van life number 2

I watched Thomas campbell's sprout the other day. First time for a long time although i've seen it so many times since it first came out, every scene was like meeting an old friend. It's difficult to underestimate how much influence Sprout and The Seedling before it had on me and thousands of other people around the world. It still stands up as a great film and it's worth dusting your copy down and watching it again.  It's funny to think that when it came out, owning a twin keel fish semed like a radical idea!

chuckle-bility

Randall and Elsie

all for one

 

Ready to log some tip time!

Here's a thing......... When you load your board on your car roof, do you put it fin first or nose first?

In the UK i'd say everyone goes nose first (with the exception of those kooks who stick it up through the sunroof etc!) and there would be some sniggering behind hands in car parks if you did anything else.

Cross the pond though and California is exclusively fin facing forward, at least if you want to swing into the car park looking cool and correct. weird eh?

Thankfully my boards travel inside a van so thats one less detail to agonise over in order to maintain my aura of hipster cool ;-)

Speaking of cool, Gulfstream now have a 5'2 SeaPea mini simmons available to demo, call them on 01271 815490 and get your shred on (brah!)

walkabout

 

I'm pleased with this shot. In my mind it is my own little homage to the work of Ryan Tatar who's one of the photographers that got me stoked on using film originally.

glen

This is Glen, owner of local shop Surfed Out going beyond the call of duty and delivering a new board to a customer at the waters edge early one saturday morning.

Glen was a sometimes divisive figure when he first moved here and openend his stores but time mellows and I've always found him to be friendly, helpful and just trying to make his business run well in sometimes difficult circumstances.

blue sky thinking.....

Summer has drawn to a close and the anticipation of some autumn swells rolling through is building. I finished august with another super fun week in the lakes. Once again we lucked out with the weather most of the time and had a great time. I've said it before but it's genuinely my second favorite place in the country to be i think.

 

I think maybe its just the outdoors vibe about the place as well as the spectacular scenery abd the big hills to test yourself climbing up and bombing down!

 For reference, Honister Pass is something you enjoy after it's finished!

testing testing 1,2,3......

I've just stolen Gordon from Wavedreamer's pictures of the aforementioned Will from Gulfstream testing the first stock SeaPea. This is Will's take on it:


As you know I have been given the responsibility of testing our new board, the Sea Pea. Mainly im testing this one to see if it surfs how we want it to, and most importantly like its Father, Chris Preston's aka CP, Sea Pea.

I knew of a few subtle differences before surfing it. There was slightly less rocker, and i felt it had a slightly straighter rail line. It looks fantastic and was praying that it surfed as well as the original one.

The first session was in horrendous 2ft woolacombe. Strong NW winds had been blowing all day saturday and it wasn't til 5 oclock that i mustered up the stoke to get in. Gordon from Wavedreamer came along with his camera to document the event.

To give you an idea of how bad the surf was, there was only 2 other people actually attempting to surf, both of which were on shortboards and were having no luck at all. To say this board made me smile is an understatement. It didn't even have many good long faces to open up its turbos but good golly did it surf well. There is few boards that accelerate and trim quite like this board did in conditions like this. The whole experience of surfing this type of board is rad.

I also surfed it early Sunday morning in super clean 1-2ft. It was really weak and gutless but the Sea Pea served its purpose yet again. While a few keen loggers where in trim and getting nice nose rides, the Sea Pea was flying across little walls and making me wonder why i haven't owned a board like this for the last 5 years. Dam you CP.

Testing boards in good waves is no real test, most board will go well in 3 ft glass, but very few will go well in 2 foot absolute wind blown rubbish. This board is one of those few. It finds speed from the flattest wall, and drives through forever searching for the next section. You can beat sections that wouldn't dream of making on your standard thruster. It caught waves very well too, being flat and floaty gives you plenty of paddle speed. Once up, a few moments after, a subtle pump and I was going mach 10.

I will say a few constructive criticisms of it though;

- friends wont want to surf with you anymore as you get too many waves

- your hair will end up long

- you'll grow a moustache

- words like 'rad' will and 'stoke' become normal day to day words

If you can deal with the above then come and get one! See below for a few little snaps of it in action. More updates to come when i have had a few more surfs on it...

There are more of Will's thoughts and pictures of the orange SeaPea here.

Whatever your choice of trousers, corduroy lines never go out of fashion!!

So the other day, i lent my new little mini simmons, the SeaPea to my friend Will. To set the scene, Will is a shortboarder, he's actually a very very good shortboarder in a conventional pointy white thruster sense. He finds logs boring, doesn't like fish and thinks eggs are best confined to breakfast!

I think he wanted to try a sim partly becasue he's seen mine take shape and partly out of curiosity. I'm pretty sure he really just wanted to confirm that they were odd dysfunctional hipster shapes ridden by me and my beardy pals!

He rode it a couple of times, in onshore lumpy 3 foot croyde and in clean lined up 1-2 feet croyde. I'm just going to paste some of his texts to me here

"Oh my god, just surfed it at croyde, that was SO fun!!!!!!"
"It's by no means a shortboard but it went amazingly well in average waves and created speed from nothing!! I need one in my board rack!"

Whats pretty cool about this and the reason i've posted it, is that Will could see the fun in this shape despite coming at it from an entirely different direction and surfing reference points. It blew his preconceptions out of the water and in his words "made a very average day a lot of fun!"

 It's nice to know that someone with much greater small board ability than me, see's the validity in the design for our waves.

More about my board here Jools will make you one here