Surfing anorak that I am, I’m always looking out for new DVD’s to keep me stoked while the sou’ westerlies blow. This DVD popped into my mailbox a week or two ago, the new film from Mikey DeTemple, the man behind Picaresque which came out a couple of years ago, called Sight | Sound. With great anticipation I popped it into the dvd player tray and it’s been living in there since!

Although he does wield a camera, Mikey mostly takes on an actor/director role and steer his films firmly into the artistic side of the endeavor with little in the way of voice or titles cluttering the piece. The film flows past smoothly and in full colour from one section to the next, with a “modern electric” soundtrack that is a hell of a lot better than that description makes it sound!

Like Picaresque, Mikey made an effort to seek out some of the roads less travelled while gathering footage. This time we are treated to, amongst others, spitting Nicaraguan beach break barrels, sub zero snowbound Canada, dusty Baja zippers and colourful Barbados.

There’s an eclectic mix of surfcraft to fit with an eclectic mix of surfers. Chris del Moro clearly rips on anything, Ryan Burch makes slabs of foam look fun and there’s plenty of high quality logging on offer from DeTemple, Kassia Meador, Scotty Stopnik and Justin Quintal, an East coaster that few will have heard of but many will remember. There’s some good footage of Tyler Warren and DeTemple on mini Simmons style boards too, maybe the first footage on DVD outside Richard Kenvin’s sphere of influence and making them look just as fun as they undoubtedly are. The Canadian footage is high quality too, even if it does look ball-achingly cold! It’s somehow gratifying to watch pros donning full suits boots and gloves to surf in 40 degree water and snowstorms just like we do!

My favorite section features a rifling right hand Mexican point which looks almost cape St Francis perfect. Jared Mell and Kassia Meador feature heavily, their contrasting styles creating a counterpoint like a conversation through the footage. Meador smoothly logging some of the most impressive women’s longboarding I’ve seen while Mell’s highly technical almost jagged and urgent “Knost-esque” style sitting on the other side of the coin. Mell is exceedingly good and has perhaps the longest hang heels I’ve ever seen committed to film.

The overall feel is similar to picaresque although the production crew and many of the cast have changed. There’s a more balanced mix of short and long equipment, warm and cold water. The most obvious difference is a hike in production values from last time. There’s a more lush feel to the shots and some of the footage is shot on 16mm film stock.

It’s altogether less self-congratulatory this time – something that Picaresque was criticized for – I really liked it and it’s stood up to repeated viewings so far.

Perhaps the best way of rating a new surf film is by answering this most simple of questions… did it make me want to go surfing?

In this case, the answer…….”HELL YES!”

(Mercifully the star wipes are not in the actual film!)

More of my rambling here.

Photo by Nick Lavechhia.

A little while ago I rolled into the car park half an hour before dusk, not expecting much, not really expecting a rideable wave if i’m honest. Sea breezes were still blowing and at first sight they were crumbling barely knee high waves. Seconds before I turned tail and headed home, a set came through, hit the best bank on the beach and a familiar silhoueted figure carved it up smoothly with tip time and drop knee.

Decision made, I scrambled into my suit and paddled out anxious to wash off the grime and suncream after a day of shed clearing and visiting the local dump. The sets were infrequent but there were  few to share them with. When they came, the waves were still a mushy waist high at best but with just enough shape to allow some fun logging, the bank marshaling the disorderly bumps into decent shape, the breeze slackening as the sun dipped towards the horizon. The small righthanders were playful and teasing, demanding fleet of foot and light of touch but rewarding with stolen moments of ten over and dropped knee. Kick outs with smile lost in the fading light.

As i sat waiting, alone with my thoughts, it struck me how personal the surfing experience is, how little the experience of each wave is shared no matter how many there are in the line up. How the feel and the feelings engendered are different (yet the same) for each of us, modified by board choice and local conditions. For me it’s the little things i love, the perfect imperfections. I’m drawn to the edges of things. The warmth of the sun on your face, the glow of the sunset sky, water drawn over  soft rails,  making the most of a flawed wave. It’s in the subtle grace of good trim, the weightless feel of a well placed noseride, the sweeping swing of a well timed cutback and the addictive momentum of a well timed fade as you take off. Grace in adversity, good style making economy of movement more powerful than wild action. It didn’t need to be six foot and perfect, i didn’t need to be here yesterday, i just needed to be here now.

The light was gone all too soon and I wandered out in near darkness, spent but smiling, storing my little packets of stokefulness like a squirrel mindful of the uncertainty of my next meal but content with an appetite sated.

For many of us there’s no escape from the cold and we must greet the winter face on, the gloom, the damp, the light so flat the horizon is lost in the sky. Endlessly watching the forecast hoping for the prevailing southwesterlies to abate for the bittersweet triumph of stolen moments in offshores.  Freezing wind from the east blowing the mess to corduroy and then to ironed cloth.

You could send yourself mad with the longing but it’s better to embrace the dark mornings, the frost on the inside of the windscreen that never clears quick enough, the teeth of the wind biting into exposed flesh as you struggle into the wetsuit that never quite dries, the shock of the first duck dive as you struggle through lines of whitewater, battling current and wind beyond the break.

Because if you look, through the waiting, the discomfort, the grey light, the grimace as your suit fills with 6 degree water for the first time, there’s still that little spark of fun and stoke that keeps you coming back. Still the need to grasp that elusive sliding feeling we are all addicted to. Still the afterglow that warms you and has nothing to do with the van heater on full as you drive home, reliving the waves of the day. It’s still surfing and it still makes me smile……………

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!

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 4 http://www.driftsurfing.eu/index.php/archives/4344 http://www.driftsurfing.eu/index.php/archives/4344#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:51:58 +0000 Chris P http://www.driftsurfing.eu/?p=4344 Good surfing doesn’t always mean you have to dominate the wave.

I’m going to expand a little on the things I touched on in A quiver approach – if you’ve already read it you’ll know there is a common thread to my own choice of surfcraft. Personally I believe style is all important in surfing, I don’t care how radical your turns are, if you have an ugly style, I’m not interested.

Having been initially drawn to the style inherent in traditional longboarding, once I started to experiment with shorter boards I looked for shapes that would still allow a smooth flowing style, one that works with the wave, rather than trying to beat it into submission.

When I’m trying to explain it to others I often term it like this: conventional shortboarding is all based on getting vertical, drawing very “up & down” lines on the wave. The surfing I’m into is based very much on drawing more flowing lateral lines on the wave, heavy singlefin logs on small waves, two- and four-fin fish on bigger waves and, lately, the ultimate lateral trim machine – the displacement hull.

If you watch a decent amount of video of these designs you will notice that there is a consistency to the tracks they draw, even though the direction changes may get a little more radical as the length comes down. I think you can draw a line through history based on this observation, from the very earliest surfcraft  through to these modern boards, whereas modern day shortboards represent the endpoint of a branch that sprouted following the “shortboard” revoloution of the late sixties when there was a global reaction against almost the principal of “trim” itself.

Some of you will relate to that, some of you will think it’s boring surfing. Thats cool. Each to their own – the world would be a boring place if we all liked the same thing. but I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Surfer’s ear is hardly breaking news. A cursory trawl of the net will reveal a wealth of wealth of information about the condition. Unless you are a complete beginner, chances are you will have either had some surfing related ear problems or at the very least know someone who has.

I’m not going to insult your intelligence by going into detail about why our beautiful obsession with waves can lead to repeated ear infection, partial deafness or unpleasant surgery to sort the problems out. What I am going to do is encourage you to be proactive about it.

Most of you will be aware that the damaging effects of wind and water can be reduced by wearing earplugs when you surf but most people don’t start using them until they are already having problems. If you will allow me to offer a piece of advice – start wearing them now, before you get a problem, you’ll thank me in the long run!

There are lots of different options, blue tac does work as do off the shelf silicon putty plugs but the safest option is custom made earplugs exactly like the ones Rob Shaddick at Surfplugs made me. Granted they are more expensive than blue tac but (unless you are a muppet like me and lose one) they last for years. We spend hundreds of pounds a year on boards, wetsuits, petrol, carparks all in the pursuit of waves and custom plugs are realtively cheap in comparison, especially as they will help prevent a condition that could seriously limit or curtail your water time eventually.

Surfplugs are made in a cast of your ear, poured up from a silicon rubber impression Rob takes of your inner and outer ear which is an interesting and slightly weird experience in itself. After placing a piece of sponge over your eardrum the rubber is injected into your ear and sets hard enough to remove in a couple of minutes.

My plugs were back in about a week and, once you have the knack, are easy to place and remove. It does take a few sessions to get used to them. Lots of people say it affects their surfing but I honestly think if you wear them for every session you adapt to the feeling of wearing them quickly. I think lots of people don’t wear plugs consistently enough to get past this. They don’t affect your hearing enough to stop you chatting in the line-up, though you can feel a little cut off in winter if you are wearing a hood as well.

Having already worn the putty-style plugs for a number of years I’ve found the custom plugs more comfortable and you don’t spend half your session pushing them back into your ears. I now feel a little uncomfortable surfing without them, especially in winter when it seems the cold gets inside your head more without them in.

Don’t just take my word for it, many of the best surfers in the country are wearing Rob’s plugs, whether the logo is on their board or not. If you want to find out more about the plugs themselves or surfer’s ear, click here.

Incidentally, I paid for my plugs. They really are that good: no free product related ass kissing here!

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!

Ironically they weren’t originally conceived as a skateboard company, they were a small family business making shoes to order that saw an opportunity to get involved with skateboarding after requests from the Dogtown team (who were just on the cusp of blowing up worldwide) for a shoe built to their specs to skate in.

As the company moves into it’s fifth decade they have released a cool coffee table book celebrating themselves. Put together by Doug Palladini it is part history of the brand, part biography of the skaters, surfers, musicians and others who have become synonymous with it over the years (think Steve Caballero, Tony Alva, Joel Tudor etc) and part eye candy, filled with great action photos and pictures of one obsessive’s frankly huge collection of the shoes themselves. It’s a well thought out volume, with some really interesting stories and facts within it’s pages, some of which you’ll know some will suprise you. Since it’s been around for so long, the history of the product in a way also charts the history of Skateboarding and to a lesser extent elements of the history of surfing, BMX and snowboarding too, all of which adds to it’s appeal. It’s a stylish package with good quality pages and the cover is inlaid with a red rubber panel bearing the vans logo, just like each pair of off the wall shoes.

I’ve owned & worn out numerous pairs since i started skating years ago, in fact I rarely buy any other brand of trainer and I know there are thousands like me across the world. If you’ve ever bought a pair of Spiccoli-esque check slip-ons or slid your feet into a beaten up pair of SK8-hi’s held together with shoe goo (remember that?) prior to hurling yourself off the local architecture, you’re bound to enjoy this book and it’s a good choice if you’re looking for things to put on your letter to Santa!

I posted this on my blog, Adventures in Trim last week and it provoked a couple of interesting comments so I thought I would re-post it here along with the comments themselves. Hopefully KK & Rebecca wont mind me using their words & it might provoke some more discussion. Incidentally Rebeccas blog is worth checking too if you have five minutes spare!

Here’s the post in full:

It’s been with a certain sense of mild amusement that i’ve watched the gentrification of Watergate Bay over the last few years. It’s gone from being a slightly overlooked end of Newquay to a kind of middle class yuppie enclave where the London set come to take the waters without having to be bothered by the great unwashed masses that clog up the town beaches. Where the farmers market is Jamie Oliver branded and the flats & holiday lets are well out of most peoples price range.