty light footed or, more likely, I'm not charging hard enough. Any clown can fall into a barrel but it's a lot harder weaving your way through and making it out, and my bin it:win it ratio isn't all that good. This board kicked the bucket on a really good swell but a pretty ordinary wave when I pulled up under the lip and as I tried to drive down and out of it the lip landed right on the nose, snapping my board half way between the nose and my front foot. When I came up the nose was still hanging on by a flap of fibreglass, but then the next wave landed on my head and I ended up proning in with just the back half of my board. Another surfer found the nose washing around the shore break later on and brought it back up for me.

Repaired snapped or creased boards are never the same again, particularly ones with light glass jobs; they flex differently, they carry a bit more weight around the repair but there's no way I'm putting this board in the bin: it's either getting repaired or I'm turning it into a chair or a cool looking shelf. The snap's close to the nose so won't affect the important part of the board and truth be told I probably won't notice the stiffness or extra weight.

The scene of the crime on the day before I went from two boards to one board and two bits in my boardbag. Mozambique, 2011.

REUSE: Howies "buy, use, discard" organic cotton tee shirt.

A friend gave me this tee shirt almost 10 years ago. It was the nicest tee shirt I owned and was top of the pile for a while, kind of my fancy going out tee shirt of choice despite getting a lot of grief from people with no sense of irony. After a while it slipped down the rankings and just became a standard go-to bit of clothing before ending up in the "Sunday stack" to wear for painting fences and doing odd jobs. Then it got the promotion to surf shirt when I lived in West Australia. A knot got tied in the back of it so that it wasn't all baggy when wet and wouldn't end up being pulled up over my face in an approximation of being water-boarded when getting rolled around underwater. This shirt was originally a really dark petrol blue, but now when it's dry the shoulders and back are a really pale lilac colour where it's just been punished by the sun and salt water over years of surf trips. The only bit that's close to the original colour is under the arms and whenever I see the faded shoulders I'm glad it wasn't my skin copping all that brutal UV. When it starts rotting and an arm falls off or something it'll end up in my workshop as a rag for wiping up glue or oiling picture frames. That or I'll hang it up on my wall as a trophy. I think I've made the most of this garment.

RECYCLE: Patagonia Wayfarer boardshorts.

Good, surfable, boardshorts are rare like rocking horse poo. Finding out that your new pair of boardshorts chaffe or catch on your knees or are too tight or have a button that makes them damn uncomfortable to lie on a surfboard in is rubbish, especially if you've only taken two pairs on a trip with you because you're going to be spending a lot of time being uncomfortable. My old pair of boardies are starting to give up the ghost so I'm phasing in these new favourites and the nice thing about them is that they're recyleable under Patagonia's common threads programme so when I've worn them out, ripped them in half or decided that I don't like stripey shorts any more I can send them back to them (or drop them in store) and they'll recycle them into new fibres or fabric. They've also developed an ebay store to sell on unused or unwanted Patagonia items rather than have people leave them at the back of the cupboard because they don't surf/climb/go outdoors anymore.

Do the planet a favour please and take stock of all of your stuff then see if you can implement any of the 4R principles in any way now or in the future. The future will thank you for it.

The Storyboard

I've been sitting on this project for a good while now, dying to shout about it, and now at long last I'm allowed to leak out a few images and let you in on it: For the past 9 months a friend and I have been working on a wooden surfboard project called 'The Storyboard' which goes live next Saturday, September 17th, and we're both really excited about it as what started out as a small seed of an idea has grown into a multi-faceted project incorporating an exhibition, a book and a magazine article.

The tools of his trade; James shaping the nose of The Storyboard.

James Otter designs and builds beautiful bespoke wooden skin and frame surfboards here in Cornwall, in a workshop on the most photogenic smallholding above Porthtowan beach.

We've documented the lifecycle of one of these surfboards, using timber from just a single Western Red Cedar tree, all the way from the woodland in Cornwall where the tree was felled, through the sawmill and then every single step of the making process. Ordinarily this style of wooden surfboard uses a variety of hardwoods wrapped around a plywood frame but due to the "one tree" principle James even made his own plywood from the same planks that were then used to make the rest of the board, going as far as producing the frames for the exhibition from the leftovers and offcuts.

The internal framework of the surfboard is being left exposed (displayed without the deck) to reveal a poem which has been engraved onto the plywood ribs that traces the lifecycle of the timber from tree to sea, from the moment it crashed to the ground to the moment it will splash in the waves.

It took many hours of painstaking craftsmanship to get to this skeletal stage.

The Storyboard will be displayed alongside a photographic exhibition that documents the entire build process, and accompanied by a small coffee table book, from September 17th through until the end of October at the Tubestation and Zeath Gallery in Polzeath, North Cornwall, UK.

You're all welcome to come along to the launch party on September 17th from 3pm for tea, cake and wooden surfboards, and then another event is planned to coincide with the Jesus Longboard Classic being held in Polzeath over the weekend of October 15th and 16th, where James will also have some demonstration boards available for people to paddle out for a wave on. Or just stop by anytime over the six weeks to get your eyes on it.

The Surfer's Path has an interview with James in the latest issue, which to my great surprise ran with one of my images.