coastal cruising no.2

Happy New Year one and all, yes i know it's slightly premature but reading blogs will doubtless be low on all your list of post celebration things to do tomorrow morning so i'm getting in early!

The last couple of years i've listed my top three "funnest"  boards of the year at this point but 2011 has been a year of transition in my quiver with a bit of a clearout followed by some new acquisitions so i thought i'd list them all as they stand right now, when i'm happy with all of them and not bored of anything enough to sell right now!


So here goes:


5'2 Tyler Warren for Hobie Bar of Soap.
5'6 Gulfstream twin keel fish.
5'6 Jeff McCallum Mford
5'8 Larry Mabile classic keel fish
6'10 Spence by Tim Mason displacement hull
9'4 Bing NR-2
9'4 Gulfstream CP model diamond tail saunton foil or "old faithful!"
9'4 Squire Dirk of doom (gato death dagger inspired pointy log!)
9'5 Dano Old Pleasure
9'6 Classic Malibu Jai Lee 1 model

If i'm honest, it's the bar of soap and the mford that i'm most excited about surfing at the moment, both different branches of the simmons inspired tree, both blazing fast and loose, both great on our frequent average days as well as the good ones. Of course ask me in a couple of months and i'll probably give you a different answer!

Incidentally, the photo is topanga in case you were wondering!

coastal cruising no.1

 

carp 

 

seasons greetings..

the merriest of christmasses and best wishes of the season to everyone!

crystal cottages

Taking the title for my girl's favorite californian beach is historic crystal cove, just up the coast from laguna beach and one of the bays that make up a state park. There's a beautiful golden sand beach and tucked into the dunes a collection of wooden cottages in varying states of repair. Back during the depression they were built by a group of locals keen to escape the awfulness of the times and live simply by the sea. They became a favorite area for artists to work before many fell into disrepair. The Californian State Park authority purchased them all a few years ago and is busy restoring them, rebuilding, painting them. It's possible to rent them to stay in now as well although word has it it's difficult to get a reservation.

It's a spot you could easily drive right past on PCH 1 but there's such a cute feel to the place it's worth stopping and taking the time to visit.

soap and chair no.1

 

Feels a little like groundhog day around here, the pattern of big lows but strong westerley flow has wrecked any plans for surfing my local for the last few weeks and i'm starting to worry i might actually have forgotten how to surf by the time i get in again. The water temp will undoubtedly have dropped by the time the wind eases and the rubber quotient will have risen to the full gimp suit level as a result!

Listening to others plans for imminent departure for sunnier climes is not helping either! At least there's plenty of christmas cheer around in the village to keep our spirits up!

les dunes

Dear Santa...

If that special someone in your life is casting around for christmas pressie ideas, here's a book that it might be worth dropping a few hints about..........The Surfing Tribe by Roger Mansfield..........

The british isles has rich and storied surf history but for many years, not much of it was written down, that was at least until roger mansfield took the task in hand and started to write "the surfing tribe"


Originally released in 2009 and now back in a second, updated edition, it's a beautifully presented book, crammed with high quality photographs and little vignettes of the places and characters that have populated british surfing over the years. From the outside, its a mind boggling task to begin, even if you experienced much of it firsthand as Roger undoubtedly did. It must have taken a huge amount of work to bring it together. The resulting tome is well researched and lovingly written with a section for each of the surfing areas in the country, detailing the history of the scene in each place. The prose is easy to read if a little simple at times and the scope of the information is vast which perhaps necessitates the slightly simplified approach. While the focus is very much our own country's stories, the worldwide history of surfing is told in broad strokes which helps to contextualise our history within the greater whole.

Like much of history, it's the characters within the stories and events that make it interesting and as the name suggests, the sufing tribe is very much about people rather than places and things. With surfing's counterculture past it's little surprise that the book is filled with tales of wanderers, dreamers, chancers, visionaries and hustlers. Names that still grace our surf landscape today and names long forgotten, tales of derring do and those with better luck than judgement.What comes through it all is a peculiar britishness to surfing in this country, something the book rightly celebrates and something that we should be proud of and celebrate more than we often do. Surfing in our damp windy isle is not quite the same beast as it is in sunnier climes and this comes across well in "The surfing tribe".

All in all its a worthy addition to any coffee table or bookshelf. I like to think that I have a reasonable grasp on the past but I learnt many new things, not least about the stretch of coast closest to my front door. I enjoyed it and I think you would too!

searching for a life less ordinary.....

aren't we all?

douglas e powell

 

 The exceedingly talented, Mr Douglas E Powell. Acoustic singer songwriter tinged with americana, english folk and melancholy. Wholly deserving of your attention!

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!

flathead

 

solace in a six string....

 

One of the peculiar (and also best) things about surfing is how all-consuming an activity it is, while you're out there i mean. There's the oft-used quote of the "church of the open sky" and hackneyed though it is, the sentiment behind it rings true. For me, and for lots of others too, no matter what's going on in our lives or how busy or stressed we feel, we can leave everything on the beach and let our minds be all consumed by the activity itself. The lines of whitewater serving as breaks to disconnect a busy mind as we wade out, the physical effort bringing peace through repetition of simple action. The rhythm of the sea, not the ticking of a clock dictating the pace of the activity. It becomes a touchstone, a constant in our lives, marking the passing of events, helping to deal with the peaks and troughs, a stillness we can come back to, a place of refuge in a sea of change.

Playing the guitar is a lot like that too. I've been playing a long time, counting up just how long makes me feel old, and though the desire to play waxes and wanes as the years pass, it never leaves. It's hard to explain to a non-player but, though your mind is partly focussed on making your fingers move, letting the notes flow through you and out of your fingers, especially while improvising, brings a kind of relaxing that makes minutes drift by and nothing else matter. Sounds cheesy typed out but some of you will know what i mean.

As an aside, i was well into music before i picked up a guitar. Not long afterwards, I remember one day looking across at my guitar in the corner of my bedroom and thinking how cool and amazing it was that pretty much all the music i'd ever heard or would ever hear could be coaxed out of those six strings. The breadth of the human condition and the full gamut of our emotions expressable for anyone with enough imagination. My tastes and views are more mature and broad and sophisticated now but its still true and its an idea that still fills me with wonder whenever it flits through my conciousness.