The shelves of your local surfshop are filled with a steady stream of new dvds each featuring an all star cast of action heroes pulling into monster barrels in Tahiti or pulling monster airs in Indo. Yet the number of movies celebrating our homegrown talent is woefully small. Having already seen some stills from some of the sessions included in Fusion, it was with a fair amount of excitement that i slipped it into my dvd player.

In the shops as you read this (or available through http://www.surfclips.co.uk) it aims to reveal British surfing and British waves at their best. It’s been a labour of love for filmaker Ross Johns over the last three years and has lead to many an uncomfortable night asleep in the car and many a junkfuelled petrol station dinner.

From the start, there’s no delusions of Thomas Campbell, there’s no chin stroking celebration of how cool we all are for being surfers, this is straight up surf porn. Set to a pumping soundtrack of dance and guitar bands, it’s a balls to the wall barrel fest of epic proportions.

If you are unaware of the quality of the current crop of top British surfers, or you are unaware quite how good some of the waves in the UK are, you will be picking your jaw up off the floor time and again. Some of the slab waves are very scary looking indeed with tow or paddle entry and the quality of the camera work is good. It’s not all pits either, a large number of lips get well and truly slayed over the 60 minute(ish) running time along with some pretty progressive aerial surfing as well.

It’s filmed all over the South West, shows the brown water of North Yorkshire at it’s best and features some of the recent slab sessions in Caithness at waves like Bagpipes that have been well documented in Carve and others.

The cast list is a veritable who’s who of UK shortboarding from Russ Winter and Stokesy (who has a good section as does Mark “Egor” Harris) to newer names like Tom Butler. Reubyn Ash is perhaps the only notable not present.

There’s a dash of progressive longboarding in the mix too. Adam Griffiths and Ben Skinner wield their nine foot sticks into turns that most people dream of doing on boards three feet shorter, before they prove they are both equally at home on shorter, skinnier equipment.

This isn’t “Thicker Than Water”, its not trying to be. It is a great document of where we are right now and almost certainly shows the highest level of homegrown surfing captured on video to date. If it doesn’t inspire you to pull in deeper or smack the lip harder the next time you surf then nothing will!

Have a gander at what’s available here, if you like quality custom-built boards, with a flair, intuition, creativity and love, you’ll get on board with Neil’s finished articles.

The beauty of finless surfing was captured immediately by Tom Wegener when he thought about shaping again and then surfing his first alaia. At the beginning he rode it prone, because after having mastered his art as a finned surfer, riding a finless plank of wood was suddenly a new beginning and a new form of glide, one he had never felt before, and one that happened to be extremely difficult. Soon enough he stood up and so did the amazingly talented surfers that share his Noosa sessions, capturing our imagination all over the world, and stimulating some of us to try it too.

Trying is what it is all about really. So I tried and still am, sometimes successfully riding a wave, most of the time struggling to catch them, but always with an intense satisfaction when it is done right.

Most people will not do it because they wouldn’t want to waist a good session on their dialed board. Too bad; but then most people don’t like to get out of the track either. For those who dare experiment the finless motion though, a new world of glide will open its doors to them.

What is happening is not a revolution. The shortboard was a revolution, when from one year to the next, almost all longboards were replaced in the water by shorter single fins. In spite of the fame finless boards have acquired in the last couple of years (mostly alaias to be exact), no significant proportion of surfers will soon swap their usual boards on a regular basis. And yet, everybody knows someone that has one in his quiver, should it be made of wood or of foam.

Neither is it an evolution. The evolution was Tom Blake’s idea to add a stabilizer to his surfboard and make it easier to ride and turn, followed by creative surfers and shapers fine tuning whatever idea was theirs at the time (Bob Simmons, George Greenough, Simon Anderson, etc…), and contributing to surfing’s big leaps. Considering the type of boards we are talking about, taking the only element of balance out of the equation would be rather coldly considered as a step backwards by most surfers. And who could blame them given the level of ability and technique required to surf properly those new finless surf crafts?

Rebellion is what most accurately defines what is happening with finless surfing, or to simplify, finless boards.

Alaias have been shaped and surfed again for 5 or 6 years. Seeing some of the best surfers in the world ride them the way they do is striking after such a short period. What will the surfscape look like in a generation, when some young surfers will have learnt how to surf on these boards from the very beginning?

Part of the answer lies in the efforts of finless shapers and surfers to come up with new type of slick boards, adding some volume to the genuine alaia. They will float better, paddle better, and most of all allow access to many more waves.

History and memory is one thing, improving concepts is another, and as the French say, there is no need to be more Royal then the King himself. Finless foam or hollow boards are not as fast and flexible, but they are much easier to surf than the thin wood planks, and still deliver that very specific joy and stoke.

The movement started with one man, interested in ancient times, skilled and passionate. He reproduced what he saw in the Bishop Museum of Hawaii, but didn’t hang it on the wall like others before him. He surfed it. Then shaped another one and changed things. He found out what worked and what didn’t, outlines, lengths, rails, curves, he explored all aspects and even found the best common wood for the job. If everybody talks about alaias and the absence of fins today it is because Tom Wegener dedicated so much time to this idea. And he still does. Logically, the next step was to add volume to the alaias, which he did with what he calls the Tuna, a bodied interpretation of the alaia, made of wood, or foam, or even both sometimes. Every day in Noosa he surfs and experiments with these finless prototypes, changing materials, measurements, and templates once again.

At the same time, other surfers also started thinking that fins were not that essential for a surfboard to glide and begun their own experimentation, following different tracks, and creating a world-wide interest through the films, footage and pictures that can be seen more and more often as time goes by.

What Derek Hynd is doing in his world class South African backyard is mind blowing. His approach is so different from Wegener’s that it surely paves the way for more finless shapes and directions to become available in the near future. Instead of a long concave and sharp rails to grab the wall and fly, Derek Hynd started cutting inches out of old boards, shaping channels on the bottom, foiling back the rails, then re-glassing them to see how these ideas worked. They obviously do, if he can spin several times at big J-bay without loosing his forward momentum, then take a highline and accelerate even more while launching himself again on the steep wall of the wave.

In California, the everlasting Hydrodynamica project led Richard Kenvin to shape, with his non-surfer accomplice Carl Ekström, finless foam boards. For them the approach was similar to Hynd’s, using deep channels to compensate the absence of fins and create grip. The concept was however carried out by a designer, an expert in fluid hydrodynamics, which led in turn to a totally different result. Kenvin started surfing and filming to show what was going on at Windandsea.

More recently, Ryan Burch, goofing around and having fun as he does, dug a little more into the planning hull bible (Naval Architecture of Planing Hulls, by Lindsay Lord, first published in 1946). He proposed that perhaps something even more basic could work, a rectangular piece of foam for instance, slightly scooped on the nose and not even glassed (why bother?). And he saw a similar result, the speed down the line is so unbelievable that when you see the footage, it almost seems as if the film was played in fast forward. He could make waves that would have possibly not been makeable with a finned board, getting deep into barrels with nothing but a piece of EPS. The cheapest board ever…

Ryan Burch & Eric Snortum surf alaias:

Historicism, empiricism, hydrodynamic theory and application; whatever the method, a few creative shapers and surfers have recently decided that it was time for something new, that they’d had enough of fins and of the everlasting debate of what set up is the best. Now for them, and those who listen, it is no longer an issue. Many people would agree, we live in the best times to be a surfer, and the best times to rebel against the monotony of the line-ups and the dictatorship of the top 44 surfing style.

Tom Wegener has brought to our attention again the possibility of surfing finless, while standing up. Without him we would still have forgotten that not so long ago surfers didn’t even have a choice, and most of all without him, finless surfing might still be only anecdotal.

The finless virus has spread and is now very active all over our the globe, though few people have yet been contaminated. For those who are interested in contemporary surf culture, no decent surf festival excludes the finless phenomena: Noosa Surf Festival, Green Room Festival, Surf Film Festival Ciudad de Santander, Surf Film Festival Saint-Jean de Luz, every one of them is now fishing for the latest finless surfing premiere.

Perhaps we should keep in mind one of surf’s unwritten rules – the less we are, the better we are.

Luke writes… We’ve just gotten back from a few days in the jungle with our friend Hendri. It’s something that we’ve wanted to do for a while. A few hours upriver in a small canoe, a muddy trek for an hour or so, and a step back in time.

The Mentawai people are known for having on of the world’s most fascinating and preserved indigenous cultures. Living in the ulu (jungle), they’re completely in tune with their environment. For a pair of city slickers like us, it was a humbling experience and something not easily forgotten.

For now the modern world has little relevance to this remote part of the world, but traditions are slowly eroding. It may be that the Mentawai way of life may soon be a thing of the past.

Happy hunting

Tools of the trade

Keeping watch. cooking sagu over the flames

Sikerei - mentawai medicine man

This aint no master chef - preparing poison

Poison arrows

Harbour masters

Family portrait

Flavour country

Bye bye Mentawai

If you’re interested in learning more, our friend Rob spent a year living in the Mentawai. He’s finalising a documentary project at the moment – check the trailer on his website (or watch below) and subscribe to his mailing list.

It’s 5.30pm and I’m strapping the boards on the car. 5.30pm and I’m only just about to leave – no early finishes, no afternoon off, but it doesn’t matter because 5.30pm today doesn’t mean what it did a couple of weeks ago. 5.30pm today doesn’t leave me with only an hour left of light in the sky, 5.30pm today doesn’t mean a cold chill setting on as the sun goes down and the frost starts to rise, 5.30pm doesn’t mean having to hunker down and wait until morning.

Because it’s spring time. Officially spring time. We’ve all made it through the coldest winter in years, frozen faces and hands, icy headaches diving under and freezing wind chill coming back up; we’ve survived and this is our reward. Light until well after 8pm when the wind drops down to a barely detectable offshore so that the waist high waves glass off and peel away as the sun sets below the horizon, warm on our skin until the last second.

It’s a dream that kept me going through the winter, a dream that now, after a fast-paced half hour drive is being realised. Suiting up quickly, no need for hats and gloves, I paddle out and sit back, waiting for my slice of the pie. But there’s one thing I hadn’t counted on, one thing I had wiped from my memory, one thing that seems to occur naturally through the winter, but which, as the air warms up and the sun comes out, soon becomes a thing of the past.

To start with, out in the water, it all works fine. A group of 10 and we all know the score. We’ve done our cold weather penance and earned our place on the peak. Take off, paddle back out, wait our turn. It might make your fingers itch, watching glassy little walls roll on by while those in front of us hoot as they slide across the surface, but we don’t mind because we know we’re next. That’s how it works. Then they come. Scores of them. Each one armed with their plastic board and new smelling wetsuit. They’re down for the weekend, first year studying here or finally taking it up after years of standing on the beach. It doesn’t matter what their motivations are – all that matters is that they are here with only a few hours of Xtreme Channel viewing and a gut full of enthusiasm to show them the way.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with learners. We’ve all been there, standing in the shallows getting our first taste, building our confidence then paddling out past the white water to try the green waves beyond. And sure, it’s hard at beach breaks where the peaks shift around. If you’ve not been in the water much, knowing how the waves are going to behave and how people are going to behave on them, can be tricky, but you just have to get smart. Keep your wits about you, be aware that there are other surfers in the water too, look around and get the hang of how it’s supposed to be done; it’s all part of the learning curve. We all did it, right? The problem is, with the ever rising popularity of surfing, as the late light and warmer water arrives, so too do those learners who haven’t found out what they should do in the water, who don’t look around them and who paddle for every wave because they want to give it a go, regardless of whether someone else has already got right of way.

Dropping in, snaking, ignoring the line-up or just blindly floating around; all that’s bad enough. But the real problem with those especially ignorant learners is that they agitate everyone else in the water. No-one likes their waves being taken time and time again, so it’s not long before other surfers start to ignore good practice too, because if they don’t they’ll never get a wave. Suddenly it becomes every man for himself and there’s even more dropping in, even more snaking, even more aggression. What started out as the blissful dream of summer becomes a churning cauldron of frustrated surf reality with no-one getting the waves they want because everyone is trying to get the waves they want. For me, out in the water, summertime blues seriously set in as I remember that to have a good seasonal surf I’m going to have to play a bit dirty. Which sucks.

However, there is a solution and a pretty simple one. January 2010 saw new signs go up on the beaches around Sydney, Australia. With surfing an integral part of Aussie culture and busy beaches all year round, the councils took affirmative action by putting up surf etiquette signs to explain the rules for everyone riding the waves.

Now I know Cornwall’s no Australia, but there are more people getting in here than ever before and it is causing more trouble. If everyone in the water understood the rules then those who already knew the rules would be more likely to abide by them and we’d all end up happier, surely? The good habits built up over the winter when the water is emptier wouldn’t melt away as the sun came out and the ugly every man for himself mentality would stay on shore.

Idealistic? Yes, but then let’s face it – that’s what dreams of British Summer Time are all about…

There is a very thin line between spectator and contestant… if there is a line at all. Anyone can enter and have fun …and that’s much more interesting than watching some very talented surfers surf by themselves from one of the sponsor’s tents. The last addition to these events is the Onda Longa Longboard Festival.

After a long waiting period (1 month), it took place on March the 27th, the second to last day of the waiting period. The reason: because it breaks deep inside one of these fjord-like Rías that dot the Galician coastline, Monte Pedrido needs a combination of huge swells, spring tides …and on a weekend. Luckily even during one of the worst winters in recent history in terms of waves, Galiza is never short of huge swells and, after some close calls, the event could take place right before the end of the waiting period. The wave itself isn’t high performance friendly at all, even for logs. It is the closest version of a cold water Waikiki you can find around here: very soft, hardly much a wall and reforming endlessly; hence the name of the event: onda longa (Galician for “long wave”). And so the format of the event was quite simple: everyone surfed together wearing a distinct shirt -or tee-shirt- that helped identify the rider and the winners were sorted out later after a nice dinner.

Check the Onda Longa 2010 video clip from suso ben.

And check all the action and photos HERE .

Niegà

Chris Preston caught up with Andy Haworth, the man behind a new British longboard film, for a sneak preview and to find out more about the man behind the lens…

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 10 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 wishthound’s 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 and 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, because a son might have given me the perfect, spouse-approved, excuse to keep going!

Incidentally I just saw the latest Flip Skateboards 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!

]]> http://www.driftsurfing.eu/index.php/archives/4520/feed 2 http://www.driftsurfing.eu/index.php/archives/4380 http://www.driftsurfing.eu/index.php/archives/4380#comments Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:09:13 +0000 Clare http://www.driftsurfing.eu/?p=4380 This time last week I thought I was going to die. At least, I was trying to ignore the thought that I was going to die by telling myself everything was fine. Fine. Fine. F-i-n-e….

I chewed it over so many times as my arms dug deep through the water that the word lost all meaning, suddenly reduced to empty hollow letters tripping off my lips, just a noise I was making to drown out the sound of my blood pounding. Which was telling me everything was not. Fine.

It had all started so well. A quiet afternoon, a big winter swell, light offshores. Those are the best days, the unexpected days, the ‘am I really going to be this lucky,’ days where you’re stood surveying a near empty lineup at 2.30pm on a work day with the sun shafting through the February murk, head high faces flying off the river mouth.

And I felt lucky out back too. For a while. A few sets in and I had had my pick of fast punchy rights, garnering nods of encouragement from the handful in the water, a confidence boost for someone like me; no longer a novice but far from accomplished. Then the chop started. I didn’t notice it at first, too busy looking along the beach to the left hand peak banking up and rolling in. Someone took off; tucked in tight as spray flew back, dancing forward heel over toe, with arms up high and smile stretched wide. I smiled too, closed my eyes for a second to feel the warm sunshine and breathed deep. This is why I live here, I thought, this is what it’s about.

That’s when it happened, or I should say, when I realised it was happening. I looked around; I was at least 30 metres further out than everyone else and moving fast. Out to sea. I started to paddle left, scooping full, rounded strokes to draw myself out of the current. No luck. I tried paddling in. Fifty strokes, one hundred strokes. I had to stop to breathe. I wasn’t moving anywhere. Now I was worried. I was tired. And cold. And no-one was with me. The other surfers were wide of the river mouth, contentedly waiting for the next set to roll in, their eyes fixed on the advancing swell ahead of them, not looking in my direction at all. Every time I lifted my head to check they seemed further away; the boarded up lifeguard hut perched on the cliff top impossibly small. I tried to calm myself; perhaps all it would take was a few big strokes before I was free and laughing and back in the game – but the more I paddled the more I realised that there was no more game, or that this was the game now, paddling hard, then harder, to avert disaster.

Overhead I could hear the dull thud of a Sea King on manoeuvres and I found myself wondering what I would need to do to catch its attention. If I stopped to wave I would lose all the ground I had made up and anyway that would be like giving in, like admitting I shouldn’t have come out in the first place, like saying yes, I’ve taken on too much here, I can’t cope. Although as the relentless paddling sapped my strength and the cold wash of reality flooded my wetsuit I knew that that was the truth; I couldn’t cope, I wasn’t moving – I was losing the battle and losing energy. Fast.

It started to hurt. I felt cheated; betrayed by my favourite break which I had surfed for years and which just shouldn’t be treating me like this. I’d have expected it of Brazil, where I learnt the powerful channel at Saquarema should be handled with care, or in Lanzarote where I was warned to stay vigilant of Playa de Famara’s rip which had dragged more than a few surfers out to sea. But here, where I was at home, where I grew up riding whitewater on my bellyboard, where my Gran fished from the rocks in the 1930s; this place was part of the family and family shouldn’t treat you so bad.

Which is when I worked it out. It’s teaching me a lesson, I thought as I stopped for a moment desperate to catch my breath before dropping my jaw to my board, digging deep and ploughing on. I’d got complacent, got cocky, forgot to stay aware; too wrapped up in feeling smug to pay attention, to pay my dues. I found myself apologising, as the last gasps of energy drained through my limbs, promising not to do it again, not to forget who was the boss out here.

It felt like forever before I could make out the concerned features of one of the other surfers; offering a tentative thumbs up as my spent arms slapped the water to draw me the final few feet forward. I nodded back, too tired to speak, silently catching whitewater into the shallows.

Sand has never felt so good.

Lying on the shore, lungs stinging, I could still hear the helicopter circling, slicing through my dazed relief, a reminder of what could have been – me wrapped up in a tinfoil sheet, fished out of the sea all blue lips and shivering. Or worse.

Lesson learnt. I’ll never take the sea for granted again, no matter where I am.

Oh and I’ll never close my eyes in smugness on a surfboard. It’s an accident waiting to happen.

It’s probably clear to anyone who reads my ramblings on here that i think style is important when you surf. I think everyone has an innate type of style, a natural look to the way they surf, be it smooth as silk like Dane Peterson, nonchalant like Lopez at pipe or just plain different like Alex Knost.

Although it is possible to work at surfing in a certain way, it always looks slightly contrived compared those who are lucky enough to have good style naturally. Obviously “good style” is a very subjective judgement and to a certain extent a personal assessment.
I’ve spent a lot of time watching video of people surfing, both other peoples films and the footage that went into my two. After a while it’s very easy to identify different people from the way they move, the body positions they adopt, even if they are riding similar equipment, doing similar things, on similar waves.

I’d like to think i am at least a little smooth when i surf but in the interests of self disclosure i must admit to my own weird style quirk (besides having funny shaped toes). I seem to point my index fingers, especially on my left hand. Don’t ask me why, i’m not sure it is crucial to successful balancing, but i do it on a skateboard or a snowboard too. I’m telling myself it’s that attention to even the tiniest part of body english that helps me look like i know what i’m doing out there but i’m probably grasping (pointing?) at straws!