Varuna Will Grow Your Quiver

How often, if ever, do you consider your impact on the environment?

No, me neither...well, not much anyway, and not often.

I know it's one of the most shop-worn tropes out there: how surfers are connected to nature, stewards of the environment blah, blah, blah, but mostly we go through life fairly oblivious to the impact of our toys and lifestyle. Derek Hynd laid it out in blunt terms in a recent article for The Surfer's Journal: “Ecologically, we're all in this, a clusterfuck of toxic guilt. No matter the level, age, or method, the surfer is up there with the worst relative global individual footprint."

Guilty as charged. I try to keep my footprint light, my lifestyle simple. I'm no Kelly Slater that's for sure; not building energy-guzzling, water-hungry wavepools in the Arabian desert and flying all over the planet on a whim. But still, every so often I look at my petro-chem water toys, last minute trips to Indo, and feel like I would like to do better for Old Mother Earth and her biosphere.

Thus my interest was very much piqued when I started seeing the Varuna wooden boards around; a few in the water, and then a bunch of clips on YouTube outlining the vision and the business model.

The gist of the venture are chambered boards made from balsa grown as a regenerative tree on degraded land in Indonesia, then crafted by Indonesian builders using designs licensed from noted shapers. Joel Fitzgerald, Chilli, Maurice Cole, Stuart D'Arcy, Renaud Cardinal, Jared Mell, and Beau Young are already signed up with more to come.

Chambered balsa is a major league blast from the past. A board-building method developed decades ago and kept alive by a few hardcore afficionados working out of backyard wood-shops. The process is elaborate and slow. Varuna's point of difference, however, is that they're taking the concept of chambered balsa and applying it to production models. In this, it's a first.

Balsa was chosen because it's light, it grows incredibly quickly, it's not native to Indonesia so it can be harvested as a weed, plus it can be used as a primary regenerative tree as it offers abundant shade. Once a stand is harvested, Varuna then selects the next piece of degraded land again using balsa trees as a harvestable cover crop, the area later planted out with fruit trees and natives once the balsa is removed.

Raw balsa stockpiled in Varuna's Balinese warehouse plus the finished product. Note: This is an earlier generation Varuna with the air vent on the forward section of the deck. Later models now have the vent - which releases hot air before it expands and stresses the internal joints - in the legrope plug. A simple and elegant solution.

The solution to a more sustainable surfboard - which is a primary aim for Varuna surfboards - cannot come from petro-chemicals. To fulfil that goal, in whole or in part, the primary material needs to be natural and regenerative. Currently, only wood can fulfil that function.

The carbon cycle is amazing and a simple primer is called for. The story goes like this. Without human interference, the carbon in fossil fuels would leak slowly into the atmosphere through volcanic activity over millions of years in the slow carbon cycle. By burning coal, oil, and natural gas, we accelerate the process, releasing vast amounts of carbon - carbon that took millions of years to accumulate - into the atmosphere every year. By doing so, we move the carbon from the slow cycle to the fast cycle. In 2009, humans released about 36.8 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel.

Growing plants removes carbon from the atmosphere, and via photosynthesis incorporates it into biomass. This is the foundation of the fast carbon cycle. For the purposes of this article, the incorporation of carbon from the atmosphere into plant structures (wood) is the basis of the sustainability claim for wooden surfboards. Basically, as long as the board isn't burnt or degraded by micro-organisms, it's a net environmental gain as far as helping the atmosphere with sequestering excess carbon dioxide.

An even easier equation to understand is sunlight and carbon dioxide are the raw materials of a wooden board, while fossil fuels are the basis of every other surfboard.

Varuna is not perfect in this regard, the wooden deck, rails, and bottom are laminated with fibreglass and epoxy bioresin. Still, as far as comparing carbon footprints goes, a Varuna balsa board will emit from 1.5-4 times less carbon than the average surfboard.

In effect, as co-founder Damo Cole explained to me, shapers could offset carbon emissions from standard surfboard materials by incorporating balsa construction for some of their models. That made a lot of sense to me.

Similarly, the same counter-balance can occur with surfers swapping out one or two PU/PE boards from their quiver for a chambered balsa board. Of course, that'll depend on how they ride.

Margo lays a Maurice Cole 6'4" Twin Pin on rail

I tested four boards over several months: two shortboards and two mid-lengths, and I have a high degree of confidence in the following observations.

The boards are well built and the blonde-grained balsa is beautiful to look at. I dropped mine several times onto the carpark, ran into rocks, and generally treated them like all my boards in high rotation, which is to say, roughly. There's not a single shatter, dent, or foot well to be seen. I have no doubt this method of chambered balsa construction is extremely durable and would likely last years, possibly decades.

Every material has different properties and different hydrostatic* and hydrodynamic** properties. Balsa feels more dense than a standard PU/PE board, it paddles lower in the water for the same given volume. It's heavier and with that comes greater momentum when paddling into a wave and cutting through chop and bump. Shaper to Harry Bryant, Josh Keogh is unequivocal on the merits of extra weight: “We've been tricked into thinking weight is a bad thing in surfing,” he said in an article appearing in the latest Surfers Journal. “Weight anchors the board to the water, which isn't a disadvantage unless you are trying to do aerials.”

Those are my thoughts exactly. Almost every surf I had on the Varuna boards had some wind chop and lump - it was summer in the Northern Rivers after all - and balsa's ability to dampen and cut through that chop felt like a performance advantage to me. Other surfers, perhaps used to twitchier, more lively-feeling equipment, may experience that extra weight in a different, less positive way.

The first board I rode, a 6'10” Joel Fitzgerald Cosmic Twin had a learning curve of one wave. That first one it felt weird, the second I felt the balsa glide, and every wave after that was a joy. It was both my first ride on a mid-length twin and my first ride on balsa and that combination felt like a marriage made in heaven. To be honest, balsa for mid-lengths seems like a complete no-brainer. You get better paddle, better swoop, better trim, and connection and carry too. Balsa guns have traditionally been crafted with these attributes in mind. Brendan Margieson described this feeling of balsa as having a “hidden energy”, which is something I have to agree with. Similar thinking would apply for their longboards.

The case for shorter, more performance-oriented boards is strong, but less compelling. Two smaller, twin fin-style boards: a 5'8” Space Hawk again by Joel Fitzgeral and a 5'11” Water Bird by Stuart D'Arcy, felt very fine to me and I had many fun surfs on them. But there were also moments when reaction times of the board were not quite as snappy as PU/PE. Talking to shaper Gunter Rohn in the carpark, who is going to incorporate two shapes into the Varuna stable, he thought the solution maybe to reduce volume. That may be possible, but Varuna are heading into a new frontier of design. Chambered balsa construction has different physical limits as far as width and thickness goes. The undeniable attributes of traditional PU/PE and EPS/Epoxy materials are their uniform and customisable nature. It's incredibly easy to tweak and refine dimensions from board to board. Wooden boards are a little more like carpentry and less able to be tweaked to suit individual preferences.

An example of this is the current limitation for shortboards in terms of fin boxes and weight. The reinforcements required for the boxes in the aft-end create an imbalance for quad set-ups in small boards - there are no quad fins in their range. The waterproof chambers also seem to have a point of diminishing returns as far as high performance equipment goes with the weight increasing as a proportion of decreasing length. These are engineering challenges that Varuna are confident they'll overcome through the short to medium term. For now, the chambered balsa technology applies perfectly to mid-lengths, longboards, and more alternative designs.

There are between 10 and 12 steps in making a standard PU/PE board, while in contrast there are up to 120 steps in making a chambered balsa Varuna. Chambered balsa boards are prone to sinking if the skin is punctured. Varuna get around this by glueing Gore-Tex between the chambers which allows air to pass through but not water. If the skin is breached, only the damaged chamber will fill and the board will still float.

The Seed to Surfboard ethos of Varuna has created a pathway and system which transcends surfboard building. Part forestry, part permaculture, part engineering, part local carpentry. This is not the first time it's been done. Small batch builders like Tom Wegener and Paul Joske have created similar systems using Paulownia. Varuna represents the first time this ecologically sustainable method of surfboard construction has been scaled and bought to market. Using the intellectual property of known shapers and using Indonesian craftsmen is a model borrowed from other Asian-sourced manufacturers, and has proven to be successful at managing costs. This amalgam of simple and innovative, ecologically sustainable, and business friendly puts Varuna on the cutting edge of several axes.

The business model creates several high-value products. According to co-founder Tom Nuytens, when the balsa is cut and milled only 10% is of the correct density for surfboard production. The rest is sold as high-value wood for different applications - kitchen fittings and wind turbines being just two. The reforested land creates value for the local communities with fruit crops and enhanced biodiversity. The increased value to livelihoods extends to shops in Bali and Australia, the shapers, everyone involved really. We don't tend to think about surfboard companies in this way, but in this instance it's worth reflecting on.

If riding a more environmentally-friendly surfboard is of even passing interest to you, you need to go check out the Varuna stable for yourself. To date, they've been pushing the idea of demo days and test rides, which, if you're curious, are worth pursuing to experience the feel of balsa and understand how the volume metric compares to traditional materials.

So has Varuna cracked the fully sustainable surfboard nut? For the purposes of what you can go and buy off the shelf, close enough.

// STEVE SHEARER