The Major

Tom Major, another one of the younger local crew with a penchant for longer equipment, now terrorising welsh line ups until christmas...

tidepools

fizzers!

Happy faces after making the most of another Westerly day. Greg (on the right) is possibly one of the most surf stoked people i know & always down to surf no matter what the conditions.
He has a blog here

sunset sessions

I'm not a big fan of winter (unless i'm in the mountains) so it's always with a certain amount of sadness that i watch summer end, the nights draw in and after work surfs finish for another few months. Something about facing up to the inevitability of having to don even more rubber in chilly car parks to get a few waves for the next 8 months brings with it a sense of melancholy.

However, autumn is a great time of year for clean swells and the last few days of sun. Some of my favorite ever surfs have been trading small waves & smiles with friends, watching the sun go down, catching a wave in by feel alone & stumbling up the beach in the dark. I've been lucky enough to have a couple of sessions like this recently, reminders of years gone past when the crowds were fewer and you knew every face in the water. Fun times.........

microstoke....

slightly self indulgent but i am stoked/ very proud of my daughter who stood up on her first wave sunday, not bad for 4 3/4 years old. Wish i could have started that young!

ex world champ

As a "p.s." to the skelton post, he really is ex world bellyboard champ, for this session selecting his mothers favorite board, painted with a pregnant seahorse in honour of skelly's birth.

one more

There's an old bumper sticker, seen around california a few years ago: "One Fin, One God, One Country"

While I'm not in any way a religious man in the normal sense of the word, I am perhaps something of a zealot when it comes to my choice of logging equipment. I know there are sound performance reasons for choosing a 3 fin board but I've never found they work for me, their more drawn out turns don't fit naturally with how I want to surf, and as for bigger waves, in the words of Tmoe Campbell, "logging is a strictly under head high trip." (Don't even get me started on progressive longboarding!)

Thinking about this the other day lead me to an interesting question: Does your choice of equipment end up defining how you surf or do you end up choosing equipment that fits your natural style? It's probably a chicken and egg question but by way of illustration...

I spent a couple of hours surfing a friend's Junod Two-tone noserider the other day. It's a very "pig influenced shape" with lots of roll, wide hips and a narrow nose. Very much a pocket noserider and a beautiful board. I tend to surf with a fairly smooth (in my own mind) traditional style but with this particular steed, the more outrageous body english I attempted, the more it seemed to respond. Fixing in my minds eye a vision of Alex Knost style theatrics, I proceeded to have an absolute blast. Suddenly I could see where his style had it's roots and I'm sure that years of getting the most out of such a shape may have helped to define his approach. Jared Mell surfs similar boards and clearly has similar elements to his style too. Musing further, it's also clear that your local waves will have a massive influence both on style and choice of equipment. Piggy logs, for example, love clean steep waves but don't noseride especially well in the mushy windswell waves we deal with so frequently.

Not a conclusive answer or a scientific approach at all but something that made me think.

caught inside

Clearing out an old bookcase the other day, i came across "Caught Inside" by Daniel Duane and was reminded quite how important a book it was to me at the start of my surfing obsession. I came to surfing pretty late after a mispent youth obsessed with skateboarding and snowboarding. Surfing had always appealed to me but living over 2 hours from the ocean and not being a strong swimmer it always seemed an unobtainable pursuit. Around the time that caught inside was published i found myself with a job, a car and time to make it to the beach. Funny to think how those first few forays into the whitewater came to define my life thereafter so much.
The book itself chronicles Duane's year after moving from Berekely to Santa Cruz to learn to surf. Once there he immerses himself in surfing, it's history and begins to meet some new friends, real surfers not those chasing sponsorsip. Much about the book appealed to me, the descriptions of isolated NorCal beaches somehow sounding similar to our rugged coast, the agony and ecstasy of the learning curve, the way that surfing finds it's way into your soul and the sense of community found between everyday surfers sharing waves.
I loved every page and have read it several times since. For me it described something i wanted to be part of, ultimately something i've since felt i had been searching for all along and it definately influenced me into prioritising moving to the coast.
I guess many of you will have read it already as it's ten years old, but if you haven't, treat yourself to a cheap purchase from amazon and feel inspired.

the skelton

He'll probably hate me for posting this but......

Skelly, a true local underground legend, surfs better than you, rips on everything from a vintage 60's bilbo to a modern thruster, has one of the largest collections of vintage boards in the country, learnt to play the concertina (really well) for a bet, ex world bellyboard champion, Gulfstream shop manager, spear fisherman, true friend and someone I respect a huge amount. His name would have been all over the mags if he was interested in the recognition but he prefers a simple life with as much water time as possible.

The pic is from midtide, midmorning Saunton, the board is a 5'8 twin keel, shaped by Rich Pavel in exchange for a fish and chip supper when he visited here a couple of years ago. Legend has it that this board and it's 5'4 successor are virtually the only boards Rich has completely handshaped in recent years. Either way they both fly under his feet.

maximum fun potential..

One of the things i love about logging is that you don't need a lot of wave to have a good time. Sometimes it's good to be silly and remember that surfing is meant to be about getting away from the stress of life and having fun with friends.

photo courtesy of youngstu

howling

With our prevailing wind direction being onshore and surfing mostly beach breaks we have to deal with a lot of short period windswell, 6 or 7 second period, stuff our californian colleagues would not step into a wet wetsuit for and waves your average east coast US surfer is used to (albeit with much warmer water)

If you're in the right mood, it's big enough and you can face the marathon paddle outs, it can still be a lot of fun. I still find it only takes one good wave in a session to push lifes trials and tribulations to a far corner of the mind.