The Blue Blanquillo

Easily recognisable due to their streamlined bodies and blue coloration, with darker stripes running along their bodies and a white belly, the blue blanquillo is a truly distinctive fish.  Ordinarily found swimming alone in Indo-Pacific waters, lurking around coral reefs near the sea floor, it's remarkable to see one jumping out of the water in front of such a decidedly Cornish backdrop…

White surfboards can be stunning and certainly have their place, but I don't half love it when somebody goes for a beautiful resin tint (as is the case here) or spray job and gives their precious sled a name and a personality.  Surfboards are works of craft and art that we spend great deals of time with and money on, so it seems appropriate that when we get one with character we celebrate that.  Decorate it, name it, cherish it…and throw buckets with it.  

Nick Holden of the National Trust did and does with his Blue Blanquillo, making more than most would of a close-out under the Cornish cliffs.

The Big Blue

The oceans cover 70% of Earth's surface.  We have technology (the Hubble Space Telescope) that can form images made from light that has travelled over 10 billion trillion kilometres from the edge of our known Universe, and yet we can see less than a hundred metres under the surface of the ocean because of the way that seawater absorbs and scatters light.  We just don't know all that much about our oceans considering how influential they are to life on this planet.  We know more about space and that strikes me as being a touch ridiculous.

We exist on a watery planet, and we rely on that core element.  But the oceans are big; perhaps bigger than we can easily comprehend.  Only a few hundred years ago, nothing in terms of the duration of human evolution, we still believed that the waters of the world's oceans just poured straight off the edge of our flat planet - they were that infinite that the water just kept on coming.  And so because they are so enormous, often stretching as far as the eye can see in every direction, some people still believe that their vast ability to dilute and distribute whatever we put in them makes them cheap and easy dumping grounds.  But this abuse of our planets largest ecosystems is catching up with us, and the ability of the oceans to absorb our excess carbon dioxide and maintain the status quo is starting to tip and our actions are altering the delicate chemical balance maintained by them.     

We are all emotionally attached to the oceans - some more strongly than others but nonetheless every single human being has an unquestionable and deep affinity for these massive bodies of water far larger, greater, and mysterious than we can comprehend.  We all lose ourselves staring at them given half an opportunity.  Why?  Maybe it's because, depending on what you believe and where you place your faith, several million years ago our ancient, ancient, predecessors flapped out of them when they became too crowded and adapted to life on "Earth".  Perhaps, considering this, we were a bit wide of the mark when naming this planet of ours.  Now there's something to consider on World Oceans Day.  

Calling All Cartophiles

I have to admit to having a bit of a thing for maps and charts; I find them utterly fascinating and can lose myself in them in just the same way that I can stare for hours at a fire or the ocean, and I don't think that I'm alone in this.  

Close your eyes, stick a pin in, and make a plan to go there.

Maps have been with us for thousands of years, allowing us to locate ourselves and place ourselves egotistically at the centre of our own personal universe, however big or small.  They allow us to travel without moving anything more than our eyes, faster than the speed of light, shrinking geography to a manageable scale and making every single one of us an explorer.  

Maps and charts transcend languages and, I would imagine, predate human speech - how else do you think homo sapiens who'd not yet figured out how to organise their grunts into primitive language were able to direct each other to food sources and co-ordinate hunts?  I'd like to think that they grabbed a stick and used it to draw directions in the dirt - the original mud map.  At some point our artistic interpretations of the landscape around us took to the skies and showed our world as the gods saw it.  We looked up to map the constellations, and we did our best to look down, taking an educated guess at what lay over the unknown horizon and beneath the sea.  Where there were blank spaces yet to be explored, cartographers used their imaginations and either made something up or drew a monster.

Both my grandfather and my great-grandfather on my mother's side worked at the Ordnance Survey. Somewhere there is a wonderful photograph of my grandfather in North Africa during WWII surveying as part of his role as a map maker for the Royal Engineers.  Perhaps my appreciation of cartography is partly down to genetic memory?

Maps take many forms and information can be presented in many different ways, the most obvious being the two flavours that world maps come in: political or geographical, one being subject to the short term nature of humanity and the lines that we draw in the sand and the other showing what is physically present but only in a narrowly defined scientific category such as vegetation or elevation.  No map can show everything and therefore no map is perfect, and in fact most of the information that we are shown is presented over a flawed template because it is so difficult to present the surface of a sphere undistorted on a flat surface.  Gerardus Mercator produced the best attempt to date in 1569 and that still forms the basis for our view of a flat world map 445 years later, but there's no getting around the fact that Greenland just isn't that big.  If a map is conveying information where location is one of the key considerations, then how it is presented is down to the cartographer.  When Harry Beck sat down at his drafting table in 1931 to produce a new map of the London Underground he took inspiration from an electronic circuit board and spaced each station more or less equally, showing how stations related to each other across the entire network rather than laying them out geographically.  It's an iconic design that has been printed more than any other map in history and is absolutely fit for purpose, but you couldn't use it to navigate yourself overland from Hammersmith to Upminster very easily.  All the same, I don't understand why I've never seen anybody waiting for the tube with Harry's famous coloured lines tattooed on their forearm.  

Other maps show such information as GDP per capita, weather patterns, military spending by country, place names sized in relation to population and how many people are currently online.  The list of what we can convey using a map goes on and on, and there are many different ways in which we can do it.

I have no idea how I manage to get any work done with this lot stuck up in front of my face above my desk.  W.Graham Arader III (the most famous, wealthy and contentious map collector/dealer in the world) probably doesn't have anything to worry about, but I am pretty fond of some of my maps and charts and the day dreams that they trigger.  Current favourites include the "Anti-Piracy Planning Chart" and "Time Zones of Antarctica" map.  

I recently picked up a second hand book called "The War Atlas", a volume of "carto-journalism" produced as part of a series illustrating inequality by a socialist publishing house.  The spread shown above shows the post Cold-War distribution of nuclear weapons (c.1982) looking down on the North Pole.  It is equal parts fascinating and terrifying.

Maps do an awful lot of things and one of the things that they do incredibly well is arouse curiosity where they are meant to sate it.  They tell us enough about a place to pique our interest but never transport us there physically.  They are the ultimate cause of itchy feet, and for that I love them.

My oldest friend gave me this beautiful three dimensional relief nautical chart for my birthday last year.  He said that he'd tried to find one for somewhere that I'd visited on a surf trip but then, as my birthday drew near, he panicked and "just bought the coolest looking one that they had" and in doing so inadvertently added another destination to my "must visit" list.

Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands is one of those books that I dearly wished I had written.  I think that I would probably have written a slightly different subtitle if I had been the author though:  

"Fifty Islands I have not visited but intend to".

 The stuff that dreams are made of/dual purpose bedside lighting and inspiration.

 If you want to see an incredible collection of maps then check out "40 maps that will help you make sense of the world" over on Twisted Sifter.  They are incredible and many of them are very thought provoking.  

And, if you're looking for some bedtime reading in old-fashioned paper and ink form then "On The Map" by Simon Garfield will tell you everything you ever thought you wanted to know and then some about cartography in it's many guises.  That, and an Atlas.

Be A Haymaker

"When the sun shines, make hay.  Which is to say: take time when time comes, lest time steals away"

Patience

Seek a pastime that demands the development of patience: an activity with no final whistle; no finish line; no scoreboard.  Find something that you love and can lose yourself in for hours and hours without realising.  These days it seems that many of us can't handle being alone with ourselves for more than about twenty seconds - just take a look around next time you're stood on a railway platform or in the queue at the supermarket and watch all of the humanity around you reaching for their phones because they're so uncomfortable just being in the present.  There's real value in having to wait for a reward, be it waiting for the tide to turn, for the fish to start to rise or for the rock to dry out after a rain shower.  It gives you the sort of time needed to let things settle and to subconsciously process your thoughts.  Patience is becoming a lost art, and whilst there are many benefits to the immediacy of modern culture, the loss of our ability to wait for things to happen in their own god time is surely something that we ought to make efforts to salvage.  It's said that patient men win the day, after all.

Outside Food: Camp Stove Hash

It's May and, despite the long fingers of winter still doing their best to cling on, the weather is by-and-large improving.  For the next six months the light is green for living a more complete life outdoors - eating, sleeping and doing all of the fun stuff in-between out in the fresh air.  So, over the summer months, I hope to drop in a few posts featuring recipes that are best enjoyed when prepared and eaten outside - and I'm going to get the ball rolling with a dish that I have a personal (and so far unbroken) rule to never cook and consume under a roof:  Camp Stove Hash.

Camping food often falls into two categories:  dehydrated or boil-in-the-bag "mystery meals" that were invented for astronauts and are now eaten by kids on Duke of Edinburgh expeditions, or food that doesn't need a lot of preparation or cooking like tinned ravioli, packet couscous and stale sandwiches.  Camp stove hash is another story, with easily transportable ingredients that make a brightly-coloured meal that I'd probably pick off a cafe menu if given half a choice.  It's a two stage process though - so the first stage can be done at home before setting off if you anticipate working up a hunger and wanting to refuel as swiftly as possible.  Prior preparation and all that…


Stage 1:  Potato Wedges

• Potatoes - quartered lengthways, par-boiled, dusted with salt, pepper and a heap of paprika and then shallow-fried in batches until crispy. 

Stage 2:  Camp Stove Hash

• Equipment: Camp stove, pan, pocket knife and a wooden spoon.  Fork and fresh air to eat with.
• Ingredients: Potato wedges (see stage 1), onion (optional), chorizo sausage (the ready to eat sort), small bottle of cooking oil or butter,  bag of spinach, salt, pepper and paprika. 
• Method:  Find a level, sheltered, spot out of the wind and get your camp stove lit.  Heat a touch of oil and roughly cut your onion straight into the pan taking care not to add any bits of finger or a thumb to the ingredients.  Soften.  Cut the chorizo into slices about as thick as a pound coin and add these, allowing them to release their bright red oil and crispen up.  Tip in as many potato wedges as you want to balance out the dish or satisfy your hunger and stir the whole lot together, breaking down the wedges a bit and combining all of the ingredients - add a little more paprika at this point if you fancy it.  Heat through.  Add spinach a handful at a time, stirring it in and allowing it to wilt down before adding a bit more.  Season to taste.  Keep over the heat for a few minutes then share it straight from the pan.

Paipo-a-Go-Go

Me, a big baked bean and some deep-winter wedges.

What with it having been a long weekend here in the UK and many other countries, I should really have written this post a week ago so that the classic long weekend of DIY hammering and sawing could be channeled into producing one of these wonderful little surf craft.  But I've just moved house and spent the last few weeks without internet access, so now the challenge is for you to make one of these in two days instead of three next weekend…

But just what is it?

Dan Crockett on an Otter paipo.

When Captain James Cook dropped anchor in a Hawaiian bay in 1778 he witnessed many of the locals riding waves lying down on wooden boards.  These basic wave riding craft are called paipos (pronounced pipe-oh) and the name is derived from the Hawaiian "Pae Po'o" which means "to surf headfirst".  Generally around 3 feet long, the paipo is the little brother of larger finless Hawaiian designs such as the alaia and olo, the alaia having experienced a resurrection of sorts over the past decade in alternative surf-craft circles.  Travellers to and from the Hawaiian islands at the turn of the last century exported the paipo and it was adapted at various coastal locations around the world, becoming known most commonly as a "bellyboard".  In the 1970's Tom Morey introduced the boogie board and foam bodyboards instantly overshadowed the traditional paipo, with just a few small pockets of traditionalists keeping the flame burning - mostly in Hawaii.

I made my paipo a few years ago, and it's the sort of board that sits in my quiver waiting for a time when I've surfed enough good waves on my regular stick to make heading out on something a little different not seem like much of a risk to my monthly wave-count.  I managed to get hold of a 3'6" long paulownia kitchen worktop off-cut from a friend (the same wood that the majority of alaias are made from) and wondered for a while what I could make with it.  The worktop was made from a number of planks of varying widths, all glued together.  I cut these apart, trimmed them to uniform widths and then glued them back together with thin strips of a random hardwood (that I had some strips of lying around my workshop) sandwiched in between them.  I planed down the hardwood stringers and then drew out a template for my paipo.  It looked like a giant baked bean.  Once I'd cut out the shape of the board I shaped the rails using a small block plane (turned down at the tail, up at the nose and 50/50 through the middle section) with the board clamped against a workbench.  Because I have a bit of a thing for not wasting off-cuts I cut a band to go around nose on the deck, using the same template, and once it was glued in place I routed a groove into it to act as a hand-grip.  The whole thing was sanded smooth and then had a few coats of linseed oil to seal it before being taken for a splash in the sea.  All up it was a fun way to spend some time and I came out the other side with a new surfboard, of sorts.  It takes the bare minimum of tools (a pencil, saw, a few sash-cramps, glue, a block plane and abrasive paper) if you want to try making one yourself.  Essentially it's just a wooden bodyboard which makes it the ideal choice for shorebreaks, but it's also great just to run in with for a quick half hour in summer to catch a few waves and ride some whitewater back towards the beach.  It depends how seriously you take your surfing, I guess.  If you're open to different ways of experiencing waves though then I would definitely recommend sliding in on a few head first.

Ride anything: wave-wise and board-wise.

Check out the stoke that the crew at The Paipo Society have for these things, and keep your eyes peeled for the next Approaching Lines Slyder Cup event - celebrating finless surfing in all of it's many forms.