this green and pleasant land

snow fun....

So, just back from a rad trip to Norway. The light is so good when the sun shines it's easy to take beautiful photographs, it's a shame that all my film cameras are too bulky to fit in a pocket. Thats my excuse for posting digital shots anyway, that and avoiding frostbitten fingers messing around with fiddly camera buttons!

it's here.........

 

6'10 of californian goodness and boy am i excited!

 I was hoping to have an initial ride report to post with the pics but it made it to devon just before i went to the mountains and the swell hasnt really co-operated yet, maybe today is the day?

It's a lovely board though, the glassing is flawless and the shape is really refined. It might be a midlength "egg" but it's about as far from a mini-mal or beginner board as you could get. It's going to be smooth!

#cx

Surfing is inevitably a stop/start endeavour over the cold months, bursts of consecutive panicking to get in the water while tide, swell and wind align followed by lengthy spells of wistfully watching videos and ignoring facbook posts from friends in warmer climes.

I've been riding inbetween, enjoying the hard excercise and the solitude and the beauty of my local surroundings. This cx bike (a charge filter if you're interested) was built up for next to nothing from ebay and scrounging and yet it's logged more mileage than anything else recently. It's comfortable and fast on our devon lanes and the added frisson of danger riding it off-road compared to a mountain bike makes it fun to link big loops of mixed terrain. I suppose in a way it's similar to riding a heavy single fin, taking something thats flawed in some ways and celebrating it's impracticalty, making it perform - overthinking again......basically its fun! ( apart from riding it home in the dark by light of my iphone when my batteries failed!)

handmade

Gulfstream have some exciting new shapes in the pipeline, it's all too secret squirrel to reveal here yet but it's looking exciting!

exploring....

 

Amazing what you can find just around the corner if you keep your eyes peeled. This beautiful old stone bridge is hidden a couple of valleys over from my house at the bottom of a forest track. The late december light was beautiful and the frost was hard enough to solidify the mud. The only sound was my breathing condensing in the cold air and the babbling of the stream.