I spent most of last Thursday morning watching Josh shaping my new board. From his hands sprang an amazing Long Fish Simmons, mixing the best elements of the Skip Frye design with some of his own design touches. She looks great and all the details make sense – I’m sure it’s a keeper!

We had just one blank left at the factory, and after a delicious pepper steak for lunch we figured we had time to fit in a quick drive around the area’s tourist spots. Josh was only here for a week, and we wanted to fit in as much as possible in the short time, so we headed to the atmospheric old town of Sintra – famous for his historical buildings, luxurious gardens and ancient palaces – and had a quick sightseeing tour encompassing Castelo dos Mouros and Palácio da Pena, residences built for past kings and queens.

From Sintra we drove to Guincho. The old road goes across the mountains and is flanked by old trees and gardens. It’s wet, foggy and curvy, and back in the days it helped to keep visitors away from the royalty.

Arriving at Guincho we finally set eyes on the ocean. It was too windy for surfing – the wind was blowing the sand off the dunes – but there were still a few nice waves out there. So we kept driving to Cascais. The road winds along the coastlineand we enjoyed the fresh sea breeze. Cascais is a beautiful city by the sea, just 30km from Lisboa. Once a small fisherman’s village, it gained fame in the late 1800s and early 1900s as a resort for Portugal’s royal family. Nowadays it’s one of the richest cities in Portugal and home of rich and famous, so we just drove by!

Our next stop was Sao Pedro do Estoril. The coast there faces south and is protected from the big swells and the north wind. There were a few nice waves breaking and a small right-hander, perfect for longboarding, captured Josh’s attention.

We stopped at the shop where Nico is showing his boards because Josh wanted to check out his work. While we were there, Josh got a last-minute order, so he had to head straight back to the shaping bay and turn out his last board in Portugal – a 5’8 Mini Fish Simmons Quad. Then it was time to clean up his tools, check logos and glassing details, before it was over.

It was time to say goodbye. Josh’s trip was coming to a close and we were already talking about a new one.

Organising a trip like this takes time and money and it’s always a risk. It’s important that all the people involved get along both professionally and personally, which can make the difference between failure and success. This tour wasn’t perfect, but it came out better than expected and in the end everybody was happy and up for doing it again. The smiles on our faces said it all!

I have to thank Alexandro (Southcoast blanks and Lokbox Fins), Pedro (carpenter and factory handyman), Hugo (photographer) and the man who made it possible for me, my good friend Nico. Without you guys I couldn’t make it.

And last but not least, the customers, for their trust.

Now it’s glassing time! Nico’s got a lot of work ahead of his – I’ll be back with more about that very soon…

[All photos by Hugo Correia]

We drove to Ericeira so that Josh could see some of Portugal’s best surf spots. The waves were huge, too big to get in, but at least Josh got an impression of how powerful the waves over here can be.

After a spot of lunch we headed off to the factory, which is located in a small village near Sintra. Nico, the owner, shaper and glasser, was there to greet us and show us where to start, and Josh checked out the blanks, the tools and the shaping bay. We stopped for a leisurely lunch – this is Portugal, after all – before Josh got to work on a 9’5 Big Fish Simmons out of a red cedar triple-stringer blank. The first board in new conditions is always the hardest to shape, so he eased himself into things.

The blank was beautiful and shaped nicely, the cedar leaving a sweet smell in the bay. It’s a huge board for a fish standard, and watching Josh shape that one was really impressive. The way he worked on the bottom of that blank came as a surprise, and opened our minds to a whole new way of doing things. That’s the beauty of working with great shapers like Josh – you can learn to much from them. Josh was super willing to share, and we could have stood there for hours and hours listening to him talking about his boards or his connection to Skip Frye.

Day two, and Josh finished the Big Fish before starting on the small ones. By the end of the day he had produced a few more boards, including a nice twin keel and a Rocket Fish that particularly caught my attention. The Rocket looked like a winner, made to ride well on good waves like Supertubos! After a break for some Portuguese fast food Nico and Josh went back to work and finished another board that evening.

Wednesday was rainy and windy – perfect conditions for shaping! Josh shaped a couple of Mini Fish Simmons, a Skosh, and his most radical design: the Pescado Hinchado. At only 5’5, there are so many details that come together to make this an awesome board. It might look weird, but there’s a lot of thinking behind the design and when Josh explained it, it just made sense.

With just enough time left to shape a board for me, Josh’s work was almost done.

To be continued…

[Photos 1 & 3 by Hugo Correia]

The five-metre seas were tossing the ship’s incumbent passengers around the show bar, violently delaying their arrival (and thus our departure) by eight hours, all the while filling the ship’s bowels with vomit ballast. Had we not met and talked to some of these mini-cruisers, we would never have believed that at least half of our fellow passengers had been hoodwinked by unscrupulous Welsh and Liverpudlian travel agencies into using this RORO transport ferry as a three-day pleasure vessel.

On our first night about this luxury cruise liner we were forced to beat a hasty retreat back to our cabin by the unrelenting ShowTune entertainment, and two rounds of cold 37p a slice toast and butter to the good the following morning an early stroll revealed pockets of Scouse fun-seekers dotted around the ship’s duty-free shops, huddled around hastily torn-open 24 packs of Strongbow and Stella desperately slurping their hangovers away, compelling the fun to begin once more.

The days travelling back to England and awaiting our onward connection to India provided time for reflection on the previous eight weeks of 9ft by 5ft van life. The peaks, the troughs, the countries and the people. For a couple to live in such close-quarters is challenging, rewarding and a journey of discovery… Discovering those traits, those foibles, those personality ‘ticks’ that we tend to cover up in our normal spacious living. But we survived… mostly.

Learning to live as one organism – Sofie, Neil and I – was tough. Having to do everything either together or in complete sympathy is a necessity of close-quarter living. We had to sleep and wake at the same time, eat, sit, stand, move, wash and breathe together. Everything takes five times as long to do in the van because the stowafe system is constantly being re-arranged. To use the pan you move the coffee-pot to the side, the spices back in the cupboard, the water bottle to the seating area, the ash-tray to the side table, the washing-up bowl to the back step, the lighter from the front to the stove, and so on and so on… The constant search for water, toilets and camp spots meant an unrelenting round of moving this, packing that, stowing this, folding that, re-packing, removing, unwrapping. These trials obviously irked on some more sensitive days, but were no great hardships and living in such a basic, simple way was a great life-lesson in terms of the difference between needs and wants. Whatever, these complications were more than outweighed by the luxuries of mobile living. We dined on an Algarve moonlit terrace watching sliver-crested waves wash onto fine, pale sand only yards from our feet as we ate smoky, sweet paprika tinged squid, breakfasted on cliffs high above wild rocky ocean ravaged bays, romantically celebrated on the sunset drenched dunes of Galicia and socialised at the World Surf Tour’s Portuguese headquarters.

Luxury is available to all if you’re prepared to rough it and to search beyond the well-trodden path. In fact it only seems to be available at either end of the scale – the ultra-rich can pay through the nose to stay in the most beautiful and exclusive locations, but the curious, mobile and independent traveller can find amazing places without the cost.  It’s the majority in the middle ground who are caught in the mire of packaged, developed, managed mediocrity.

Last summer I started talking to Josh Hall about getting him over here for a visit. He was planning a trip to Spain to visit some friends and could stop by Portugal to shape some boards. My work at the Wavegliders factory was going well, so I had a place for him to shape and a good glasser to finish the job. Everything seemed to be in place.

As time went by, we kept talking about it, but we didn’t really get anything fixed up until September. Then Josh emailed to say that he was ready to roll, and would be arriving in November for a trip that would take him through France, Spain and Portugal – fantastic!

There was a lot of work to be done. First thing was to get a price list; not an easy task, because I wanted to make sure that – even though they’re 100% hand-made custom boards – they were still affordable to your average surfer. Next I needed to price up blanks, cloth, resin, pigments etc and work out how much Nico wanted for glassing them. After a few busy days on the phone and e-mail, everything was set.

On 22 September the word was out. Press releases were sent all over the web, and I’ve lost count of the number of e-mails I sent during those first few weeks of promotion. Josh Hall is already a big name in the US, but around here he’s still new to most of the people. A lot of time was spent on promotion, talking about him, writing about him, getting his name out there.

As orders start to roll in we had to order the right blanks, fins and pigments for to customer’s order – which isn’t always easy!

Josh’s trip started in France, where he shaped some stunning boards, and he’s now on the way to Spain where he will stop off at the Santander Surf Film Festival. At the end of the week he will arrive in Portugal and we will finally meet; then a new journey will start.

You can follow Josh’s shaping tour of Portugal at magic-quiver.blogspot.com

It’s coming up to five years since I first set foot on a foam-board in Byron Bay, but the mix of being a late starter, with an already (too) well developed sense of mortality, and the intervening years being spent deep in the design mines of England’s south east – keeping me from surfing as regularly as I would like – means that a good surf has a fair prospect of being my best ever!

It didn’t look much from our van viewpoint on the cliffs above Praia Amado on Portugal’s southwest coast, perhaps similar to last night’s easy-going sunset session, but paddling toward the clique I could see that at this higher stage of the tide the now submerged rock, which breaks the wide open bay here, was producing a well overhead A-frame peak offering lefts and rights to the bold and well positioned.

A troupe of British kids were hoovering up everything going for the first half hour and I resigned myself to picking up the odd wave which swung wide of the take-off spot. But en-masse the Brits left the water, lured no doubt by elevenses, and there were more than enough waves to go round for those of us left. By my standards there were big sets pushing through, certainly well overhead, I might even call some double-over but then again it always looks bigger peering up from sea-level, but instead of just rearing up, faltering and closing out in unison across the bay, today a distinct peak feathered, tumbled and peeled. I had countless lefts and rights, making cavernous drops which spat me down the line at speeds my board hasn’t encountered before, trailing my hand in the smooth, shimmering, carved wall of water for stability, rising to the lip before turning and dropping back down the shear liquid face again, and again… and again, kicking up and launching myself head-over-heel over the brim before it dumps into the shallow sandbar. Every cell of my being was vibrating and alive, very much alive, reverent of the ocean’s grace for allowing me to catch those fleeting rides sharing her surging energy for a few seconds of Life.

This southwestern corner of Portugal feels like home, for two distinctly different reasons. To observe starched English families spending tense half-term days at some of the beaches we frequent has seemed bizarre, in a detached other-worldly way, and served as a reminder of the proximity of the British tourist colony that is The Algarve. Yet the wild, arid, red-earthed southwestern tip with its rugged undeveloped coastline, herbaceously pungent, sheltering herds of goats, leather-faced shepherds, packs of wild dogs and van-dwellers of all denominations feels like the place we’ve been looking for as we traced Europe’s Atlantic fringe. If only the British hadn’t invaded nearby, pushing prices of land beyond it’s natural level.

Footnote [after the second surf of the day]
Don’t do your surf check from the hill above the beach: the angle and distance distorts perspective rendering judgement calls hazy at best. Don’t ignore the Swiss duo you’ve been surfing with these last few days when they come back defeated, unable to get past the cascading walls of raging spume. And, most importantly, don’t take the sea for granted, don’t get complacent and don’t ever feel like you’re getting the hang of this surfing business!

I managed to get out back in a lull between sets using a rip at the north of the beach by the rocks, and when I did everything seemed more acute. The waves were not only taller, but more voluminous, more powerful, formidable. I found a position to sit out wide of the main peak in order to watch for a while, to analyse. But the peak had spread out across nearly the entire bay and this once quiet spot was in path of the relentless marching behemoths. I was in position to dig deep and go a few times but as I rose up the face, inertia giving way to gravity I pulled back as I saw the canyon-like drop beneath me, suddenly aware of the rocks scattered on the inside.

I paddled up the bay navigating my way precariously over the cresting waves, and through the swirling, churning waters between as huge masses of water heaved around, but what had been the ‘outside’, the safety zone, the non-breaking belt was quickly becoming the dangerous ‘inside’ as progressively bigger waves were breaking further from shore, the gaps between sets decreasing and the faces of the handful of surfers left out more determined. My mind turned to the book I had recently finished about Mark Foo and Ken Bradshaw’s 10-year tussle amongst the huge surf of Hawaii’s Waimea Bay and I began to get a sense of what genuinely big wave riding was about, whilst gaining a humbling perspective on my pickle as I visualised waves at the very least three times this size.

Walls of ferocious whitewater were unavoidable and on my buoyant fish un-duckdiveable. Numerous times I tried, only to have my board ripped from grasping hands and flung about thuggishly underwater. Once I turned and tried to ride the whitewater in on my belly, yet the boiling, seething mass was too turbulent sending me end over end, head over heels, inside and out. Edging closer to shore in any discernable hiatus I was reserved to an un-triumphant exit and looked for smaller waves to shuttle me back to dry sand. Choosing my moment, and wrapping my arms around my board I hugged her as I was shot gleefully onto the beach and trudged back up the hill to the welcoming arms of Sofie and Neil: bedraggled, defeated, but wildly exhilarated.

Two things were traced on my mind:
1. I loved the experience, the nowness of the situation, the sharpening of the senses, the vitality of being.
2. She’s the boss.

Recently I’ve been working with a Portuguese shaper called Nico who did have the guts to change.
Nico has been shaping for over 20 years and during the last 10 was backshaper at one of the biggest surfboard companies in Portugal. While working there he was well-paid and had a good life. It was hard work, for sure, but working at a big company comes with its advantages.
But Nico’s passion for surfboard design and his need to create something other than shortboards and performance longboards was stronger than his need for stability and money. So Nico left the big factory and started out on his own with Wavegliders Surfboards.
It’s not easy to start something new, and doing it alone is even harder. Finding the right premises, building shaping bays and a glassing room, buying resin, glass and tape… there’s a lot to do before you even think about getting your hands on a blank.
And to add to the upheaval Nico decided that, instead of sticking with the range of shortboards he made in the old place, he would go in the opposite direction, following his passion for classic surfboards, shaping classic longboards, singlefin stubbies and fish. Rather than going retro and using proven designs, he incorporates modern performance into those classic lines. A surfboard should be judged on more than just looks, after all.
Probably the most difficult aspect of building a new surfboard label is building a good reputation, getting your name out there and reaching your potential customers. Hand-crafted boards aren’t cheap, and selling through shops isn’t always a good plan because they don’t have the turnover. So Nico began selling his boards directly to customers on the internet, and spread the word about Wavegliders through the blogging community.
As Nico built up his quiver, refined his glassjobs and persevered with his dream, Wavegliders started to gather attention.
Now I guess Nico is at the tipping point – it’s easier to make boards than it is to sell them; it takes a while for the seed to see the sun. Fortunately, Nico’s boards are really good, finely tuned shapes wrapped up in perfect glass. I’m certain that he has a long and successful future ahead, and that he’ll never regret the day he decided to change his life. But even if he fails, the experience will always be part of his life and something that made him a better man.
Is change an option for all of us? Is getting out of the rat race and becoming our own boss the recipe for a better life? There’s no straight answer. For some, the security of a job allows them to live their dream outside of work; others are lucky enough to find a career they love that’s funded by someone else; but to those who have a dream, I say “follow it!” Maybe someday your dreams will become reality.
As for me – I’m working hard to make mine happen.