We started in the Tasmanian wilderness, long before the idea of building anything took hold. Back then, days were measured by the smell of damp ferns, by the dark shine of wet soil, by the low chatter of coastal winds pushing through the bull kelp tang. The air there has a kind of thickness to it, as if the land is still deciding what to reveal. Walking through those gullies, you begin to understand that time isn’t linear, not really. It folds and loops, like a wave you’ve ridden before but can’t quite place. Maybe that’s why it felt natural, later, to shape something that would live inside that kind of rhythm.
Surfing came into our lives not as a sport but as a scavenger’s pursuit, old boards found at tip shops, half-snapped things from garage sales, resin-cracked or sun-blistered, discarded by people who’d moved on. We rode them anyway. Or at least tried to. Some of those boards had no right to touch water again, but there was a strange education in them: learning what not to do, understanding the limits of foam and fiberglass, seeing how a board holds the memory of its maker even when broken.
Over time, the relationship shifted. We weren’t just riding boards anymore; we were interrogating them. Stripping them down. Wondering what surfing looked like before fiberglass and leash strings and the impulse to dominate a wave. That curiosity led inevitably backward, back beyond modern surf culture, beyond glossy edits and aerials, all the way to the ancient Alaia riders in Hawai‘i and to the many ocean cultures whose histories never made it into print. Those boards weren’t tools for performance; they were instruments of connection. A way to read the sea the way some people read weathered faces or old maps.
Working with wood felt like returning to something we’d never fully known but somehow recognised. Paulownia especially light, flexible, and persistent, sprouting again and again from its own roots seemed to hold the patience of the ancestors in its grain. Cutting into it never felt like cutting. More like uncovering. Like the board had been waiting inside the tree for years, biding its time.
The Alaia’s original form was too honest to tamper with, but we found room for a small evolution: adding subtle fins to give riders a little more stability, a little less strain in their joints. It wasn’t modernising so much as adapting, listening to the body and the board at once, trusting that neither wanted unnecessary pressure.
Shaping became a slow ritual. Planing the rails. Feeling the natural flex. Letting the board become thin enough to sit within the wave rather than floating above it. When you get it right, the board doesn’t fight the water. It follows it, bends with it, allows you to sense the wave’s intention before it becomes visible. Riding one feels strangely intimate, like the ocean is telling you about its secrets in increments.
When the shaping is done, we seal the board with grasstree resin, the same substance Australian Aboriginal people have used for over sixty thousand years. Mixed with oils, it forms tiny bubbles that lift the board just enough to glide, but its real purpose isn’t hydrodynamic, it’s cultural. A way of tying each board to land, time, and people who understood cycles far better than we do.
And then there’s the final step: drawing on the board. Not decoration, more like tracing the story of its birth. The lines often echo the places we first walked: fern fronds, tree rings, the curve of a bay that holds certain winds year-round. The board becomes a kind of diary, but one written in a language that requires salt and movement to read.
A reimagined Alaia slows everything down. You choose your waves with care because you must. You ride without a leash and accept responsibility for whatever the ocean decides. You find yourself paying attention in ways you’d forgotten were possible. And in that attentiveness, something shifts. The act of surfing becomes quieter. More deliberate. Less about conquering a moment and more about joining it.
In the end, the board follows the same rules as everything else in the natural world: it will return to the earth when its work is done. The glue will break down. The timber will feed soil. Nothing wasted. Nothing lost. Just energy changing shape, the way a swell becomes a wave and then becomes air again.
Maybe that’s why the boards feel alive, even before they touch water. They aren’t just objects. They’re participants, threads in a long lineage of hands, trees, oceans, cultures, and quiet decisions that carry us, wave by wave, into whatever comes next.