Here’s a mini-mal that’s just been finished and gone off to its happy owner. I love how the deck came out on this one – a swirl of red cedar, redwood and japanese cedar.

Umm, in this case – and apologies to the late and great Jimi Hendrix – it’s more like: ‘Excuse me, while I plug my surfboard’. Yes, have a look at the picture – it’s in a shop window, it’s beautiful and it’s for sale. Now go and buy it, potential customers.

Seriously, this is a one-of-a-kind, collector’s item surfboard. It’s a piece of art that’s functional too – a 9’6″ single fin hollow wood longboard. The deck is really special – there is a centre strip made of pieces of driftwood that I’ve picked up along the South African coast during my wave wanderings. This strip is framed by a stunning piece of kiaat which I found on a woodpile and the kiaat flows into some striking  redwood. The bottom of the board, which you can’t see in this picture, is Western Red Cedar, a premium wood with a fine, straight grain.

You just won’t find a board like this anywhere. It’s a piece of art that took upwards of 60 hours to make. Where: Corner Surf Shop, Muizenberg. Price: R6,500 (this is a steal for a labour of love like this. Everyone’s telling me it should be selling for much more and they’re right, so before I change my mind  go and buy it!)

PS…Other shops that have Groundswell Wood Surfboards are: Empire Cafe in Muizenberg, Pisces Divers in Glencairn and Pakalola’s restaurant and bar in Hout Bay.

There are over 60 pieces of wood in the 5’4″ twin-keel hollow wooden fish in this video. This means that, at a minimum, over 100 cuts were made with different varieties of saws to get those pieces of wood to the right length and width. That’s to say nothing about planing the wood to the correct thickness, edging, hundreds of individual clamp applications, hand shaping of the rails, sanding through numerous grits of sandpaper, glassing, more sanding and final polishing. Take all of that graft away though, and essentially this surfboard was once a collection of rough planks on my workshop floor. And before that it was a tree, swaying naturally in the wind. Watching Alan and Simone Robb get to grips with the flex and flotation of wood, it seems like the timber’s memory of swaying in the wind has been given new life as the sway of the wind becomes the flow across the wave face.

These pictures are just for the hell of it. No story or tidings of classic surf, just two twin-keel fish basking in late afternoon braai-time sunshine.

Here’s an update to a December post about a quad fish being made for The Empire Cafe in Muizenberg: The board has been finished for about a month and is looking splendid hanging on the upstairs wall of The Empire. Feel free to go and have a look and enjoy a drink and/or a meal while you watch lazy lines roll into the bay. Here are some pictures provided by owner Dave Jones (pictured left).

This 9′.6″ longboard with driftwood insets is nearly done and reluctantly gave permission to have some pictures taken this morning before going back into the glassing room for a little more clothing. I’ll try and persuade her to let me shoot a full profile, but for the moment here are a few hints at what she looks like.

While the rest of Cape Town shut down Sunday morning thanks to the huge cycle race, I managed to beat the first peloton and get through for the dawnie before the roads were closed. The swell wasn’t huge – five foot at most on some of the bigger sets early on – but it was worth the journey and for the entire morning there was a blissful feeling that with the roads closed there would be no carloads of surfers rocking up to colonize the peak.

Surfed a hollow wooden twin keel fish. This is it. It cooked. Fast as anything. Definitely noticed that the weight was an advantage in very strong winds.

Some spots just keep on giving.

I haven’t been going as much as I used to, distracted by wanting to surf other waves, kids, work. And the crowds, you tell yourself, mean it’s not worth the trip.

You forget that it’s the sense of place too, the history, the familiarity that has somehow found it’s way into who you are. Or the way you shed a load of stress when you step out of the car and look across the bay and down the beach at a scene that, compared to some places, really hasn’t changed much at all since you first visited 25 years ago.

There really wasn’t anywhere I would rather have gone when it came to a camping trip. It was calling me somehow, even though the swell forecast was dim and I wasn’t expecting waves. Like the handprints in the rock paintings that symbolize the drawing of strength from the rock face, I somehow needed to go there to rejuvenate, fill up.

And it gave. Small and fast, breaking into a howling wind, the ocean white capping on the outside. Go for a paddle, I thought, and then hooked one all the way from the outside almost to the beach. That was worth it. And then another. And another. The best surfs are when you don’t know how good it’s going to be.

Light a fire, crack a beer, watch the skyline turn orange, hear the waves crashing, the first star coming out, the silouette of the point. ‘Do you want potatotes and salad with the meat,’ I tune my lightie. ‘Just meat Dad, we’re South African my bru,’ he chirps. Later, bored with cooking one at a time, he wants to take the whole packet of marshmallows and chuck them in the foil we didn’t use for the potatoes and then put them in the fire – with a slab of chocolate on top. Yum. Gooey like melted marshmellow. Kids have the best ideas sometimes.

And that’s it.

In the last 10 days, we’ve finished a 6′.5″ quad fish, a 5′.4″ twin keel fish and a 6′.5″ single fin.  The single fin was the first to return from its sand, spit and polish finishing operation and has already been handed over to its new owner, who is taking it on a surf trip from Cape Town to Durban and back again. Gonna have to make one of these for my personal quiver…

It’s been great to work on a single fin project again, and one with wings at that.

The first four boards I made were all single fins, inspired by a decades-old Larry Levine shape from J-Bay that a friend of mine bought. On the fourth generation of that single fin, I came up with the board pictured on the right, made out of recycled oregon and locally-grown Saligna gum. It’s still in commission and gets taken out by the owner on special occasions. It’s still one of my favourite boards and I wish it was hanging in my lounge and not his! I just love the shape of it – the idea of it – and the possibilities of the narrow tail and the forward wide point.

So I was really pleased when a fellow single fin enthusiast got in touch wanting a single fin – and only a single fin – but with a slightly more modern edge to it. Here’s the rough shape pictured left, which I’m really pleased with – it’s going to be a great board and another one of those that will be hard to give away when the time comes.