number 3

lifeguard hut number 3 Mars............well Del Mar actually

young greg

i'd love to give some bethany hamiltonesque tale of greg's struggle to paddle in a straight line despite losing part of his arm to a particularly pissed off local crab but it would all be lies!

the skipper

Tourmaline, despite being designated an "official surfing park" is never going to make headlines on it's wave quality alone. In fact on an average day it bares a very close resemblance to my local spot being a lined up mushy beachbreak. It is, however, a lot of fun on a loggy board and has a pretty vibrant local scene, with friendly talented locals in the line up.

It's also Skip Frye's local beach and i have to admit that sharing the lineup with him was one of the highlights of my trip. He's still a REALLY good surfer, always in the right spot to take off with minimum effort. Lithely bounding to his feet with a grace that belies his age. Eaking every last moment of trim out of each little peeler before paddling back out with a smile.

I'd love to say that i managed to pick up one of his boards as well, a nice Eagle or something, and i did see a couple for sale, but at $1500 - $2500 second hand, even i couldn't justify it.

summer reality

 With the sun and the waves come the crowds and the frustration of not being able to get a parking space in the lot or a wave unmolested by kooks. Marlow has the right idea perhaps having just invested in a 10 foot Bic. Unhampered by a nice gloss coat he's prepared to mow them down!

I'm thinking a padded paddle and an SUP, then i could evolve some kind of medieval jousting moves!

spacehopper

It's father's day today and i'm proud to be a dad. It's an honor and a privilege & I hope i've been a good one this year. Happy Father's day to my dad. Thanks for being a cool parent, always interested in the stuff i was into and always supportive. I know you're proud of me and that means a lot.

oh and happy birthday to me too!

Horsies

We woke up one morning in Morzine to find these semi wild horses raiding the bins. My daughter was way more stoked to see them than our hosts. Seems the French binmen run on an even more relaxed schedule than ours!

playing place

As you read this i am either sat at Heathrow or sat on a shiny Virgin jumbo winging it's way towards LA and (right hand) points south. I am hopefully going to be "mining the stoke" in So Cal for the next 2.5 weeks and "excited" barely covers it! Stay tuned for future posts to find out if the reality actually lives up to the dream!

carousel

My daughter's in there somewhere!

jus lookin (but in a different direction)

Al trying to decide which goggles to take!

Robot Ballet

Bar of wax if you can tell me where this is!

twinkling toes

I tell myself my hooked toes are an evolutionary advantage to aid my control while hanging five or ten but really i'm just deformed!

With the forecast looking promising, hopefully today's wind allows just a temporary rest between the fun waves of the last week and what lies in store for next.

I've had plenty of hull related stoke recently, culminating in probably my best session on the slippery wee thing on Tuesday. I know i've said before but the feeling of smooth drivey projection off the bottom and the knife through butter high line trim are just awesome. It's also kind of fun lending it to friends who are good surfers and watching it confuse them. Trying to surf hulls off the back foot just doesn't work (eh Ben?)

There's a Isaac organised surf jumble in St Merryn tomorrow, in the village hall i think. He'd love it if lots of you stopped by. I wish I could!

jus lookin

They say procrastination is the thief of time (i've always loved that phrase) and they are probably right. Most of us always look at the surf when we get to the beach (despite often having spent a fair amount of time checking a variety of webcams beforehand) but i think sometimes you can look too long. Especially  if it is small or cold or massive or onshore, too much time looking can just allow that element of doubt to creep in, is it rideable? is it too big a paddle? am i feeling a bit tired? Usually you are actually better off just changing and going in anyway, if you're like me you will rarely regret it. Take this pair for example, watching a succession of (admittedly occasional) very loggable sets come through before going home again.
The next few days were flat. Moral of the story, make the most of what you've got and never drive away from clean waves without getting wet first!

unseasonal

Another holga self portrait. I'm off to france to slide down some mountains again this week. Kind of seems weird to be going to a snowy place now spring is in the air and summer logging seems just round the corner.

what's old is new again

The wishthound gave me a new skateboard a month or so ago, much to my wife's disgust i might add.Since then i've spent an enjoyable number of hours (in upstanding member of the community fashion not like a ne'er do well abusing council property or anything :-)) rolling around Barnstaple's new-ish skatepark. I have discovered a few things:

Firstly i'd forgotten how much fun skating is, not having ridden anything other than a big long skateboard for 5 years. I can actually remember how to do some tricks though i've forgotten more. Each time i leave for home, i remember something else that i should have tried, a trick that used to languish in the bottom of the trick bag. all those years ago. There is still that same satisfaction from landing something (however simple now) and rolling away clean that never changes.

Secondly, i don't bounce like i did ten years ago. I have a fraction of the bottle i used to have, gone are the days of throwing myself down sets of stairs with abandon. The threat of broken limbs & their consequences loom ever larger and well, concrete is hard and it hurts, for a lot longer as well at my advanced age. In the wishthounds words, the ability curve for surfing is gradual but with an overall upward trend for most of your life, with skating it peaks early and it's pretty much all downhill from there, but if you're having fun, who cares right?

Thirdly, like surfing, it never truly leaves. Skateboarding was a big part of my growing up, becoming a man, it shaped my future path in life in a way that i only recently understand. It changes how you look at the physical world we interact with on a daily basis and i don't think you ever fully forget that or ever lose the desire to skate, it's just your body that lets you down. Even though there are a couple of long periods when i haven't rolled around, it's always in there bubbling away under the surface.

Finally kids today have it easy! The park in the pictures is one of at least five small skate facilities (off the top of my head) within a 30 minute drive, in a relatively rural area, all well built and good to skate. Back in the early nineties, my friend's mum fought for years for our midland council to build some ramps and when they did it was virtually unusable. Skateboarding is acceptable now in a way that it never was when i started (though there is still a punk ethos like there used to be once you dig beneath the shiny veneer of tony hawk & the x games)

Kids today learn tricks in their first year that were beyond the imagination of the pros of the eighties and it's easy to learn them because the boards are light and you can see things to inspire you in magazines, dvd's, on youtube and in your local town. Things never used to be like that (please excuse the monty python style "it were hard in my day" monologue but..)

Take learning to ollie for example, essential basic skating building block. That took us ages to learn, we had heard reference to it & seen stills of people in the air but never actually seen a video or much less anyone do it in real life. Our town had no older skaters to copy and it wasn't until a friend of a friend managed to get a photocopy of a "how to" from an old mag that we managed to see how it was done, before that it might as well have been magic. In fact i can still remember the afternoon my friend and i first managed to properly leave the ground.

Steve Pezman has a great quote in Andrew Kidman's Glass Love where he talks about surfing as you get older being just as challenging and rewarding even though your actual ability level might be decreasing as your body ages. His point is that as even the simpler things become harder, the satisfaction in still achieving them increases and the sum total of joy (or stoke if you like) in that is the same as it ever was. I think he's right and the same applies to skating, surfing, pretty much any physical activity

So here's to my fellow old skaters with a peter pan complex! It's a shame i have a princess obsessed daughter, a son might have given me the perfect, spouse approved, excuse to keep going!

Incidentally i just saw the latest Flip movie (Extremely Sorry) The level of skating is fully RIDICULOUS!  I always have a soft spot for Flip, being the phoenix from the ashes of Classic Brit brand Deathbox & sponsors of two of my favorite ever skaters Tom Penny & Geoff Rowley. Their new dvd is well worth a watch if you get the chance, just not with any young impressionable children in attendance!

self portrait

winter wonderland

Rare to get this much snow round here but certainly made my walk to work a bit more picturesque (& treacherous!)

fish frenzy