leadbetter

A few hundred yards from the great sushi shack on santa barbara harbor. Very mellow righthander breaks off the point in the distance but lack of swell and no lack of SUP's prevented a first hand assessment of it's quality!

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!

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.

trim kings....

One really cool thing about surfing in california is the amount of natural life in evidence all around you. Perhaps thats more true of the slightly less urban beaches but there are seals and dolphins swimming through the line up, kelp fronds grabbing your fin and smoothing out chop, lizards scurrying past you feet as you walk down the beach paths and of course the pelicans.

There's something really pleasing about watching a group of pelicans glide past, in formation like WW2 bombers on a mission. The way they glide with wingtips mere millimetres above the water surface, never touching, harnessing the updrafts along a walling wave before climbing high, folding their wings and dropping like an arrow into the water to bob up seconds later, nonchalent and still.

They make our honking seagulls seem yobbish and louche and i never once spotted one attacking a beachgoer for his sandwich!