The Inertia x Angles of Attack

A little while ago I was lucky enough (through a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend kind of connection) to be picked up by US-based online surf publication The Inertia as a contributor.  I'm really pleased to be involved with them as they put out some great contemporary content with a real finger on the pulse, and their list of contributors shows great depth and puts me in amongst some names whom I hold a great deal of respect for, and I'm humbled to have my dodgy work featured alongside them.

In my eagerness, I sent them a piece that I'd been working on for a while that easily tripled their normal word count for articles.  Understandably, the editors at The Inertia had to trim it down somewhat before putting it out there, but in doing so some contributions from some friends whom I interviewed were lost.  As it's been out a for almost a week now and is about to drop off The Inertia homepage, I thought I'd put up the full and uncut version here with a few extra images.  

Click HERE to read the published article on The Inertia, or if you've got the time, inclination, and haven't been scared off by my highly questionable writing style already, then please read on...

   

 

Reflecting on a decade spent trying to work out the best way to get the best waves possible.

Ideally, somebody could just pay me to be me.  Personally, I think I’d provide pretty good value for money but as yet I haven’t been approached.  So, like the ninety-nine percent of fellow surfers who aren’t either sponsored free-surfer’s able to dictate their own agenda, or the wave riding offspring of the filthy rich, I have had to accept that as well as surfing, I need to be working.

I hadn’t really planned it as such, but looking back it appears that I’ve used most of my twenties as one extended experiment.  One that revolved almost exclusively around getting as many good waves as I possibly could.  I had no intention of it working out this way when a few months before my twenty first birthday I walked out of my final University exam and into a world where I didn’t have to be back somewhere come September, but that seems to be how it’s played out. 

Getting the best waves possible, or “Barrels before breakfast” as my friend Kelly coined it.  I’ll expand on that a little bit, because if that had been my sole aim then I wouldn’t have moved after the end of the first six months and I’d have found a way to stay put in Indonesia.  I guess, digging a little deeper, my intention over the past eight or so years has been to find and maintain a way to surf good waves regularly whilst still leading a life that fulfills me.  Probably pretty standard amongst the vast majority of surfers.  Deep down I always knew that my aspirational dirtbag lifestyle of living in a tent on the beach or out of the back of a car wouldn’t seem so crash hot in ten or twenty years time.  Girls don’t dig it after a week, and it’s rubbish when the weather’s bad.  The aim is not to end up being the middle aged guy propping up the bar telling everybody stories about how bitchin’ life used to be.  How could I sustain a diet of waves that make me smile in balance with all the other things that make me smile, until I’m too old to care?

So far I’ve taken three different angles of attack.  Don’t ask me which one works the best; I haven’t drawn my conclusions yet.

Seasonaires

This is how so many of us get started.  When I was sixteen years old I got a job in my local surf shop sweeping out sand and making cups of tea.  I used to read out the surf report to the local radio station and shuffle the wetsuits on the rails, then ended up spending my summer holidays outside on the beach hiring out foam surfboards.  It was great fun, but my friends over the stream at the surf school started later, finished earlier, earned more and sometimes even got to surf on the job.  Through my late teens and early twenties I surf coached alongside my friends and housemates in the school holidays, which seemed really glamorous but we were solely concerned with saving for surf trips so worked long hours repeating ourselves parrot-fashion over and over, and peeing in our wetsuits over and over.  It was worth it though as in the lag time between regular school holidays and University starting again we could make trips to Europe and then further afield to places like Indonesia.  When we no longer had to return for University our trips to Indonesia extended across the winter months.  So many people we knew did this seasonal work routine, working a summer on the beach then a winter in the mountains moving from one scene to the next with the only difference being a change in temperature and the type of board underfoot.  Same faces, same long hours and same party scene.  I wasn’t into snow as much as I was into waves so worked hard for the summer season then tried to see how long I could make it last.  Inevitably, it wasn’t as long as I’d have liked it to have been and I’d be home before winter had faded, pulling pints in bars and carrying plates in restaurants before the surf school opened up again and I could start the saving process over again.  So this is the bi-polar option of either half a year of hard work followed by perhaps the next half a year of nothing but blissful release to surf your brains out, or six months of working hard and playing hard in one environment before shifting location for another six months of the same.  I didn’t see any longevity in this approach, so one year, at the end of the summer season, I bought myself a one-way ticket.

Work Where There’s Waves

 Some people are lucky enough to be blessed with this one from the outset, but it doesn’t stop them from wanting to check out what’s over the next hill; if you aren’t blessed with the good fortune to already live somewhere where the waves are consistently really good, then move to such a place and take any form of employment that keeps you there.   The first problem that I encountered with this was that there’s an awful lot of places to choose from where the waves are really good, and even narrowing it down to where the waves are really, really good still leaves a lot of choice.  My approach was to spend several years moving from place to place, usually on one-way tickets, bedding in and living for extended periods of time surfing, working and leading a normal life.  I wasn’t on a surf trip; I was living somewhere else.  When an opportunity arose to move on I’d ask myself a question, “If I had to go home tomorrow or stay here forever, what would I do?”  If the answer was to go home tomorrow then I’d move on.

Now there are definitely some places where it’s just not practical to turn up and expect to get a job, fit right in and settle down; visa issues, lack of employment in less developed nations and culture shocks can all provide a stick in your proverbial spokes.  But there are still plenty of options available.  The point with this option is that what you do in between surfing is inconsequential.  It’s all about being in the right place and having the time when the surf comes up.

The beauty of living where the waves are good is that not only can you be on it on the best day of the year, you can be in the right place at the right time, every time:  Secret spots and optimum conditions for each local nook and reef aren’t common knowledge and elude visiting surfers, but it’s just the sort of inside info that you get from work colleagues, housemates and the crew that you regularly surf with and that’s what makes bedding-in to a surf community worth while. 

I got some incredible waves living in this way, lived in some beautiful places and made some lifelong friends.  But I found that I had a bad case of itchy feet and didn’t feel ready to lock into a place for the next fifty odd years just yet. 

I wanted to surf different waves and to keep looking just to check that there wasn’t some place better, and I never earned enough money in the jobs that I took (inevitably relatively unskilled with a paycheck that reflected this) to take a holiday, so in order to take a look over the next hill I often had to up sticks and move there.  Alex Espir of Initiative Surf is one surfer who’s also given this “work where there’s waves” option a really good run in his career as a surf guide and coach and he’s spent significant amounts of time in some of the world’s best wave locales.  His take on it is as follows:

“Making sure that you surf every day ultimately leads to some sort of sacrifice.  After a while those sacrifices can weigh heavy but in the end surfing as much as you want to, when you want to and where you want to has to become the sacrifice.

Practically, it is not as easy as you might think it would be to live and work to your satisfaction where there are waves, certainly good waves. Unless you manage to build a career around surfing the list of jobs and careers that allow you to prioritise water time is rather limited. Partners, families and jobs are inevitability going to take priority over surfing as you mature. No one can live like they are in their early twenties forever but it is up to you how much you want to keep surfing and you are in complete control of this. You simply have to try to balance the few factors against each other.  The scales will always have to tip one way, you just have to work out which way they will tip for you and accept that there will always be a degree of sacrifice...and not feel guilty if they continue to tip towards surfing everyday."

At some point, when living light and perennially out of a boardbag was starting to wear thin, when I was becoming weary of starting afresh every six months or so, I recalled the early morning crew at Main Break in Margaret River.  I’d been living in the region for five or six months before moving into a spare room in the house that my friend Krede lived in.  He was a pharmacist who worked in town, and I was working in a pub.  Most mornings we’d get up in the dark and drive out of town to the coast.  It was always the same crew pulling on their wetsuits in the parking lot above Main Break before the sun had come up to warm the air:  The town’s Doctor, a Teacher from the high school, the National Park warden, my housemate the pharmacist and me, a bar tender with an accent in the local pub.  I was definitely the odd one out.

Move Inland and Get a Real Job

My most recent tack, and certainly the one requiring the most commitment.  After a lot of thought and a giant fourteen foot long “option appraisal” laid out across the floor of my kitchen, I came to the conclusion that the best way to get consistently good waves for the rest of my surfable life was to go back to the books and get a profession.  Those guys surfing the early morning shift at Margaret River were all professionals in one field or another, who’d worked hard to get to where they were now which was a position where they could surf good waves every morning before heading in to work with wet hair and earn enough for a good standard of living, i.e. multiple surf trips every year.  When I worked at a friend’s surf camp in Costa Rica, all of the guests and almost all of the other surfer’s passing through were all professionals on vacation from their careers in the States.  Almost every time I’ve paddled out at a good wave, particularly in an idyllic and exotic location, I’ve shared the line-up with a doctor or a lawyer, or more often than not, a teacher.  Maybe there was something to it then; that prescriptive western doctrine that says you have to work hard and pay your taxes, settle down and get a “real job” that I’d been avoiding all this time.  Maybe this was the key to surfing regularly, earning enough to get a few new boards and going on a trip or two every year, and maybe even migrate one day to one of those joints with all-time waves to finally end up like the doctors and teachers of Margaret River. 

There are a lot of options to choose from here.  Friends of mine have got themselves a trade spending years on an apprentice wage with the aim of becoming their own boss, downing tools when the waves are good and having a valuable skill that makes them desirable to certain wave-rich southern hemisphere nations.  Others have hit the books hard and worked long hours away from the ocean to become Doctors, Lawyers or high-flying suits, professions that are pretty easily transferrable internationally and have hefty enough paychecks to facilitate the sort of surf trips that make up for long hours in the office. 

My friend Mick Jardine made the choice to hit a ‘proper’ career hard at age 20 having had a pretty successful run at Australian State Teams and National Junior Titles, until he reached the stage on the Pro-Junior tour where he kept coming up against the Coolie kids and quit whilst he was ahead.  But as well as being one of the most talented surfers that I know, Mick is also one of the most intelligent humans that I know.  He works where there’re waves but he also has a very ‘real” and high-flying job so I asked him for the low-down on the hows and whys:

“The disclosures:  I have a job that is largely desk bound, requires me to wear a suit, is insatiable in devouring time and involves a long vertical commute each morning and afternoon. I’m 31, married, and kid number one has just arrived.  Water time? I clock probably 5 days a week locally, with a road trip thrown in every month or so, conditions dependent.

Um, balanced you said? Yes, and here’s my 101 as to the why and how:

·      Take a long-term view. I did the student/gypsy thing for the best part of 10 years after high school, so I’m fine with working hard now. Over those 20 big years from late teens to late 30’s, it will level out.

·      But be disciplined in the short term; I will find a way to surf tomorrow if work interferes today. Don’t be lazy and plan, it’s actually pretty easy these days with surf forecasting being so damn accurate.

·      Mental stimulation, learning and enjoying your work, really matters. You’re going to spend a lot of time doing it so find something you enjoy, plus there’s nothing like time scarcity to keep the surf froth up. Trust me.

·      Geography is critical. I live in Perth (I know, *yawn*) but it means I can surf every day, have a 25 minute door to door commute to a ‘real’ job and have world class waves a short drive away. On balance, it hits the brief. 

·      Finally, making the best of your time, today, is a great skill. It’s amazing how much energy you can waste looking back at the good ol’ days; they’re done, move on. If being busy is the price of a surf now, fine by me.

Of course this is just my template and while it works for me, there are an array of ‘right’ answers so approach with caution. And of course I have many, many days when the life of a surf ascetic drifts dreamily into my mind and I want to bail on the suit as much as the next guy.

But until I can convince the missus to sell up and raise alpacas on a farm down south, I will keep squeezing my early hour in and then racing off to work with wet hair and a grommet’s stoke. And it would take a bigger paycheque than I’ve ever been offered to unbalance that part of my equation."

I chose to take a line through the middle ground and went back to school in more ways than one, training to become a teacher.  I figured that there are always kids to teach, all over the world, that the work can be engaging and fun and the holidays are good.  I hadn’t figured the massive workload that teachers have, the permanent feeling of having forgotten to do something important, the long hours and the “phantom” holidays that I would have to spend marking and writing reports through my rookie years.  But in the past few years I’ve probably had just as many memorable waves as I did when I was working less and surfing more, it’s just that recently those good waves have been crammed into intense, short surf trips.  I’ve been able to go to places during prime time and surf all day long (career induced lack of paddle fitness allowing) rather than having to miss surfs for work, and I’ve been able to go exploring to the places on the map that I couldn’t get to before because of time or money. 

Work hard, play hard, in it’s most extreme form. 

I still live on the beach but I have to travel to work and I rarely get in the sea on school days until the long days of summer roll around due to our high latitude, however I get a staggering six weeks paid vacation in the summer with the world as my oyster which makes up for all of the other holidays spent working from home or going in to do paperwork in an empty classroom. Choosing this route has it’s plus and minus points in extremes.  Every trip I’ve done recently I’ve run into at least one happy teacher who’s got it dialed - they’ve lucked into a good school and have achieved that elusive work/life balance.  But teaching (particularly in the UK) has a high drop out rate because striking gold can take a long time to come around – I was once told by an official at Western Australia’s Department of Education that the queue to teach at one of the two high schools in the wave-rich Leeuwin-Naturaliste region stretched right back to Perth.  Was I interested in teaching in a mining town in the outback though?

There really isn’t a conclusion to be drawn from this; It’s simply a reflection on just a few of the routes that I’ve taken in trying to find a way to surf better waves more often.  There are clearly other ways to tackle the challenge of surfing good waves all the time whilst satisfying all of the other needs in your life, there’re bigger gambles that could be taken or more extremes that you could commit to. 

I still don’t think that I’ve figured it out though so I’ll gladly accept any suggestions and give them my full consideration.  If you’re lucky enough to have got it dialed, let me know how you did so please - but perhaps don’t tell everybody incase they end up doing it too.

Massive thanks go out to the crew at The Inertia for publishing this piece.  If you want to know what's up in the wide world of surfing right now you ought to take a look and keep checking back.

Sunshine Hit Me

Sometimes, when it's rodding down with rain outside (particularly if it's still supposedly the middle of summer), you need a bit of audible sunshine to supplement the lack of a big yellow orb in the sky.
Enter The Bees (aka "A Band Of Bees" if you're state-side) a six piece band from Ventnor on the Isle of Wight led by Paul Butler whose analogue sound harks back in subtle homage to classic artists of the 60's and 70's and manages somehow to both relax and uplift in unison.  
I caught them at the utterly fantastic Port Eliot Festival back in mid-July (more to come on that soon) and managed to get myself a spot down near the front and fire off a few shots on my trusty little 35mm Olympus Trip.  They came out pretty good and have provided me with the perfect excuse to tell you that, if it's raining when you wake up tomorrow morning and you need your day brightening up some, look these guys up and get some sunshine in your ears.  Even if it's not raining, their soundtrack will make a good day better. 

"Not Much Of A Surf Story": Bev Morgan

Bev Morgan is the Forrest Gump of surfing; I'd bet that even readers with an affinity for surf history and culture have only seen his name pop up here and there in books, articles and stories.  But the funny thing about Bev is that, if you dig deep enough, he appears to be the nuts and bolts in many of the major developments in surfing throughout California and Hawaii from the late 40's through to the mid-60's.  He was that guy in the background, involved in what was going on but never standing front and centre.  If you google his name, you'll get a whole lot of stuff come up about the Dive Helmet business that he started in the mid-60's which is one of the world's leaders in dive helmet technology.  But a few images from his days in the midst of surfing will pop up...
  

How entrenched in early Californian surf culture you ask?  This guy has pedigree and a ridiculous number of the sort of incredible stories that you wouldn't have thought could all be attributed to a single man.  Growing up as a teenage friend of Greg Noll and the Manhatten Beach Pier guys, he rode boards shaped by Joe Quigg and Bob Simmons (who shaped him a 6' x 24" wide board in the early 50's which was absolutely unheard of and has since spawned the mini-simmons trend) and glassed surfboards for Dale Velzy and Hap Jacobs.  He was a helicopter rescue diver in the early 50's, jumping out of helicopters to rescue post-war fighter jet test pilots in Los Angeles Bay, opened one of the first wetsuit shops and got big into the fledgling diving scene.  His stories about the impact of domestic detergents replacing soap in American households and it's effect on breaking up sewage effluent and it's subsequent impact on marine life, particularly the molluscs and crustaceans that he dove for, provide a harrowing illustration of overpopulation's impact on the oceans. 

In 1957 Bev sold his share in Dive N' Surf and, along with a group of friends, bought a 61' wooden ketch and spent two years exploring the South Pacific.  On a mission to collect fish samples for Scripps oceanography institute from the Cococs Islands, they discovered that the reason why nobody had done it before was because of the ferocious and inquisitive sharks, so they dove as a team with shark billys to bash the teethy fish on the nose and scare them off whilst they collected samples.  On Easter Island they were formally requested by the island elders to "contribute to the gene pool", then retrieved artifacts from the  HMS Bounty on Pitcairn Island.  Upon his return he did a stint as a photographer at Surfer magazine then got into wetsuits and started the company that would eventually turn into Bodyglove.  He hung with Pat Curren in Hawaii surfing and spear fishing, trading half their catch for gas for their car.  He  smuggled lobster into the USA from mexico by plane with a load of friends and then took a freighter and two bulldozers down to try to bring back a mile long load of pearl shell to sell to the button business (the shells were delaminated and the whole scam failed).  When he finally settled back in LA he spent a significant amount of time bodysurfing the Newport Wedge with Mickey Munoz and Phil Edwards, where Joe Quigg and Carter Pyle developed swim fins by getting a dead frozen porpoise from Marineland, cutting off the tail and used the forms to make fins on tennis shoes.  Bev then developed his diving helmet business, using all of his experience in both diving and in advanced composites from the surf industry to make the first significant advances in diving helmets in 150 years.  He now lives in Santa Barbara and, when approached by The Surfer's Journal, claimed that he "didn't really have much of a surf story to tell"...  I would disagree Bev.

Bev Morgan's story is absolutely amazing.  The closest he's got to any sort of biography is an article in The Surfer's Journal where he tells the stories behind a load of photos from his extensive personal collection, called "More Than My Share".  You can buy it as a downloadable pdf from The Surfer's Journal here.

The Brilliance of British Bellyboarding

Greater than the sum of it's parts:  deckchairs, bunting, an Original Surfboard Co. bellyboard and John Isaac's Model T Ford.  World Bellyboarding Championships 2011.

Some things define British beach culture like nothing else:  buckets and spades, stripey deckchairs, sandcastles and of course bellyboards.  International readers may raise a quizzical eyebrow at this point, however a lot of British based readers will be drifting off into memory-ville.  A lot of us caught our first wave on a bellyboard; not our first "stand-up" wave, but lying down on a piece of plywood with a rounded nose, engulfed by the whitewater from waist-deep until we were deposited in the warm shallows.  In my grandma's shed there was a stack of these old things - my grandma's bellyboard which now rests in the corner of my bedroom, and three that my mum and her sister and brother had painted their favourite sea creatures on when they were children.  Most people who spent their childhood holidays on the beaches of Britain will have one of these bent plywood boards stashed away in a shed or up in the rafters of their garage, but these days they're starting to dust them off and get them back in the sea.  Bellyboarding's back.

Jenni Hosen entering into the spirit of things.  WBBC 2011. 

"Surf riding", as it was called back then, was a British beach pastime inspired by Hawaiian paipos and which has a history in this country dating back over one hundred years to the turn of the 19th Century, when Hawaiian Royalty were sent to Britain to finish their education.  Ever wondered why the Hawaiian State flag has the Union Jack in the corner?  That's the link right there.  After World War Two sheet material such as plywood became increasingly available and shaping a 4 foot long by 1 foot wide board with a rounded nose, often steamed or laminated to a slight upward curve, was easy.  You could get 8 boards out of a standard sheet and make them at home before loading the car to head south and west for the family holiday.  Wade out to waist deep water, wait for a strong line of whitewater to advance towards you then turn around and push yourself into it.  Good, simple, honest fun.

Arthur Traveller used to come down to Chapel Porth in Cornwall on holiday from London every year, bringing with him his plywood bellyboard.  When he passed away back in 2002 the National Trust's car park attendant Chris Ryan and Head Lifeguard Martin Ward organised the first "World Bellyboarding Championships" in his memory on the first Sunday of September.  This year is the championship's tenth year, and promises to be even better, and more eccentric than ever.  Modern wetsuits are not allowed, and classic woolen bathing suits are the most you're really meant to wear in the waves.  Everyone piles in for the expression session before the "serious" heats begin in two categories:  Juniors for anybody under the age of 60, and seniors for the more "practised" attendees who can get there using their bus pass.  For anybody not keen on wading out into the Atlantic Ocean in September can stay on land and get involved in the bake-off.  It's a wonderful event where a sense of humour is just as important as a bellyboard, chock full of British beach culture and traditions with a brilliant dose of classic eccentricity.  Knotted handkerchief and sand in your sandwiches anyone?  I'll see you there on Sunday September 2nd.  Enter here.

 The "Expression Session"

Whatever Floats Your Boat

Well, she floats.


And in this case, whatever floats my boat is about a year and a half of hard work and head-scratching (on spare weekends), three sheets of fsc certified plywood, a couple of old school science desks, some kitchen worktop offcuts, mis-blown foam from a lifeguard paddleboard, various workshop scraps, an old windsurf mast, the spare sail and a few bits from a knackered old mirror dinghy, 26 old seatbelts, a load of used plastic drinks bottles, a roll of fibreglass, some epoxy resin and finally patience and advice from a whole heap of people.
  
And what a relief it was when I pushed her into the sea!  After a year and a half in the making, An Reun Govynnus had sort of become the elephant in the corner; the project that I'd taken on that was arguably waaaaay to big.  So to push my little wooden boat off the beach at Port Isaac where my Great Great Uncle was the last wooden boat-builder and for it not to keep on going along the seabed until water came over the gunnels, or instantly capsize, was a pretty nice feeling.  To be honest, just getting it finished took a weight off my mind, let alone whether or not it was seaworthy.

An Reun Govynnus (Cornish for 'The Curious Seal') has featured on here a few times in the past (here and here), but I didn't want An Tor Orth An Mor to become a build diary for a project that I wasn't completely confident of finishing.  Building a boat is quite a big job as it turns out, particularly when you're working from a book (not full scale plans), adapting all of the measurements to suit the reclaimed and recycled materials that you're intent on using, don't really understand any boat jargon and only have 5 clamps to your name.  All that, and I'd just started a new and pretty full-on job which was overly-demanding on my time.  

It must be getting on for ten years ago that the desire for an outrigger canoe first crept into my mind; it seemed like the ultimate vessel for accessing some of the little nooks and crannies under the high cliffs around where I live to go spear fishing.  The outrigger would give it the stability to climb back aboard easily after diving that a normal small boat wouldn't provide.  So I called around a load of outdoor centres trying to get my mitts on a knackered old Canadian canoe with the aim of lashing a bit of drain pipe onto the side of it.  Well that dream morphed a bit over the next decade.  Surfboards get in the way in small boats, so for small surf trips up and down the coast an outrigger canoe provides space to lash a stack of boards....and why paddle everywhere when there's free energy in the wind?  One guy that I e-mailed for advice told me to build one in a day with friends and a crate of beers then smash it up paddling around in the surf to see whether I liked outrigger canoes enough to build one properly.  But by the time I'd shelled out for three sheets of plywood I figured that I'd made an investment and might as well do it properly.  Cue admiralty charts laser etched onto the fore and aft decks (so that I don't get lost), a trampoline of recycled car seatbelts and a whole heap of other little touches that might only be known to me.  If a job's worth doing...

I splashed her back in April during a horrible storm, my girlfriend Kate patiently watching from the beach in the driving rain whilst I bobbed around making a mental list of all of the things that I needed to do and improve before I could hoist a sail.  She also had to endure a conversation that I had with Tom Kay of Finisterre at the opening event of an exhibition where we gibbered excitedly and almost exclusively for a good ten minutes about various sail set-ups, making models with paper napkins and cocktail sticks to the bewilderment of everybody around us.  I owe her a public thank you for being so wonderfully patient and understanding.  Thank you!


And so to the maiden voyage:  Launching from Port Isaac seemed like the right thing to do; kind of completing the circle of wooden boat building and heritage.  Captain Christian Beamish calls it "blood memory" and I'd be inclined to agree.  It was a dropping spring tide so, having put all of the various bits of boat down on the pebbles at the waters edge the tide had dropped a fair bit by the time I'd lashed all of it together.  A few Port Isaac locals helped me to carry it down to the waters edge and, just as I shoved off my housemate Matt pulled his boat Sea Explorer into the harbour with a full compliment of clients on a sea safari.  Nice to have an escort for moral support and mainly in case my boat building skills weren't actually all that.  It's an interesting way to test yourself isn't it?  Putting your faith in your own craftsmanship to the extent that if it fails you'll probably have to swim a long way home or get scooped up by the lifeboat.

I paddled out of the harbour walls and looked back to enjoy the view of the picturesque little fishing village that I'm so used to seeing from within (some of you would recognise Port Isaac from Doc Marten, the TV show that's filmed there).  A mile east under the cliffs to Port Gaverne and then after beaching to adjust my rigging and eat some lunch I pointed north up a rugged, beautiful and largely inaccessible stretch of coast.  I had my eyes and heart set on a semi-secret beach a good few miles away but was paddling against a light head wind and didn't want to be overly ambitious on my first outing.  The last time I was in charge of a boat was a good few years ago after all, and I kind of wanted to soak it all up; this stretch of coast is utterly stunning with verdant green clifftops speckled with purple heather and yellow gorse flowers, incredible cliffs, waterfalls, coves and sea caves.  An Reun Govynnus only draws about 15-20 cm of water with me onboard so can come in remarkably shallow and skim over some of the reefs protecting the rocky shoreline.  

I hoisted the main sail and jib (the smaller sail at the front) for the run south back towards Port Isaac, just as the sea mist descended over Tintagel Head and the breeze picked up.  After such a beautiful hot and sunny day with barely a breath of wind the sea mist came down the coast amazingly fast.  Almost as fast as An Reun Govynnus which, at 16 foot long and less than 2 feet wide doesn't need a lot of sail up to get a move on.  This was the bit that I was a bit more apprehensive about because I'm a surfer and by no stretch of the imagination a sailor, and essentially an outrigger sailing canoe is an offset catamaran with the mast over to one side unbalancing it enormously.  When the sail is out over the outrigger it is pushing down on that buoyancy, however when it swings out to the other side it is more likely to capsize the boat than power it forwards and you need to be able to scramble out to the outrigger float to counterbalance it.  Everything that I read stated that these things are fast, easy to capsize and difficult to right, particularly singlehanded.  Luckily the breeze was manageable and I made it back to Port Isaac just as the sea mist caught up with me and almost exactly on dead low tide which revealed a few choice rocks and boils just outside the harbour walls that aren't often uncovered.
My original plans had been to follow the coast south and west the 7 miles or so back to Polzeath so that I could run my boat back up on my home beach and wheel it up the sand back to the garage where I'd built her.  But that voyage is probably an overnighter that can wait for another day and the next patch of high pressure that moves over us.  One paddle stroke at a time hey, now that I know that it floats.

I built myself a bloody boat, but it absolutely wouldn't have been possible without the following people:
My parents for the boat building heritage and "blood memory"; Richard Scott of thirdshade surfcraft for telling me that building a pram dinghy "just wouldn't be cool" and for advice and materials; John Burford of Upper Deck Marine for providing me with chandlery despite my enormous lack of knowledge about what boat bits I was actually after; Kate for taking photos, her unending patience and for making allowances for my near-obsessiveness, lateness and gluey/sawdusty clothing; Gary Dierking for designing such a rad boat and writing the book that I worked from; Matt from Cornish Sea Tours for the workspace and escorting me from Port Isaac to Port Gaverne; Dave Cook of Marine Academy Plymouth for advice; Byron the Port Isaac Harbour Master for allowing me to launch from "home", and finally to everyone who got so enthusiastic about my stupid project and encouraged me to do a proper job.  Thanks very much, sorry I didn't build on a gin-deck for us all to sit back and enjoy it on.


Images 1, 4, 5 and 8 taken by Kate Fewster, images 2, 3 and 6 taken by me and image 7 taken by Cornish Sea Tours.

Le Maillot Jaune

When I was 11 years old the Tour De France crossed the English Channel for a couple of stages and passed within 10 miles of my childhood home in the south of England.  It was sports day at my primary school and my Dad asked the Head Teacher if he could take me out of school for the morning to go and watch one of the biggest sporting events in the world pass our front door.  The Head Teacher said that school was more important and I wasn't to miss a day, so on the morning of sports day my Dad let me sleep in and woke me up telling me that I wasn't going to school that morning.  Legend.


This afternoon British cycling stepped to the front in a sport typically dominated by Continental European countries and made some bold statements.  Bradley Wiggins rode up the Champs Elysees  wearing the coveted Yellow Jersey that signifies the overall leader of this year's 2,173 mile Tour De France (the biggest annual sporting even in the world) and became the first British rider to win the event.  In second place came Chris Froome making a British one-two (the first time that countrymen have shared the two top spots since 1984), and to top that Mark Cavendish was the first over the line.  No cyclist has ever won the final day's stage in Paris more than once, and today's win made it four years in a row for Cavendish, the "Manx Missile".  There's only 6 days to go now until the Olympic cycling road race.  You'd be forgiven for presuming that the future's looking decidedly golden for British cycling.

The start of the Tour de France borrows from lifesaving races, with a 'nose-to-the-sand' lying start followed by a sprint to the first beer of the race, then the pile of bikes.  Under starter's orders. 

I don't have any photos of the Tour De France though.  The closest that I have were shot with a disposable camera at a bike race with a slightly different bent:  The Tour de Point.  The Tour de Point was (is?) an annual event for members of Trigg Point Boardriders Club (TPB) in Perth, Western Australia, and requires participants to complete a 5km odd circuit of the coastal suburb of Trigg with periodic beer stops.  Quite a few beer stops.  And the whole thing's a race, just like the Tour de France, with last year's winner wearing a yellow jersey.  Trigg Point Boardriders are one of the more notable West Australian boardriders clubs and the core crew of members are comprised of some of the standout surfers in Perth, with the club regularly winning events against their rivals from the slightly more wave-blessed neighbours down south.  But they have problems finding a member willing to put their name to the bank account into which they can deposit winner's cheques thanks to events such as the Tour de Point.

Stage 2. 

I was gifted a wildcard place in the 2006 Tour de Point along with another Brit transplant my old housemate Ref.  I lived with a couple of pillars of Trigg Point Boardriders and managed to borrow a bike for the event.  Not that your bike really matters, because by the second or third beer stop there's a fair chance that somebody else will have picked up your bike in their rush to set off again, or you'll do the same and set off on somebody else's steed.  Once it's all done and dusted and after 5km of sprint-pedalling and skulling beer you cross the line back at the Point, with most competitors "blowing warmies" (frothy beer burps, bleurghh), the winner has to down another beer or five from the trophy and then everyone have a crack at riding their bikes down the sand dune and into the sea.  In 2006 my housemate Scott was the only person who managed it; on somebody else's (probably now saltwater corroded) bike.

Seven empty cans for the winner, and another one on the way.

In 2006 my friend Scooper retained the yellow jersey that he had held on to for several years previously.  This needs special mention, because whilst the riders in the Tour de France can lay claim to being some of the most incredible athletes on the planet (endurance or otherwise), and that's just the 'domestique' team riders, I bet most of them would struggle to down a can of beer faster than it could be poured on the floor.  Scooper is a man of considerable athletic prowess proven through years of open water swimming and paddling at a competitive level, however his ability to down beer is the talent that gave him a competitive edge that no man could best through his years dominating the Tour de Point.

A couple of evenings later and it's all back to normal at Trigg Point:  a few boys paddling around looking for a wave, and a few more sipping sun-downers looking at waves.