Ocean + Earth Is Expanding Its Patent-Backed Board Bag Empire

In partnership with Ocean + Earth for their Apex board covers, which you can browse here.

Two years ago, Ocean + Earth came to us with a relatively simple observation: surfers don’t trust board bags.

Not really.

We trust them enough to hand our boards to an airline employee, sure. But before doing so, most of us will spend 45 minutes wrapping rails in towels, taping foam around noses, inserting pool noodles and generally turning $2,000 worth of surfboards into a giant padded burrito.

When we first wrote about Ocean + Earth’s Apex range in 2024, that was the problem the South Coast legacy hardware company was trying to solve.

“We realized that most people just don’t actually trust a board cover from anyone on the market to have enough protection,” O+E’s head of design and production, Bart, told us at the time.

Their answer was Apex.

After nine prototypes and two years of development, Ocean + Earth landed on a board bag that was noticeably different from the floppy black canvas coffins surfers had spent the previous few decades dragging through airport terminals. At its center were two protection systems: XPS, a structured external shell concentrated around the nose, tail and rails, and IPS, a series of internal cushioning pads, dividers and compression straps intended to stop boards moving, touching and crushing each other in transit.

Or, as Bart explained to us with considerably less jargon: the outside protects, the inside cradles.

The other notable part was that O+E actually patented the product.

The US application, published in October 2025, gets very specific about what O+E is attempting to protect: adjustable padded nose supports, raised dividers between boards, tail and mid-board supports, internal compression straps and more rigid external protection around particularly vulnerable areas of the bag.

Extremely boring stuff, right up until Qantas hands you half a 6’2″.

And, judging by the fact that the five and six board Apex bags on their site are sold out, people actually want the things.

Now, what began as a premium board-cover project has grown into a considerably larger family. Ocean + Earth’s site now lists 14 Apex travel-cover configurations — a single shortboard bags, fish and longboard bags, multi-board versions, wheeled three, four, five, and six-board coffins, and now a two-longboard wheeled monstrosity capable of swallowing a pair of logs.

There are Aircon vents, lockable zips, strategically placed handles, fin pouches, wheels and an AirTag pocket. But those are garnish. The actual sell remains the same one O+E pitched us in 2024: put your boards in the bag without constructing a secondary bag inside it.

Browse the expanded Ocean + Earth Apex range here.