Choo-choo

I know what you're thinking..."what's with all the pictures of trains?" right? Trains aren't meant to be cool. I reckon otherwise though; I kinda like them as a means of getting around.

At some stupidly small hour this morning whilst most people were either fast asleep or being turfed out of nightclubs, my friend Kyle and I got back from a trip to Morocco. We went from Truro, Cornwall (well I did, Kyle started out in Wales) and got the train all the way to Marrakech with our surfboards. From there it was just a bus ride to the coast and we could get some waves. A medium haul surf trip entirely on a rail: Start-stop-start again, clackety clack, tickets, platform numbers and departure boards, four capital cities, Europe and Africa, pack un-pack, headphones, being kicked off platforms, midnight cafes and crazy taxi drivers, dining cars, eleven trains three of which were underground, a ferry, "you can't bring a surfboard on this train", books and looking out the window, seeing towns as the graffitied backs of warehouses and industrial units, "you want hashish?",lots of coffee in paper cups, wildflower meadows, funny looks and a jacket for a pillow.
We got a few good waves and climbed a mountain.

I have more rolls of film to develop than I can carry in my hands so once they're all done and I've absorbed and reflected on the whole damn deal I'll post a few up and put some words to it.

Why?
Because sometimes it's important to make the journey as important as the destination, put your feet on the stepping stones and nopt just jump right over them. Take a little bit of time.

Images:
The top one is the California Zephyr, which I caught from San Francisco to New York with my old man a few years back so that we could see what America looked like.
I drove my car onto the back of the Indian Pacific and let it carry me across the Nullabor desert right across Australia rather than sit on my own driving on a straight road for three days when my road-trip co-piolt couldn't make it.
The trains in Sri-Lanka are cool, old and clunky with little picture postcard train stations straight out of 1950's Britain. To get my surfboards on I had to pay for a first class ticket which was about a pound more.

A Finger on the Pulse, A Surform on the Foam

At some point, sooner or later, I was bound to miss a weekly blog post. I apologise but I also fully blame the Spanish rail network, a French rugby derby and Arabic keyboards for my inability to throw something up last Sunday. Anyways, this one has been in the pipeline for quite some time but its out there now [this arabic keyboard has no apostrophes its killing me] so rather than me trying to type up some mispelt rambling with bad punctuation, go ahead and read an interview that I conducted with Nick Blair a while back. The man is a damn fine craftsman and knows more about the intricacies of high performance surfboard design and shaping and where its headed than most of us can ever dream of. Definitely one for all of you surfboard geeks out there. Its been published by Drift Surf Magazine so all youve gotta do is hit the jump. Im off on the hunt for some right hand pointbreaks tomorrow, the story of how Ive fully earnt a splash in the sea will no doubt follow in a few weeks once Ive got home and developed the mountains of film that Ive been shooting this past week. http://www.driftsurfing.eu/ http://joistiksurfboards.com/ http://nickblairshapes.blogspot.com/

Explore Your Own Backyard: Part 4

The story of Ducky's

Show us yer fins! The "staffroom" at Kitchen Windows, clockwise from top left is Brett, the real locals, myself and Kim.

Kim a.k.a. Ducky, slipping under the lip on a left at Kitchen Windows shot by a gent named Tom Harington.

Libya running up the point at Phantoms. Ducky's is just out of shot to the right.

Nobody called it Ducky's. It didn't have a name because it wasn't a surf spot. It was on the Wild Side and that was all there was to it until Kim started talking us into it.

I don't even have any photos of the place.

I guess you'd define Duckies as the patch of sand and rocks around the back side of Phantoms, the most easterly of the point-breaks in Jeffreys Bay. It was the start of a stretch of beach called the Wild Side on the edge of town that just looked incredibly sharky, was always windswept, bleak and very empty. There was a big yellow sign warning of the possibility of muggings stuck in the middle of the beach, which was a fair call because whilst I lived there somebody had their camera stolen when they took it out to take a souvenir comedy photo of the sign. I had to smile at the irony.

This place was the polar opposite of the world class wave at Supertubes five clicks along the beach. It was just a funny rippy little shorebreak with bits of reef sticking up out of the sand. Kim started running down to go bodysurfing there before work because it didn't require a lot of swimming, but before long we were all joining him and we nicknamed it Ducky's after Kim's favourite cap which had a big orange peak that looked like a duck's bill. So if time was pressing before work or the sunset, or we wanted a laugh rather than a serious surf, then we'd bypass the two regular respectable surf spots right in front of us and head around the corner for a splash & dash. We'd take a nominal "normal" shortboard, a surf-school foamy, a polystyrene belly board and a set of swim fins which we'd switch around between us. The waves almost always closed out, the currents were weird and there were odd bits of rock sticking out all over the place, not to mention the whole shark vibe that was going on there. We planned on building a driftwood clubhouse and having monthly "Ducky's Days" when we'd just hang there all day.

Nobody else ever surfed the place, and that's probably still the case today.

But it was ours, and because of that we loved it despite all of it's shortcomings.

Find a place and make it your own, just like Ducky did.

The Stories of Scars

We've all got scars; even the most precious princesses have marks on their knees from falling over as kids, it's just that some of us carry a few more than others. And they all tell stories.

I was listening to one of the brilliant Dirtbag Diaries podcasts a few weeks back and it was all about scars. As I drove down the coast road to work with it playing through my earphones I started to take note of the backs of my hands and wrists - right in front of my eyes on the steering wheel: A long white line across the back of my right hand from a run-in with a grill (I once tried telling somebody that I got scratched by a tiger at the zoo), a thin slice down one finger from an Indonesian reef, three gnarled knuckles thanks to the bricks at Jeffreys Bay, the tip of a finger sliced around removing aluminium swarf from a lathe and countless chill-blain puckerings from surf coaching under a hot sun in a cold ocean. No particularly remarkable or unusual ones really, everybody'll have their own versions. Some people I know have scars that define them, with full-on stories to go with them that they're continually having to tell to curious new acquaintances.

I bring this up not because of any sort of machismo, I don't want to start a pissing contest comparing scars (I wouldn't do so well if I did). But I like the fact that they all have stories, and I love the constant reminder of how incredible our bodies are at repairing themselves.

Tattoos can be bought and I'm all for art on skin but most tattoos don't carry the same stories that scars do. You don't choose your scars or where they go but they're there for the duration all the same. In Indonesia the brown scars that surfers gain from brushes with the sharp coral reef and subsequent cleaning with iodine are nicknamed "Kerrang tattoos" after the Bahasa Indonesian for coral.

Cut deep enough and some serious repair is required. Blood clots and fibroblast sets to work, synthesising collagen fibres which cross link (rather than align as it does in the rest of our skin) and when the scab falls away after 3-4 weeks we have a fresh patch of skin. But not proper skin...just a patch up job which won't grow hair or sweat, and won't stretch to accomodate our growing bodies.

A reminder not to do that again because it hurt.

A battle badge.

Have a look at the backs of your hands, or your knees, elbows, anywhere. Take a look at some of those marks and recall how you got them. Some may have painful memories attached, but I'll bet that a few take you back to a good time or place and a pretty good story.

Top Image: Matt's a climber, and his knuckles have bore the consequences. Shot in Southern Spain, February 2011 on a climbing trip with his brother Sam Wheadon who's a pro-shutterbug.

Bottom Image: My shoes by me, but they don't look like this any more...years of walking barefoot, rock hopping and reef scrapes have resulted in some lasting marks but I wouldn't have it any other way.

P.S.

If you're passing through Falmouth, Cornwall, over April then swing by the fantastic JAM records coffee shop and record store. Sip a latte, flick through the incredible music in the racks, and cast your eyes over all the photography that I've thrown up on their wall. It'll be up until the end of April.

Howls From The Pit

"I love working. I've got to work every day with my hands. Even if I am doing paperwork all day, I've got to go home and chop vegetables or something. It's really important to me."

Yvon Chouinard

Founder of Patagonia, environmental philanthropist and climbing legend

The Pit: Surfboards, Boats & Bikes.

I lose my pencil about ten times a day, and it nearly always turns up tucked behind my ear.

Inking in the spray job on The Phoenix; rising from the ashes of Scotty's longboard.

Welcome to The Pit.

Being productive with your time, whether the outcome's tangible or not, is pretty important.

When the Rawkus Racing boys moved their car and tools out of one of the garages underneath our house leaving nothing but a classic mechanics calendar, I wasted no time in filling one corner of the garage with tools and a workbench. Suddenly, all of the unfinished projects that I had burdening the lower end of my to-do list looked like they might actually get done.

Eight years ago my friend Scotty snapped his longboard and I promised to re-shape it into a new shortboard...eight years, twenty-odd home moves across four continents (only four moves for the board) and finally I managed to reunite foam, trestles and plane in the same place and get it done.

Over the course of multiple Sunday afternoons I've slowly crossed off all of those "little" jobs so this winter I thought I'd take on a singular big project. Being descended from boat builders on both sides of my family (my Dad's Dad built motor-torpedo boats during WWII and my Mum's family were the last wooden boat builders in Port Isaac, Cornwall) it seemed like the right thing to do to complete the circle, take a deep breath and build a boat.

"An Reun Govynnus" has progressed enough now (it actually looks like a boat rather than just a pile of wood and big receipts) that I don't mind taking the cover off it.

A 16' Hawaiian style outrigger sailing canoe built as far as possible using sustainable, reclaimed and recycled materials (FSC plywood, reclaimed hardwood school science desks and biofoam offcuts from a surfboard factory so far), the pieces are slowly coming together with the aim being to splash her in early summer...surfboards strapped across the outrigger arms ready for coastal surf exploration, camping and spearfishing trips.

My housemate's on the lifeboat crew so it'd better not sink.

I'll keep you updated.

In Hope...

I just walked out to the top of the headland that juts out into the sea where I live and watched the sun dip into the sea at the end of a gorgeous spring day.

I do this every now and then to remind myself how lucky I am to be able to do just this, but today I did it to have a bit of a quiet moment for the people of Japan, and thought about the terrifying footage that I watched on Friday lunchtime which is now burned onto my memory. There's ben a lot of seismic activity around the Pacific rim recently, but this is the first time that I've ever seen the devastation happening live, rather than just pictures of the aftermath.

I live on the coast, and I know waves, but I still can't fully process what I saw.

Here's hoping that the people of Japan and their rich and fascinating culture can make it through this horrendous massive natural disaster and come out the other side.

I shot these images few years ago in the Asakusa district of Tokyo, in the area around the Senso-ji Buddhist Temple.

Always Carry a Camera

Every now and then a scene just goes ahead and unfolds itself before your eyes as a reminder that it's well worth going to the trouble of hauling a camera around everywhere.

A knot of people in the distance that slowly spread out into this rainbow coloured procession of Bedu women, walking across the dunes fringing the Wahiba Sands to the edge of the Indian Ocean. Oman, 2010.

If you've hit a link in search of the Black Swan piece, scroll down some and enjoy.