the skies.

Letting film expire before you use can do weird but great things! Talking of weird things, i just read this. Completely un surf related but intriguing in a strange but true x files kinda way!

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

standing on the edge of glory..

Mike ties in while we debate if there's time for one more route before the storm front in the distance engulfs us. We made it off the slab with a few minutes to spare, thus avoiding a climbing epic tale by the skin of our teeth and trudging happily home with a soaking and wry smiles!.....

GS go blogtacular....

Gulfstream surfboards have a new blog up and running featuring the ramblings of shop monkey Will. Check them out here

Picture of Skelton ducking for cover to prevent passersby being blinded by his wetsuit courtesey of Rob Tibbles. Moral of the story is never let someone else have free reign over the colour of your custom wetsuit!

long gone

The lifeguards are long gone now, in fact they haven't been at my local beach for years, a result of wranglings between the council and the beach owner. Each year the number of people they pull from the sea increases as more people venture into the surf in their supermarket wetsuits, more people make a weekend run to hit the surf (dude!) with little regard or experience of the power of the sea. It's a shame they only patrol in the summer, the beaches are increasingly full of clueless fools even during the winter when the swell is up and the water temp is dropping fast.

Yet you can't help some people and it sometimes makes me despair about the nature of many in our country. People wont swim between the flags, people shout abuse when you suggest they might want to avoid floating in an area thick with large hard fibreglass objects, some of which lets face it, are under questionable control. Worst of all i've witnessed a father screaming at a friend of mine for suggesting that he might want to stop his young son from swimming in a powerful rip.

OK rant over, ignore me, just look at the pretty picture!

empty nets

a certain ratio

It struck me today how little time i actually spend surfing. By that i mean, sure i spend large parts of my life thinking (obsessing if you ask my wife) about riding different waves or different boards. I spend hours checking online forecasts, webcams, swell models, wind models, tide times, discussion boards, blogs.

I put miles on the clock driving to beaches, sometimes at leisure, sometimes stressing to squeeze a quick shot of stoke into a boring work day. There's plenty of time spent shooting the breeze with fellow locals - who scored where, who's ripping, who's riding what. The minutes hurriedly shivering in and out of wetsuits or leisurely changing in the sun, depending on the season, mount up as the months pass by.

Sometimes it's a ten minute walk to the waters edge, sometimes a ten minute paddle out, dodging cold mountains of churning whitewater to finally make it out to the lineup. Then waiting, waiting for the set, waiting for your turn (honestly!) jockeying for position.

But if you think about how much time you spend actually stood up riding waves, it's not very long at all. It's almost a depressingly short length of time, if you think about it too much. There can't be many pastimes where that is the case. I mean the footballer spends ninety minutes playing a game and the swimmer doesn't just spend time floating in the deep end (though there are always ladies of a certain age cluttering up any pool for whom talking & floating seems to qualify as excercise!)

Yet perhaps that is part of the draw, the reason surfing grabs you and i by the very core of our being and wont let go. Forces us to plan, sacrifice, risk career and relationship for just one more fix, one more perfect wave, one more glimpse of the ecstasy.

I'm confident that not one of you reading this would say it wasn't worth it, that the stoke doesn't measure up to the commitment. Yet we all know people who don't get it, who would find it amusing that you might try and surf more than once a day, or even every day. Those for whom the joy of trim holds no attraction, have no interest in finding their limits and pushing them further.

We can stay smug in our secret, knowing we are part of the "us", feel sympathy for "them" for they are missing out.

climbing rocks

Super big thanks to my friend Mike who took me climbing on Baggy Point last week, such a pleasant way to spend a sunny evening with no surf. Definately found some new muscles too.

Pics are a 35mm film through the holga, nearly tore my hair out trying to get the negs scanned. As usual the solution was simple & nearly blindingly obvious once i found it!

lo-fi low tide

No posts for the next week as i'm off to Spain (the flat coast unfortunately) for a little quality family time. Waves forecast for the weekend though so i feel as if i am taking one for the team!