winter solace

Winter Solace from Tauk Is Cheap Productions on Vimeo.

A short of some wintery east coast waves. Looks a lot like here on a good day. Love Mikeys style on a log!

fronds

Pictures of silhouettes and sunsets continue to obsess me. The views from my house regularly blow my mind

Chamois

Just back from a lightening trip to France for some snow sliding. Chamonix and the surrounding area is so rad. Fun to be back in winter on the same roads and passes that i climbed by bike last summer.

lake atlantic

Summer seems a long time ago right now........

Lemon next to the pie..

 

 A little cove near Cayucos, central california. They make AMAZING pie in cayucos!

santa cruz

 

Santa Cruz is rad. It deserves the hype as a surf town with something for everyone and i really enjoyed the couple of days we spent there. I think i've had a soft spot for it ever since i visited with a skateboard in pre-surfer days twenty odd years ago. Reading Dan Duanes "caught inside, a surfers year on the coast" further ingrained it's appeal in my conciousness. For me it encapsulates a lot of what i like about california. It's a little more "real", quieter and less plastic than some areas further south. The people are friendly, it has a wealth of right hand point breaks. The surrounding coast and countryside are greener and a little more rugged than SoCal, and there are more breaks in the urban continuum along the coast. It feels like an "outdoors" kind of place in the same way that the lake district does over here.

I'd love to go back soon, i could definately live there

mondos

 

The right handers keep coming down Highway 1. This is Mondos which is inside pitas point between Santa Barabara and Ventura. It's probably the closest wave to saunton ive surfed abroad. Really mellow and friendly stoked crowd of older locals and a hefty dose of srf school carnage on the inside. Pitas point itself is i think the longest wave in Ca but it only wakes up in the winter. This inside spot was good for a couple of mornings of trunk based sliding nevertheless!

devon corduroy

 

Lines from the lookout on a solid winter swell

alpine

Because it's all water right?!

pleasure park

Holga's view of Santa Monica pier. Just far enough away that you cant see the true horror!

#winteriscoming

 

It's been a bit of a weird season in the alps so far by all accounts. Good early snowfall followed by unseasonably warm weather and frankly shocking webcam pictures of grass in resorts and places like Les Get reopening their mountain bike routes to get some visitor numbers back. Sems like it's come good again now with some good early January dumps of fresh snow. Hopefully chamonix will look like this in March again this year when we go back

We're not taking chances for our first jaunt of the season by heading to Hemsedal in Norway again next week. It's bigger and steeper than Geilo where we have been before with more chance of off piste tree runs. Should be fun exploring somewhere new and trying to keep up with our kids who get faster each year as we get slower!

Stay tuned to Instagram from the 31st for sub arctic snowy vistas by the bucketload!

keels are so hot right now...

The third(?) rise of the keel fish is coming, mark my words!

They may have been the design that spearheaded the "ride everything" alternative shape revoloution in the early two thousands, turning plenty of thruster riding shortboarders onto designs with more volume and flow and coaxing longboarders onto something shorter, but the humble keel fish hasnt really been the board du jour in more recent times.

They flat out work though, in a wide range of surf, not just mushy junk waves ( the design was basically born in san diegan barrels) and ive long believed that with a log and a fish as a quiver you've got pretty much everything covered for everday waves.

Auralian Asher Pacey and his self shaped 5'4 along with Ryan Burch and Bryce Young in california have bumped the design back into the limelight. Burch's section (most of which is above) in Psychic Migrations from Volcom in particular shows the keel in bigger more powerful surf than it is often associated with. Burch rips.

Over here Gulfstream make an amazing keel fish. If you havent ridden one, its a design that deserves your attention, whether you're concerned with being "on trend" or not!