My name is Antoine. I was born in Brussels. After some years of travelling and working on ships, I left my job as a seaman in 2016 and settled down in Portugal.
Ondanova surfboards was born from the desire to live on something that feels more consistant to me. The passion of crafting functional art by hand, with all the emotions that goes along with the process. Building our own tools and games gives a feeling of independence and freedom. A surfboard is one of those creation bringing science and art together, hydrodynamic and aesthetic and it is empirical, using them intensifies the whole process.
As main material, wood brings new challenges. The techniques and systems are refined board after board, and today wooden surfboards are comparable to their foam sisters. As surfers, using wood also narrows the paradoxal gap between our love for the ocean and letting more plastic afloat.
Ondanova is a place you are welcome to visit, not only about surfboards, it is about sharing knowledge and diversity of ideas, artistic expression, comparing techniques and designs, testing together in the water, refining and doing it again.
About the wood
The wood we use is Paulownia, a tree native from Japan and Korea, with several different species, offering densities from 250 to 350kg/m3, making it a very light, easy to work with. Also it doesn't soak water making it one of the best natural material for building hollow wooden surfboards. Because of the speed and ease of growth (after cutting it, the tree start growing again), the quality of the wood and the ecological aspect (fast intake of CO2, easy polyculture) more and more trees are beeing planted in Europe. Our wood is coming from Italy and France and hopefully soon from Portugal.
The future is seen as a combination of incorporating more of those sustainable materials, and building more from our own hands.
