this green and pleasant land

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!

fish scales and tall tales

 

What with all the SeaPea related excitement, i hadn't ridden a keel fish for ages until the other day. Pretty much on a whim i paddled my 5'8 mabile out on a tiny day, really way too small for anything but a log. It felt tiny and thin compared to a mini simmons despite being half a foot longer. I'd be lying if i said it was an epic session but there was a lot of satisfaction from generating speed and getting a couple of turns in on a tiny gutless wave. In summer everything is fun right?

no waiting

Big scary birthday today......remember, age is just a number.........

cup 'o' joe

 

A surf check is better with coffee in hand.

benched

 

This could be the most photographed seat in North Devon. I don't think ive ever actually sat in it. I'm usually in too much of a rush to get my wetsuit on, especially when the view looks like this!

Winter hasn't been kind to the sand below though. At low tide there's a big lagoon that needs to be waded through or paddled across to reach the breakers. It's rippy too and two weeks ago BGA and i watched some learners (in a lesson i might add) get blown off the sewer pipe and need to be rescued. The helicopter got called but thankfully wasn't needed. 

The next day i watched two kids get swept out in the rip at hightide saunton and need to be paddled back in, one on a supermarket bodyboard, one on a shortboard. Scary for them and lucky that those in the water noticed! Saunton is usually really safe but the winters storms have changed the sand somewhat and it's not fully back to normal yet! With the holiday crowds around, please keep your eyes open, especially on the beaches with no flags!

abandoned

 

Golden rays from a dying sun

On the subject of Sea Pea's, Gulfstream have a really professional looking new website up here. I know i'm slightly biased but i genuinely think they are consistently producing some of the best boards in the country right now and have been for a few years! There are some great little video's of Jools explaining the different shapes on there too. I particularly enjoyed watching the Sea Pea one (somewhat predictably!). I've got a real kick out of introducing jools to the mini simmons idea and seeing how much excitement and enthusiasm its brought him. That comes across really well in the video.

On the same page, i got chatting to someone in the water the other day who was riding a seapea. I played the dumb but interested surfer and didn't declare my interest. It was really cool to hear how much this guy was loving the shape and how much of an eye opener this little oblong from left field had been. In fact he had bought one based on his friends positive experiences.

If you've read this blog regularly you'll know i've been extolling the virtues of the mini simmons platform in UK waters for a few years. People are getting it now!

chuckle-bility

Randall and Elsie

1 fin

is all you need....

So it is officially summer and for once the weather seems to agree, even the surf has been in summer mood - crappy short period onshore windswell! There have been a few little cheeky sliding waves when the wind has dropped even complete with a kook running into me as i paddled out in true summer fashion. "he's paddling left, he thinks he's going left, he's going left, oh he's inexplicably wobbled nearly fallen off and is now about to hit me!" you know the story. Thankfully my arm took most of the blow!

Hopefully off to gulfstream to finish my "shaping"/blank butchering experience at the end of the week now Jools has recovered from the trauma of my two sessions so far!

stripey socks

I have a kind of love hate relationship with board socks, especially when it comes to getting them onto a longboard. They are worth it when you cant park outside your house like me and a quiver approach means carrying a couple of boards a couple of hundred metres! I say carrying but given the weight of most of my logs it's more like the staggering of a semi drunk! A central village location has its perks and it's disadvantages!

The forecast isn't looking too special for the next few days, mostly short period windswell. Time to get back on the bike and dream of better days. It's a shame as i've just been watching two of my favorite vimeo clips (here and here) and getting all stoked on DP's style and surfing my if6was9 log thats similar to his board in the clips. (a slimmed down semi pig with not much foam and a big greenough flex fin!)

a fresh perspective

Amazing how a few steps in a different direction can give a fresh perspective on stuff that is there all the time......

Geppy's on parade

the peddler

So this is one of the inhabitants of clovelly. Like i said, it's a slightly odd place. A recent headline from the local paper......" Girl attacks shop worker with biscuits!" "I'll make your glasses into contact lenses" she's quoted as threatening before pelting the checkout lady with custard creams. I kid you not!

boats at clovelly

there in black and white

A slightly more illuminating picture of the bing mini-sim. Shows the fin template well which is a normal Geppy fish keel rather than a more classic simmons half moon shape. These are set canting inwards towards the stringer by a few degrees though i'm pretty sure thats builder error and not how they are supposed to be. Legendary californian build quality not always spot on then!

 Going to have to give it back soon....

i am not a number....

Plenty of you will recognise this as the view of the harbour at clovelly as you risk life and limb negotiating the wet cobbles downwards. There's a semi secret wave hereabouts but thats a different story.

Clovelly itself is lovely in a cute devon way but whenever i visit, i cant help but feel it would be a slightly weird place to live. If you haven't been, it's a village wholly privately owned and the inhabitants all rent their properties from the estate. It's an old fishing village with a long history but now almost operates as a kind of real life theme park with a visitor centre and car park at the top and paid entry for tourists.

It always makes me think of the old 60's tv series "the prisoner"............ you are number 6

bob...

 

Rob Martin is one of my heros, one might almost say he's a living local legend, although he would hate me to describe him this way. In fact he was pretty reluctant to have his picture taken and i'm sure would hate the fact i've posted it here.

 

Ever since i moved here, Rob has been a fixture at saunton, on a log and for the last few years on an SUP. He's a good neat surfer with a litheness that belies his age and he's got more surf stoke than most people of half his years.

 

I really hope i have the desire and physical strength to still be surfing like that when i approach my seventies!

pensive......

BGA strikes his best catalogue pose while I lie panting on the grass after he lent me his spare bike then me cycle up a steep hill back in may. Jesting aside I owe Al big thank you's for lending me his old cannondale so i could find a new way of scaring myself/ having fun on those many crap surf days we seem to have suffered this summer! It's just about kept me sane and in some semblance of fitness.

 

It's wet and wild out there again today and it seems like we've gone straight to winter again. Almost seems like we've just had one season of grey wetness all year. I feel like i've hardly surfed over the last month or so and my stoke is at a low ebb from a surfing point of view. Thank goodness for alternative entertainment! There is some hope on the horizon, if the wind forecast holds and the logs might just get dusted off at the weekend.

 

In other news, the new iphone 5 is pretty cool and more importantly doesn't randomly crash at annoying moments like my old 3. Hopefully i can waste some time on it later watching the quik pro from france. Wow thats a heavy beachbreak. When a surfer of jeremy flores calibre is visibly shaken after a wipeout/hold down you know there's a lot of water moving around!

bonne anniversaire

Happy Birthday to my little bean!

sundowner

A date for your diaries, Bing Copeland and hopefully Matt Calvani from Bing surfboards will be around the village on the weekend of the 15th / 16th september. I'm not entirely sure of the details yet but there is supposed to be a demo day at saunton on the saturday morning and something happening in conjunction with the surf museum on the sunday. Keep an eye on the Nineplus, Trim surfboards and surf museum websites for details!