Product Review | Wood Paddle Board

Pro SUP Athlete Girard Middleton from Sobe Surf & Paddle gives his review on the look and feel of the ride on a Little Bay Board.

“Aloha!

My name is Girard Middleton and i’m in my shop here in Merritt Island Florida, SoBe Surf and Paddle.  Doing a new board review today of a brand new brand to the shop that i’m really impressed and excited about to share with you. They’re handmade hollow wooden boards from a company called Little Bay Boards in Petoskey, Michigan.

They’re made by a master carpenter, handmilled cedar and ash and all different kinds of beautiful wood and just amazing equipment as you can see. Gorgeous, the workmanship’s off the charts and they’re hollow. They have a honeycomb wood frame for support and the wood is milled to an eighth of an inch thick and covered with acrylic epoxy on the underneath and outside uh just what can i say eco-friendly, no foam no no no anything unnatural except for the epoxy and glue i would imagine. Just amazing!

Each board comes with a matching paddle that weighs only a pound and a half and just matches the boards.

I took it for a spin this morning in the ocean and so i can do this review and very impressive, very impressive, but i’ll talk about that in a minute. Let’s talk a little more about the specs. All the boards weigh between 26 and 30 pounds which is awesome.

They don’t come with a handle like normal boards for obvious reasons. They don’t want to mess up the art the beauty of the board but, it’s very easy to carry hawaiian style like in the crotch of your arm on your hand leaned against your head in the balance point you carried out to the beach.

Wherever you’re going you want to make sure you put it all the way in the water and stop before you hit the shoreline so you don’t mess up your beautiful board. But if you do that and take good care of it they last a long time. The owner of the company tells me they’re very durable. He told me that the the surface you don’t need to put wax or a pad on it i found a little hard to believe until i went out and caught a wave on it this morning it really has a good good grip. My foot didn’t slip once and i paddled. I did ocean paddling, i did some spins, some pivot turns. I caught a few waves, my foot didn’t slip at all. So you don’t have to mess up the beauty of the wood by putting wax or a pad on it.

All right specs. So all boards range from 10′ 2″, to 10′ 4″ long. They’re 31 inches wide, and 5 inches thick and support comfortably up to a 250 pound rider. If you have high skills, a much heavier rider than that of course.

There’s a plug, you tighten up the air vent plug and loosen it so when you go in the water you tighten it up so no water gets in. When you get out you unscrew it so that it can breathe once you’re out of the water and that helps the board last a long long time.

Like i said just, be careful with it carrying it and you know the board will last you a long long long time. He also said they’re easy repair.

He hasn’t gotten hardly any repair requests for the board itself but he said sometimes the paddle will ding or splinter. He gets some requests about how to repair the paddle but when i’m told its easy because it’s wood.

All right let’s look at the board! Let’s start with the paddle. They put a curve in the paddle and then make it one length six foot four inches and that’s a general if you got to go one length that’s a good all-around length. If you want to do a little more performancy paddling then you might want to put this on your wall and get your normal paddle out that’s adjusted to your perfect height. But i used it this morning and the height didn’t seem to be a problem, it was really nice. He puts his curve in here, kind of makes it a little nicer to plow in the water and a nice curve to
the paddle so super lightweight. Let’s look at the board a little more closely. So just like i said just so beautifully cut and put together and nice pulled in tail, the workmanship on the tail is super impressive. Nice pointy nose. Nice pointy nose with enough rocker where if you wanted to you can catch a wave. You’ll get all around shape. I’m going to turn it over and show you the bottom.

Gorgeous. Very beautiful.

Then you see the rocker and the tails. Just right. Rocker in the nose and like i said, so a good all-around shape. You can surf it if you want.

I took it for a hard paddle, like a race stroke, and it felt really good. The glide was honestly amazing and just the feel of wood under your feet on the ocean. It’s kind of spiritual, i mean it just feels so natural synchronicity with nature kind of thing. Super impressed.

I mean i never fell. I did some pivot turns, caught two waves, wrode them in, no falling down. Great experience. Highly recommend the board.

The tail, the fin, also everything’s made out of wood. Works fine. Like i said, i would just recommend not riding it all the way in the shore making sure you don’t drag and bottom out. Just to make it last forever, a little bit of care and the board’s going to be super durable.
So Little Bay Boards, here’s some examples, some other designs in back, some darker wood.

This here has the coastline of Michigan on it, pretty cool. They can take images of whatever you want, we can do custom boards, order them and cut out whatever design and make you a board. He has some like this, that has translucent strip in the middle. Very cool! So if you have it on display at home you can put a light behind it and the light is shines through the board. But again it’s functional!

You can use it’s paddle, same thing, to match pretty amazing. So if you want to see the boards i have in the shop, i have 11 right now you can go on sobesurf.com and look at our shop page, our online store page and you’ll be able to see all the boards, the specs, the prices.

The prices range from $2,800 to 6200 depending on the workmanship, the time put in it. It’s expensive but worth it. If you love the board, it’s worth it. It’s worth the money because the workmanship is incredible and there’s no other boards like them. One of a kind, each board!
All right, so, Little Bay Boards, you can also check out their company online and the link is there on our website.

Again this is Girard Middleton. This is my shop SoBe Surf and Paddle. sobesurf.com and you can give me a call 305 area code 773-1142. If you have any questions. I love to talk to people. I love what i do. I’m passionate about my paddle sport and we’ll talk. We’ll get you into one of these boards!

Aloha!”