the peddler

So this is one of the inhabitants of clovelly. Like i said, it's a slightly odd place. A recent headline from the local paper......" Girl attacks shop worker with biscuits!" "I'll make your glasses into contact lenses" she's quoted as threatening before pelting the checkout lady with custard creams. I kid you not!

nippers

At the risk of being controversial........ I've never quite seen the point of surf lifesaving clubs. It all seems a lot too much like a serious proper sport to me with all the effort of paddling out without the earnt fun of riding waves afterwards. In fact there never seems to be much fun involved. Of course that's probably me being curmudgeonly and cynical in my (approaching) old age.

I always thought it might be a good thing for my daughter to get involved with when she was old enough, teach her confidence in the sea etc but my limited experience so far hasn't done much to temper my initial misgivings. It's all taken very seriously and competitively even at 7 it seems and that doesn't fit with us. I'm thinking i'll just keep taking her surfing myself where i can make sure she's having fun and not worrying about how fast she can race round a flag.

little fluffy clouds

Another piece that seems to have been marooned on my hard drive for over a year now. I was quite pleased with it at the time, even if it is somewhat self congratualtory chin-stroking.

What is traditional longboarding?

When i was asked to write a "What is traditional longboarding" piece. It sounded pretty simple, it's just noseriding, one fin and drop knee cutbacks isn't it? Yet the more i sat and thought about it, the more difficult to pin down it became.

In it's original sense it's a term that defined a part of longboarding for a few years in the mid nineties. Back in the first "age of the longboard" there was just surfing and everyone rode longboards until Nat Young and chums changed things in 1966. When longboards started to become popular again in the nineties, it was driven by shapers like Bill Stewart applying the lessons learnt with the evolution of the shortboard to longer equipment. The focus was very much on emulating the "radicalness" of cutting edge shortboard surfing with a handful of throwback manouvers thrown in. The boards were light, often narrow nosed with shortboard style concave bottoms and multiple fins.

It wasn't until Joel Tudor and his contemporaries like Wingnut, Jimmy Gamboa, Kevin Connelly and others started to look backwards, sometimes riding vintage thrift store finds that things began to change. Longboarding begin to develop along two fairly seperate paths. While the hawaiians and aussies continued to develop the high performance school, Tudor led the charge back to black wetsuits, single fins, Volan and a focus on a style with it's feet firmly in the body english of the early 60's. Looking in magazines of the time, "traditional longboarding" really means trying to emulate David Nuuhiwa at his 1966 noseriding prime, hanging ten was once again paramount along with smooth footwork and drop knee cutbacks.Board Templates  closely followed those of period noseriders with wide noses and tails, flat rocker, concave nose and paralell soft rails. Once again, first point Malibu became the focus of world wide attention.

The years tick by, things change and evolve, "pro" longboarding faltered from lack of corporate support and to a large extent stayed as a fringe activity in the surf media despite the ever increasing numbers boards over nine feet leaving the racks of surf shops world wide. Tudor retreated from the limelight a little and turned his attention to shorter equipment. Thomas Campbell made a couple of very influential surf films and huge numbers of surfers rediscovered the joy in the glide of a heavy board in high line trim. From where we (i) sit today, traditional longboarding is much more than emulating '66 vintage Nuuhiwa.

 

Almost all of today's top "loggers" are incredibly well rounded surfers, riding heavy single fins in small waves but shorter equipment when the waves get bigger or hollower, be that fish, egg, hull, simmons, even thrusters. Shapers like Tyler Hatzikian and Robbie Kegel have started to take single fin longboard design into different territory. Both these shapers say they use the zenith of 60's design as a jumping off point but aim to design shapes that continue the evolution of the longboard as though the shortboard revolution never happened. They are not alone. The last few years have seen a subtle shift in "log" shapes away from parallel templates and wide noses to more pig influenced shapes with wide points pulled back narrower noses and more defined hips to the board. The lines these boards draw on the wave is subtly different and surfers like knost and kegel have started to turn harder as a result while still retaining the essence of a traditional style. Noserides have become much more focused on being in the pocket not out on the shoulder and the standard of noseriding and the technicalty of the poses struck with toes over has gone through the roof.

Far from being old and stale, a dry study of glories past, traditional longboarding is more varied and alive than ever and that's where the difficulty in pinning it down lies. In fact it's one of the most vibrant parts of the whole of surfing in current times, with an almost punk ethos of experimentation and expression fuelled by a worldwide internet savvy community and not bound by corporate ideas and marketing plans. 

 So if we must try to pin down a definition what can we say? What is "traditional"  today?

 I think it's best to think of it as an approach, a "state of mind" if you forgive the cheesiness of that assertion, defined by  some basic tenets. Fundamentally Style is important, . Surfing with style is paramount whether it's the Steve Bigler-esque exaggerated body English of Alex Knost or the Phil Edwards style smoothness of Tyler Warren. It's an adherence to the principles of good trim, harnessing the waves energy with good positioning and without needless flapping. It's working with the wave, harmonizing with it's form in more lateral lines rather than attempting to bend it to your will or slice it to pieces. It's about using the extra three feet of your longboard for it's intended purpose and noseriding the hell out of any suitable section. It's about believing a good bottom turn is far more important than whatever maneuver you can do at the top of the wave. It's about weight, glide, momentum and grace under pressure. 

It's not about being retro or being overly consumed with looking backwards, it's about taking the essence of Surfing's history and treating those reference points with due reverence but taking them somewhere new. 

Unsurprisingly perhaps, people are beginning to take notice and the big surf Companies are perhaps beginning to sniff opportunity. Vans have poured a fair amount of money into Joel Tudors unashamedly traditional duct tape contests and Billabong, one of the "big 3", just sponsored Tyler Warren  one of the best "all boards" surfers in the world and something that would have been unthinkable even 5 years ago. Whether this is ultimately a good thing remains to be seen but one thing is for sure. Style is alive and kicking.

 

'sup jake?!

clickety          click

life is just swell!

Sunshine, waves, smiley faces, people and traffic everywhere and putsborough charging £7 to park,  it IS summer!

 A couple of bits of local news to share.
The Nineplus shop in the village now has some Bings in the racks to salivate over, along with their own logs and a couple of Takayama's. Bing himself is coming over to the UK and will be doing stuff with Nine plus and the Surfing museum over the weekend of the 16th September so stay tuned for more details of that.

Braunton also has a new surf shop! The Board Barn has moved from chivenor to the old spa shop next door to surfed out (bet glen is stoked!) in the centre of the village. Yet another place to mooch when it inevitably starts raining again!

by dawns early light....

Something reminded me of this the other day. It made me smile the first time i read it a few years ago, it still does, i like a nice well concieved rant!


Words by Chris Moran
Is it just me, or does anyone else hate the word ‘boarder’? I don’t believe I’m alone. When did you hear Terje refer to our wonderful sport as ‘boarding’? When did Jenny Jones last say, “I go boarding all winter long”? And when was the last time you read in this very magazine the words, “we had a great time boarding around the three vallees”?
I’ll tell you when: never. NEVER!
NEEVVVEEERRR!
And why? Because no self-respecting snowboarder on Earth should ever – ever! – refer to this life-changing sport by that filthy, utterly depraved moniker that is: ‘boarding’.
Eurgh, just typing it makes me want to kill ants.
I know I’m inching towards being a wanker, but I don’t care. My pride is long gone. I don’t mind being ridiculed, but I don’t want to be a ‘boarder’ any more. I’m a snowboarder. I ride my snowboard and am therefore also a rider. And I’m damned proud of it. Here are some points you can choose to read or not read, depending on whether you’re a ‘boarder’ or not.
Why shorten it anyway?
“I remember talking to someone in a pub and they asked me if I’d seen the footie last night,” said comedian and famed football pundit Frank Skinner in a recent interview, “and I knew straight away that this guy wasn’t a fan. If anything, he was a wanker.” The quote says a lot. Why do sport names need to be shortened anyway? Point to remember: don’t call it boarding.
It just sounds wrong.
No-one has any idea how these things work, but poetically, boarding just doesn’t sit well. Consider this – in English we call two-way radios Walkie Talkies. But in France they call them – and don’t laugh too loud – Talkie Walkies! Ha ha! How ridiculous is that? Now yes, technically there’s not much in it, but come on, Talkie Walkie sounds ludicrous. It makes them sound like a toy! Point to remember: don’t call it boarding.
The Daily Mail refer to it as ‘boarding’.
And they tried to ‘Ban This Killer Craze’ back in 1992. Fuck them. Point to remember: The Daily Mail newspaper was originally conceived in order to count the number of cunts in the kingdom. The figure is printed on the front under ‘circulation’.
‘Boarding’ as a verb is already common currency.
Genuine people who ‘board’ are usually living at a public school because their parents hate them so much they’ve shipped them off for a couple of years. Here they will undergo a course of buggery and peer-group torture and be deluded into thinking it’s all good tuition on how to run a country. But the truth is their ‘boarding’ is simply a device so their parents can get some peace and spend a bit of time organising some decent wife-swapping parties. Point to remember: don’t accept an invite to stay at an aunt’s house in Dorking unless you know for a fact that the paintings don’t have moving eyes. And don’t call it boarding either.
It’s not cool.
People who think they’re cool say things like “yeah, I’ve just had a fantastic week ‘boarding’ out in Verbier. I did all the blacks by Wednesday” Point to remember: don’t call it boarding.
Want to sound like a snowboarder? Call it riding.
I ride a snowboard. I’ve been riding in France quite a lot, I rode down the Vallee Blanche last year and it was flat as fuck. I avoided all the black runs in Chamonix because any self-respecting snowboarder knows they’re utter shite. I met some boarders in Bar’d Up. They were a bunch of utter cunts. Points to remember: the pen is mightier than the boarder.
Famous boarders.
Simon Cowell – salopettes pulled up to his nips with a bulging crotch from the self-wedgie he’s inflicted – would try and chat up some chalet slags using his enormous wealth and opulent digs and the word ‘boarding’. I reckon. Point to remember: the X-Factor is only good during the audition rounds. The voting part is entirely shite. And don’t call it boarding.
Marty Pellow.
Marty Pellow from Wet Wet Wet probably goes ‘boarding’.
Wishing I Was Lucky.
The name of our sport is snowboarding. Right – I’ve got an idea. If you’re read this and agreed, you’re all on ‘boarder patrol’. The concept is simple. If you catch anyone blaspheming our sport by calling it by the name which shall forth-right never be mentioned again – you have one mission. Take a picture of them with your phone (or draw them in ash on a pub table – we just need a likeness) then send it in to us at White Lines. We’ll publish all the photos under a new ‘name and shame’ campaign I’ve just invented.
Who’s in? Point to remember: let’s stop the rot.
Sweet Little Mystery.
That’s it. Yes I know there are probably better things to be doing with our publishing space, but like George Bernard Shaw said: “Football isn’t life and death. It’s less important than stopping every fucker on Earth referring to snowboarding as boarding. Get your pictures into White Lines and support the campaign.”
I’m paraphrasing of course, but you get the general idea. You know the address: boarding@chairman-of-the-board.theheadhonchoboarder.board-meister.cock

dreams burn down......

Last one of the four shots rescued from the expired film debacle. Seems like a long time ago now, back when summer still seemed a promise of good things to come and not the damp, grey cold reality we've suffered again.

Incidentally the random post title is from a Ride song that my ipod threw up. Shoegazing was a huge musical trend there in the early nineties but most of the bands are long forgotten. Made me smile to hear the intro to "leave them all behind" on Steve Clevelands last movie. He always picks good soundtracks i think.

if only......

Stolen from Alex Swanson and the excellent ten piggies over blog. I could do with a few more sunny offshore waves and some warm water. Is it me or is the sea still cold this year?

baton rouge

bob...

 

Rob Martin is one of my heros, one might almost say he's a living local legend, although he would hate me to describe him this way. In fact he was pretty reluctant to have his picture taken and i'm sure would hate the fact i've posted it here.

 

Ever since i moved here, Rob has been a fixture at saunton, on a log and for the last few years on an SUP. He's a good neat surfer with a litheness that belies his age and he's got more surf stoke than most people of half his years.

 

I really hope i have the desire and physical strength to still be surfing like that when i approach my seventies!