dogs and surfing

here's one from the archives...

boards with wood and other inlays

my wife stumbled across the site of a shaper in virginia who makes really beautiful boards, from carbon to wood. the photos on the site are a bit hard to navigate through and you can't link to them directly, but here's the address http://www.shirebc.com/

De Lixo a Luxo

 

o design, nos dias de hoje, tem uma preocupacao bem grande com a sustentabilidade.
o designer holandes chamado PIET HEIN EEK.
Ele desenha moveis a partir de restos de madeira, entre outras coisas. O trabalho e impressionante. E, para nao falar de sustentabilidade. Ja que esta de moda! olhem o trabalho dele e verao que justifica o assunto.
www.pietheineek.nl

favela chic

 

Nada melhor que uma cervejinha antes de uma farofada na praia.
Que calor!!!
Sou gordinha mas sou feliz.

farrrah on a jay adams!

 

farrah fawcett on an old school board!

garota de ipanema

 

cores e desenhos sao importantes para pranchas.
vejo esta cores como um estilo original e com atitude.
falta no mercado pranchas com graficos realmente criativos.

and still another...

 

more punta rocas

 

flocks of birds and schools of fish that day, so many fish that i felt dozens of them during the paddle...

punta rocas

 

snaps taken by my wife a week or so ago at punta rocas on a day with nasty drops and a dreadful paddle through heavy beachbreak...

i love fins...

i strongly suggest you check out this amazing site for far out shapes...

50 people on one point at 5 a.m.

that's right. punta roquitas was a zoo early this morning, after word spread that it was picking up north swell, which creates a nice point off the jetty. trouble is that there were 50 people in the water at 5:15 a.m. and that many of the waves were too fat to catch, or were full of people calling waves before they even made it to their feet. it's considered socially acceptable here to behave like a complete ass and not pay any consequences for it. there's really no penalty for being a jerk. strange that way. in other countries where i have lived, if you are rude in a public space people will make you pay a price of some kind, be it five people crowding around you and calling you names, or shaming you or opening up a can of whoop ass. i think the threat of whoop ass obliges people to be more polite, but not in peru. here, there's no whoop ass so people act like clods. you can be a complete tosser and people just mutter a couple of words under their breath or get all passive aggressive and paddle in front of you in the lineup without bothering to be directly confrontational. needless to say, i chose to avoid the crowd and surfed the beachbreak instead, where i dropped in on a sponger, for which i am proud. ah yes, life is full of contradictions.

pelicans and dolphins

fish were biting, fleeting and skipping across the water sunday evening and the pelicans came out to feast. they made big splashes as they swooped down and gobbled up fish. pelicans and dolphins are my favorite animals. here's a shot of dolphins.

punta rocas

a bit of longboarding on saturday here in lima. i was obsessed with hanging ten and sort of neglected to carve, but had a good time walking the plank as it were. a few times i walked right off the board. sunday had big and heavy waves and punta rocas, where we all went through the washing machine a few times and the waves were fast and fierce... my fish, i should add, had no trouble even on the more powerful waves -- in part i think because the wave is fairly fat even when it's big. more and more i'm thinking that fish only don't work in the most hollow of waves and super hollow waves just aren't that common.

greg long

i recommend the highlight reel of the eddie aikau contest held yesterday, which comes with what sounds like a special bonus track sung by ozzy. it was won by fellow californian greg long. a couple of the waves he made were just perfect. i also see that chile's ramon navarro, who pioneered the nasty breaks in pichilemu, which are frigid, have terrible currents and require dancing over rocky channels to make it to the breaks, took 5th place and won a special award for the biggest drop. no peruvians were invited, so it will be interesting how navarro's success plays here. i think chileans are some of the toughest people around.

more fish here

more fish here
here's a link full of fish boards. some of them strike me as a little insane: 3.25 by 9 feet by 22 or 23 inches. others seem sensible and fun.

fish with gas

i finally surfed my fish this weekend on waves with some gas, south of lima, and it performed better than i had expected. nice and stable on days with wind chop, and enough foam under my chest to take off at places like punta rocas, which can be quite powerful. previously, i had only surfed my fish in lima, and used to take my thruster south. it works nicely too, but prefers very smooth days. the fish, however, provided plenty of control on 5-6' foot waves, carved nicely and turned about as fast as i could have hoped. this is a big relief, because i'd previously only surfed it in lima, where the waves often lack punch, and had never had a chance to test it in more powerful surf. it's really nice.

pasamayo left

 

i hoped to also load some pix of spinalsurfer at pasamayo, but he didn't send me any of him, so you'll have to settle for this one. this was one of the few good lefts that day, as mostly we were riding the right at pasamayo, which is usually considered a reef break. there was no wind and only two other guys in the water, so take offs were super smooth, so smooth that you could just play little games with the angle by leaning your head one way or another and focusing on the subtleties at hand, instead of worrying about the crowd...

birds at pasamayo

 

spinalsurfer and i, along with our photographer for the day, went on a long journey on sunday to a lightly surfed spot that you must hike into by climbing (or sliding) down steep sand dunes. the hike up is so steep it hurts. it was our first time there so we spent a few hours looking for the break, but finally made it. good surf, a bit small but a very nice wave. gotta love the birds!

what sofia's sponsors say...

so i finally had a chance to chat with one of sofia's sponsors the other day. the sponsor was partly surprised by the rude behavior of peru's queen, but also insisted that other surfers in the water should have called her out on her rude behavior. perhaps, but i really think that it boils down to the fact that sofia is a spoiled brat (a pituca) who is obnoxious. somebody else i was at the table with that day, a peruvian, said he would have grabbed sofia's board and broken it. that sounds fine to me. i made the point that when Nike signs big sponsorship deals with athletes the contracts normally have umpteen clauses in them demanding that the athlete set an example for the sport, be polite, decent, well-behaved on and off the court (or in and out of the water), and that any thing the athlete does to the contrary could be grounds to terminate the sponsorship deal. i wonder if the folks at Roxy would be more alarmed, seeing that their product is more closely related to surfing than the other companies that sponsor sofia. witness the current noise about tiger woods potentially losing sponsorship deals just because he crashed his car into a fire hydrant because his angry wife was chasing him with a golf club...
by the way, if you want to see a role model for the sport, somebody who was born with little cash and had to claw her way up, check out this website for brazilian silvana lima. i especially recommend the wild card video. she rips.