Homemade Surfboards

Reporter Andy Price tries out a homemade surfboard at Perranporth on Cornwall’s north coast. A local enthusiast puts marine paint to plywood and comes up with a design. It is about sourcing the right raw materials and fashioning a board from mahogany plywood, bending it and using marine paint to finish and decorate it. Local manufacturers came up with similar style boards and many holidaymakers would buy cheap plywood boards and partake in a spot of amateur surfing.

There is one thing to say about homemade surfboards; it was easy to paint the destination surf beaches on your board notching them up as you progressed around the South West coast on annual family holidays. The fascination with surfing really took off in the sixties with new-style boards coming from Malibu California as travellers discovered the surf at Newquay and the north coast of Cornwall. An explosion in watersporting activities on the sea, such as windsurfing, kitesurfing, flyboarding, paddleboarding, skimboarding or skurfing are now finding hydrofoil or being lifted in biblical fashion above the water by a fin, foil surfing makes chasing the big waves less important and is changing watersports.