BGA

 

Al, architect and onetime art director for Wallace and Grommett, reflecting on another quiet fun offshore logging session while the masses battled unfavorable winds elsewhere.

It's starting to be the season for finding the quiet corners out of the wind, for boots, more rubber and rather depressingly gloves and hoods before very much longer. With the dark evenings and winter storms, it's the time of year that my mind starts to focus on climbing (indoors) a little bit. Al is often on the other end of the rope as i dangle two storey's up desperate to clip the bolts before my finger strength gives up. Quite a position of trust if you think about it....... i must remember to stay on his good side!

It's quite refreshing to be able to pick a day and time to go do somthing and not have change plans for weather or tide at the last minute. We're pretty spoilt for choice around here for indoor climbing at the moment. The excellent bouldering room in Pilton school is getting about a third bigger as we speak, Barnstaple has walls in Petroc and an old church, the Mill near south molton is still open and exeter has the quay, reviewed in a previous post.

For those a little further along the coast, Bude just got a brand new bouldering facility, called the chalk house, in the kings industrial park on the edge of town. It's not been open that long and i went to check it out last week. It's a decent size, not as big as say the climbing academy in bristol but bigger than the bouldering areas at exeter or south molton. A lot of the wall is slab rather than overhang though they have plans to add a proper roof area soon they say. It's got a fairly lo-fi feel with ply rather than coated climbing wall surface and is obviously born out of a few peoples passion rather than a big investment by a business. On the day i went, they had just had a comp on so there were fewer routes than normal but there were still 50 routes up. They were ungraded but the majority weren't too hard, many of the steeper ones having fairly juggy holds, which i think is a good thing for a part time climber like me. One big difference compared with other places i've been is the height. The wall tops out at 4.5m which, although is regulation international contest height,  feels a long way up when you're clinging horizontally on bad holds lunging for an uncertain grip!

All in all it's pretty cool and great to have another alternative if you're down that way and the surf forecast lied!

gul

So after a brief lull in swell and wind hereabouts, it's back to some solid groundswell and breezy conditions again. Almost all my surfs recently have seem to have been battling some kind of strong wind, whether onshore or offshore and as usual i've not had the time to seek shelter on the bigger days. Summer's mellow sessions feel long gone and winter feels just around the corner.

 It made a nice change then earlier in the week to slide into some unexpectedly fun thigh high glass at low tide croyde of all places. Even at that size there's some speed in the wave and getting up on the nose and back requires some deft footwork, especially as it tends to be quite A-framed at lower tides. I took the pointy squire log in and i have to say, in the type of wave it is built for (i.e hollower and fast), it really lit up, light enough to feel responsive not tracky from the back as it zipped along in trim and really solid despite it's narrow nose on the tip.

Having headed beachwards with little expectation of a dip, an hour, alone in the line-up in the fading sun brought big smiles.

 In other news, i tried on one of the samples of the new Nineplus Hasu chest zip suits this week.
All black with a subtle gold logo, it features the lightest, stretchiest single lined yamamoto i've seen. Really looking forward to mine arriving in a couple of weeks now!

on the line.....

where the streets have no name...

well they do......... it's just in french!

wood is good

for the daily commute

Reissue not original but very sweet all the same, stacey peralta warp tail, trackers and cambria wheels. Loose as a goose and oh so much fun.

Mega thanks to Gavin at surrey skateboards for taking so much pleasure in sorting me out, it was greatly appreciated!

monsieur le chef

So back from France and home to conditions that resemble the hundred year storm at the end of "point break" with gale force onshores and too much swell. Thankfully we just avoided a ferry back in these conditions, I'm certain it wouldn't have been a pleasant crossing!

The friendly chef in the photo stands outside a bistro in st Gilles croix de vie, in the vendee about an hour north of la Rochelle. The beach breaks all looked super fun but we only saw them breaking at six inches on probably the only totally flat week of the summer. Gutted! Perfect for the little 'un to trim along her first green wave. Definately little acorns....It was baking hot and sunny with plenty of vin rouge and moules frites to help pass the time, all of  which makes our sudden headlong rush into autumn seem all the more saddening.

In other news, James Parry's hip wigglers went off last Saturday at gwithian, there are reports of real high quality logging and some great pictures leaking out. Little bit gutted I missed it but thank you James for the invite! James just left blighty heading to Ca for the Malibu duct tape next weekend, neatly coiffured as usual and with a shiny new slide 65 under arm.

Issue 13 of Corduroy Lines is nearly ready to buy as well, its a proper homegrown longboard magazine and each issue gets better. Sure this one is no exception! you can pre-order from corduroy lines.com.

Right i'm off to batten down some hatches, or something like that!

refugio

What the Santa Barbara area might lack in year round swell, it more than makes up for in potential for fun when the swell does come. This is Refugio, yet another friendly right hander about 25 minutes north of town. Tiny but perfect fun!

going right

rolling in SB

Beach cruisers on the boardwalk are a classic californian stereotype in the world at large but the reality is that they are ridden by huge numbers of locals completely without irony. As i've blogged before, cruisers are fun to ride (on the flat) and a sunny beach side path is just about the best place to ride one.

This is a schwinn that i rented in Santa Barbara, a company that have been making these bikes for a long time. Not quite as nice to ride as my electra but a couple of hours cruising the coast path  in SB on this one was one of my favourite parts of the trip.

a moment of singular joy

There's nothing quite like the moment you round the final bend to see glassy lines rolling in and no one in the water. Of course it doesn't happen often in todays crowded line ups but when a little effort yields this kind of result it's a moment to savour!

rocking the status quo....

Not the actual Quo you understand. I'm not advocating you go out and listen to caroline or rocking all over the world! I'm thinking more the way things are, there in your comfort zone. It's easy to get complacent, follow the same routines, the same well worn ruts to the same spots with the same boards.

Sometimes what you need is something from out of left field to make you sit up and take notice, make you take a look at things and see them from a new perspective, maybe give you the things you were missing even if you didn't realise they were absent. Just because things are easy, rubbing along nicely doesn't always mean it's the best way forward. Maybe there's a lesson for life, that you should keep looking forward, working at it, not rest on your laurels. It's fashionable to talk about "going on a journey" right now, reality shows are full of it but Shmaltz aside there's a kernel of truth there...

Case in point, the mini simm in the picture. Obviously a fashion correct hipster such as myself had to have one or i wouldn't be able to walk down the beach with head held high. Yet jesting aside, the mini simmons design and the thinking behind it has had a big effect on the daily surfing of a lot of people worldwide. It's a design that looks odd, feels a bit funny to surf initially but unlocks a huge amount of fun in marginal conditions. It's certainly redfined the way i've felt about small boards in small waves and is responsible for more surf stoked smiles than almost anything else in the last few months

surfcheck..

 

 Even with all the sophisticated ways of predicting and checking the surf, swell and wind from your phone or desktop at work, nothing really beats doing it visually. Even if you have an idea of what you're going to find, the nervous anticipation of glimpsing sections of sea as you near the beach, teasing views with not quite enough scope to reveal the conditions at hand, rounding the last couple of corners to actually eyeball the 

waves........

Sometimes lo-fi is the best way to go

type 3

super cool vintage surf mobile!

Mc mushburgers...

 I'm sure that certain designs or types of shape suit some people's natual flair more than others, i think it's a two way process and I think it's interesting how riding different things influences and improves your surfing. What you ride changes how you surf, how you look at a wave and the lines you aspire to draw . It's something i really believe in.

I've been riding my dano old pleasure a lot lately but last week i swapped it's place in the van for the classic malibu jai lee, one of my old faithfuls.

The dano's definately pig influenced - narrow nose, wide tail and wide point aft. Getting it to perform means quick footwork, an almost exagerated level of body english and stall and trim style surfing. Especially at a slack wave like saunton, it needs to be kept in the pocket as much as possible and bogs quickly on the nose if you stray too far away. In the wrong place it feels sluggish and heavy, in the right spot it's loose and stable will beat sections from the nose in breathtaking fashion. It's also my heaviest board yet turns on a dime with a bit of grunt to help it rotate.

The Jai Lee is more of a conventional noserider shape, albeit with a bit of a hips back influence, and is a much easier board to surf.  This particular session i really noticed how much quicker my footwork seemed to have gotten and how much more power (in a pivoty sense) i felt in my cutbacks since i've been riding the dano. Maybe it's just my perception but it really felt like riding the dano and thinking about how to get it to work best had kicked up my surfing just a little notch, that i got a few seconds more on the tip, that my crosssteps were more surefooted, my cutbacks a little deeper, my surfing more fluid around the pocket.

Of Course i'm sure i still looked like a kook fromt the beach but i'm a legend in my own mind!

race

BGA,five over, racing the section.

The last couple of weekends have had fun clean waves but the onshores are back today. Funnily enough it's the start of the contest season at saunton too. No doubt people in vests are enjoying the paddle workout of 4 foot onshore mushy beachbreak right now. I, meanwhile, have coffee and a smug feeling i'm not missing much!

the open road

There's something exciting about the start of a road trip. The anticipation as the leaving date approaches, the loading as you try to cram one too many essentials in a little too little space, obsessively checking the forecast. Then the off, the road and the possibilities stretching out in front of you, a map and a hunch and a bunch of cd's..........

on the racks...

Perhaps i'm biased but i don't think anyone is making surfboards in the UK that are any better shaped or finished than Gulfstream. Maybe there are a couple of people that are comparable, but sadly i don't think there ar man people even trying to match the care and craftsmanship that most US logging labels strive for.

That said, i  have an order in with Squire, the label run by John Isaac and made by Seabase. Given John's eye for detail i'm sure it will live up to expectation.

norwegian wood

on the rocks....

Local foul weather "go to" spot. Sadly a case of looking better from the shore than the line up. Maybe it's a symptom of my addiction but it still felt better to paddle out and prove the wind was too strong than leave without surfing and later convince myself (erroneously) i drove away from an epic little session!