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COMMUNITY<br />
CHAMPIONS<br />
Bringing the joy of building your own surfboard<br />
with a heightened eco-conscientiousness to the<br />
suburbs are the good folk at Tree to Sea.<br />
These guys are quite literally the community<br />
champions of environmentally friendly surfboard<br />
construction. Their wooden surfboard workshops<br />
are now that of legend here in Australia and are truly<br />
something special to experience.<br />
Based in Mt Eliza, three friends, Rob Ivers, Gary<br />
Miller and Darren Minchin hold their wooden<br />
surfboard workshops in their purpose-built indoor/<br />
outdoor workspace. They are bound by their love<br />
for surfing, timber surfboards and the sensory<br />
experience of crafting your own, so much so,<br />
they want others to experience the feeling for<br />
themselves.<br />
It all began some twelve years ago when one of the<br />
founders of Tree to Sea Australia, Rob Ivers, met<br />
Rich Blundell, an American pioneer of the wooden<br />
surfboard making workshop and founder of Tree to<br />
Sea in the USA. Not long after, Rob met Gary Miller<br />
through a mutual friend and the two of them talked<br />
about bringing the workshops to Australia.<br />
They invited Blundell out to Australia and it was with<br />
him they taught their first workshop, which was a<br />
huge success. Subsequent workshops filled just as<br />
fast as the first and so the two sought an agreement<br />
with Rich Blundell to use the name Tree to Sea.<br />
The team crafted surfboards using Rich’s original<br />
template of a hollow wooden surfboard with<br />
fibreglass coating. They further refined their board<br />
building process when Darren joined the team, who<br />
is a carpenter by trade. This took their workshops<br />
to another level and since that time they have<br />
continued to refine their processes, construction<br />
methods and the materials they use. The desire has<br />
always been to experiment and innovate to realise a<br />
more environmentally friendly product.<br />
Today the boards are no longer hollow nor feature<br />
fibreglass. What they now refer to as their “Eco<br />
Board” is made using a sandwich design where<br />
inside a lightweight plantation-grown timber veneer<br />
is a pre-shaped recycled polystyrene blank. All<br />
that is needed to complete the main body of<br />
construction is sustainably grown cork rails. This<br />
innovation has not only lessened the build time so<br />
boards can be fully constructed and ready to surf<br />
at the completion of a two-day workshop, they<br />
are now incredibly lightweight and performance<br />
orientated.<br />
<strong>SB</strong> / #54 / 30
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