twangin'

I've long had a thing for fender's offset waist guitars, even with their well documented idiosyncrasies. Probably to do with idolising j mascis and the guy from teenage fanclub in my late teens. Pretty stoked to have a Jazzmaster and a jag sat in the "music room" now.

thems the breaks.........

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the aforementioned broken ribs was watching lovely autumn swells on the webcam, knowing there was no way I could consider paddling out. I tried a couple of times after about a month but with varying success and pain levels and it wasn't really until past 6 weeks that I managed a proper little logging session.

In an effort to distract myself I searched out a cheap old canon waterproof camera, an a1 sureshot which took some lovely pictures on my first session back in before it sprung a leak and died. That's what you get for shooting with 30 year old cameras I guess!

the retreat

see-land

So i've been working on a new log with Jools at Gulfstream ready for summer. More details to come soon - it's going to sit as a model in their range as a nice counterpoint to the saunton foil.

The place in the picture has had a big hand in it's template and  the direction my prefered longboard shapes have taken over the last few years, coupled with the worldwide move by loggings stylemakers away from the paralell templated Nuuhiwa style logs and towards those more informed by Pigs, Nat's magic sam, Greenough's 4a template and the Australian involvement movement.

a place to play

One from California, one is visiting in a couple of months....................

Tumbling.....

Tickets for the second ever Somersault festival at Castle Hill in North Devon are well and truly out. It's a cracking line up this year and should be a whole heap of fun if last year is anything to go by. It really feels like they have built on last years success and this year they have, amongst others, Laura Marling, Passenger, Bombay Bicycle lub and Crystal Fighters as well as legends Jimmy Cliff and Norman Jay.

It should be good!

In the meantime, feast your eyars on Laura Marling's first album. It's a really beautiful record. Top pop fact is that her band at this time contained some of Mumford and Sons before they "made it"

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!

no waiting

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

chuckle-bility

Randall and Elsie

welsh lines

Journeyed from under milk wood to meet lines that travelled from afar.

planing

Jools hard at work in his shaping cave.

It's hard to explain just how difficult it is to cut a decent shape with a planer (for a newbie like me anyway) The foam is so fragile and the planer so aggressive that the tiniest change in angle or speed is reflected by creating a bumo or worse still a gouge....

The best comparison i can make would be trying to carve sonmething out of florists oasis with a dremel tool! Steady hands and a good eye are the bare minimum.

Hope everyone got some fun fathers day waves over the weekend. There certainly were a lot of people in the water. In the end a bit of patience was rewarded with a slightly smaller but quieter session. I rode my pointy squire log which hasn't been in the water for a while. It's pretty different to a proper log and a nice alternative to a three fin longboard in bigger waves. Despite having the wide point back of center, the roll in the bottom and the flexy fin give it an almost hully feel to the bottom turn. Especially if you get low and crank it over. There's a nice pivoty drive to it's cutbacks and the 17 nose really makes you work for your tip time. It's an unusual but satisfying board to surf.

Monday was a beautifully fun logging wave, small glassy and perfect for the if6was9 log i've been favoring recently. Boots off too!

The rain may be back today but it's my birthday and i'm going surfing!!!!

180 degrees

It's always winter somewhere too!

waypost...

There's sunshine for now outside the window but the eyeball surf reports are not promising. Hopefully the push will whip up a loggable ripple. I'm amping to get wet after a day spent drydocked in classroom and traffic jam yesterday.

In other news, i finally convinced Jools from Gulfstream to borrow and ride my TW bar of soap. It will be interesting to see how he feels about it coming from a 3 fin shortboard background. His current every day board is a 5'5 epoxy shortboard so even at 5'2 the soap is going to feel like a lot of foam!

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!)

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

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!