A Four Day Festival of Froth

Ten days ago the second annual Approaching Lines Festival of Surf (presented by Reef) wrapped up, following 3 nights of surf films on an enormous cinema screen and a single fin surf contest that went down in classic conditions.  I was fortunate enough to be there as event photographer again, which meant that in between squeezing through the crowds to photograph everyone enjoying a beer in the intermission, I also got to sneak in and watch a few great movies from the back of the auditorium.  It's really great to see the various Approaching Lines events gaining so much popularity within the surf community, as British surfers continue to get behind the sort of events that bring us all together and break our bad habits of sticking to our own crew at our local beach.  It's a real pleasure to be a part of it all, regardless of the surf movies and complimentary beers...

Here're a few of my favourite shots from across the 4-day event, held in Newquay.  Hopefully I'll see a few more of you there next year.

Life size surf movies, and then some.

Shakas for Deus' new movie "North to Noosa".

Berads and beers, both courtesy of the fine folks at Sharps.

Event Director Chris Nelson, broadcasting.

There were sell-out crowds throughout the festival, not least for Kai Neville's latest shred-fest "Cluster" which had crew queuing out the door. 

Not least because the man himself was there to present his latest offering and do a Q&A after the credits stopped rolling, along with Saffa ripper Brendon Gibbens who features in Cluster.

Trying to make a multiplex look nice with light trails at dusk and all that...

James Parry about to paddle out for his heat in the Reef classic single fin invitational.

Sam Lamiroy running down the beach in front of the Headland Hotel.

A loomer rearing up out back.

Sam Lamiroy launching off the end section.  He stuck some solid moves in heat 1.

Heat 1 contestants (L-R) James Parry, Sam Lamiroy, Gee Piper, Toby Donachie, Neil Holland and Tom Anderson.

Heat 2 contestants Archie Cross, Sarah Bentley, Alan Stokes (Victor), Sam Boex and John Eldridge.

Alan Stokes did about 8 of these on the same wave, all the way to the inside at Little Fistral.  If I had been shooting film I would've burned through a whole roll on this wave alone.

Sam Boex took out the "Most Stylish" award, and rightly so.

This year's champ, Mr Alan Stokes.

Slyding Sunrise to Sunset

This past Saturday saw the finless clans of the British surf community converge on Lusty Glaze beach to compete in this year's Approaching Lines Slyder Cup, presented by the good folks at Reef.  With it being just a few weeks shy of the winter solstice, the "Friction Affliction Winter Convention" filled the few short hours of daylight and extended the magical golden hour to cover what felt like half of the heats contested.  Huey co-operated and sent some solid lumps shoreward for the duration of the day, testing all competitors waterman skills as well as their abilities to ride waves with no traction.  Here's a selection of my shots from sun-up to sun-down that sum up a great day of wave sliding.

At first light the surf looked fun.  An hour later it had jumped in size by about four feet as a westerly swell filled in, providing big, cold and bumpy conditions for the bodysurfers.

Swasssshhhhh zone stand-off.  Crabbing my way half-way up a rock face and balancing my camera on my knees doesn't get quite the same results as a tripod, it would seem.

There was a lot of water moving around the small bay as the bodysurfers competed at high tide, with wash-through sets leaving the "smaller" inside waves as the only consistent options.

Wooden surfboard shaper James Otter preparing to swim out with a handplane produced using offcuts from one of his surfboards. 

I'm pretty sure that Rich Pope was entered into every category.  Here he takes on an outside bomb on a 4'x1' bent plywood bellyboard before going on to win the air mat category and take second place overall.

The Otter Surfboards demostration station - showing what goes on at a bodysurfing "build-your-own" workshop experience day.

Jimbo Bennet returned to defend his title, drifting all over the place on an albacore with control and grace - here delaying the drop with a mid-face tail slide.

Pat from Surfboard Art Wales made the trip down and caught some screamers in the paipo category, switching between prone and kneeling and causing the judges to quickly glance at the scoring system.

Sarah Bentley, deserved winner of the "Most Stylish Human" award for making drop like this time and time again on a surfboard with no fins.

The twilight expression session saw all manner of wave-sliding craft in the line-up, including Ross Curwen and his trusty tray.

The mat finalists making walk to the waters edge at low tide, and considering how they might paddle a large, buoyant, bag of air out through shifty overhead surf.

Contenders ready!  The finless finalists.

Jimbo Bennet using nothing but rail to stick a drop that most surfers would be stoked on if they had a few fins in their board.

Finless friends, congratulating each other on a well surfed day and demonstrating the camaraderie that exists between the tribes.

Event Director Chris Nelson with Wooden Surfboard maker James Otter, watching the sun set on the last minutes of the grand final and a day of great surfing.

The Straw Draw

My hands are starting to get horribly sweaty. It's not the tropical sun getting to me though, but nerves.
It's a Saturday morning in early November 2007 and I'm stood on the sand of Tavarua Island in the South Pacific with three small lengths of palm frond gripped in my outstretched hand and I'm waiting for an American, an Australian, and chance to decide where I surf today.

Prior to a recent change in Fijian Law which had extended land rights to the coral reefs over which islanders fished (and thus meant that island surf resorts such as Tavarua and Namotu could claim exclusive access to several world-class waves) the only way that you could catch a wave at Cloudbreak if you weren't paying US$350 per night to stay on Tavarua was to turn up on changeover day and surf the short window between one set of guests departing and another set arriving.  I was staying on the mainland, next to the mangrove swamp and boat ramp that was the jumping off point for these luxury surf resorts, and had asked the lady at the place that I was staying to call ahead and book me a space on the boat out to Cloudbreak for changeover day.  Somewhere along the line there had been a mix-up and Tavarua resort were only expecting two of us, rather than the three who jumped out of our skiff into the warm, ankle deep, waters off their beach.  Their boat was already almost full of surfers who had boated in from other islands and the mainland, so there was no way around this:  we were going to have to draw straws and one of us would be heading back to the soft right-hand reef pass that none of us had travelled to Fiji to surf.  I didn't want to put the pressure on myself to draw a straw, let alone go first, so I picked a fallen palm frond out of the undergrowth and tore two long lengths and one short one from it and arranged them in my fist.  The others could decide my fate.  I offered out my hand, equidistant between the young American surfer who I'd been surfing with all week and the Australian banker who'd unapologetically dropped in on me several times the day before.  They both reached out and simultaneously drew a piece of green.

Deep breaths.

I tried to swallow but my mouth was dry.

It felt as though I was being punched in the chest but from the inside, my heart was beating so hard.

On the count of three we all opened our fists to see who would be taking the two remaining seats on the Tavarua skiff.  I exhaled loudly, tried to stifle my smile, and made ready to spend the next few precious hours grabbing my outside rail and hoping that I'd make it to the end of each wave.


This piece was also published online this week by the folks over at Approaching Lines, timed to coincide with the start of the Volcom Fiji Pro 2013.  Please head over to Approaching Lines to check out some of the ace content that they're publishing.

Slipping, Sliding and Finless Wave Riding

Stop/Go, Surf/Stokesy.

Finless heat #1, Stokesy sliding beneath some seagulls.

"Your feet must be awfully cold?"

Yup.  I'd not had a whole lot of time to mentally prepare for this though.  When the call went out for the first annual Slyder Cup, a finless "friction affliction" wave sliding event, I thought that mid-April would mean a summer wetsuit and some heavy whomping in the shore-break.  Instead, I was stood at the waters edge in my winter suit with the hood up, gloves on and no boots.  I'd realised the night before when I was stuffing neoprene into my day bag that I can only just squeeze my hooves into my swim fins anyway, so I had no chance with wetsuit boots on.  Gwynedd, who I'd guess is easily twice my age, seemed quite concerned for my well being as we waited for the starter's claxon.  On the other side of me stood Alan Stokes, former British Surf Champion, and along from him was a bloke with a warped plank of untreated plywood that he'd cut from a sheet of 8'x4' that morning.  There was also a Welsh guy with the most incredibly shaped asymmetrical paulownia paipo with a drop-knee cut-out.  Five minutes into our paipo/bellyboard heat and Stokesy and I figured that Gwynedd was beating us fair and square (and for the first time ever I wished that maybe I'd had a childhood of bodyboarding to stand me in good stead for moments like this, a thought that I quickly dismissed).  

After twenty minutes, sure enough my toes had turned white and gone numb.  

 Alan Stokes and Gwynedd Haslock lining up for our paipo/bellyboard heat.  Read more about Gwnedd here and get inspired.

Paipo/Bellyboard heat #2.  Check out the craft!

Dream Big. 

Paipo

Sawboards are the people responsible for the assymmetrical paulownia drop-knee paipo in the photo above. 

The Slyder Cup featured four categories of competition; finless surfboards (anything from alaias and Wegener albacores to normal surfboards with the fins pulled out), paipos and bellyboards, bodysurfing and mat-surfing.  There were a couple of heats in each category before a final…and then a grand final with the winner from each discipline going wave for wave to crown the ultimate slyder.  

The albacore riders dominated the surfboard rounds, with Alan Stokes and the eventual champion Jimbo Bennet getting some insanely long rides with spins, slides, shove-its and even a couple of head-dips.  In the final they were spinning their boards right onto dry sand in the shore-break. 

There were tons of bodysurfers present, including a small crowd who turned up with some old skateboard decks, a load of hand tools and sandpaper to shape their handplanes there and then.  

The South-West's mat-surfing crew were also present; a committed bunch of surfers whose choice of craft would ordinarily raise a few eyebrows on the beach, but not here.  They looked to be having so much fun in their heats and I learnt a lot about these rare inflatable sleds over the course of a five minute chat with mat-maker Graeme, which will probably make another post altogether.

Alan's Albacore.

Bodysurfers on the start line.

Fin(s).

Marcus Healan, mat surfing victor.

Jimbo Bennet spinning on to the sand in front of a punk-as-hell spectator.

Bodysurf competitor kicking into a little high tide wedge.

At the end of the day, as the drizzle started to thicken, the final claxon sounded and Jimbo Bennet climbed the podium (a small slide) to hold aloft a tiny trophy.  There was a brief "run-what-you-brung" session in the high tide shore break with tea trays, polystyrene kids boards from the '80's and me trying to ride a canoe paddle like some sort of polynesian grommet with no success, before the crowd retired to the scout hut for a surf movie and then a few beers and some music.  This is slated to be the first of many events (some competitive, some not so) put on by the Approaching Lines crew, and I can only imagine that they will grow in popularity as word of the good-times and smiling spread out radially.  A competition where you need no prior experience, can borrow your vehicle, line up alongside champions and senior citizens in the same heat and nobody gives a damn about the scores, statistics and rankings?  Sign me up already!

Ben Sousek's homemade handplane quiver, crafted over the previous 24 hours from old skateboards.

Fins and Flags.

The final line-up…from left to right, Jimbo Bennet (surfboard sliding), Alan Stokes (bellyboard), Joe Brown (bodysurf) and Marcus Healan (surf mat).

You can read more about the event here, and keep checking back if you want in on the next one.

Huge thanks has to go out to the organisers Chris Nelson, Demi Taylor and Nick Holden for putting together such a great event, and to Reef and the other sponsors who put their faith in such a quirky, edge of the surfing spectrum, event.  There were a whole load of people who pitched in judging, tabulating and marshalling who did an incredible job just for the love of it.  Thank you.

The Arrival of Approaching Lines

If you dig on the the words/images/movies side of surfing almost as much as you like the act of riding a  wave itself - if you have a bedroom chock-full of stacks of old surf magazines and you're reducing your attention span by incessantly goggling 3 minute surfing shorts on the interweb - then this weekend is like waking up to see the first lines of a new swell marching in.

Approaching Lines is a collective of surfers who between them churn out a wide range of words, images, movies, artwork, design and music, headed up by Chris Nelson and Demi Taylor.  Chris and Demi are the directors of the London Surf Film Festival, and between them have edited numerous surf magazines and authored a number of books and surf guides (Surfing Europe and Cold Water Souls to name just a couple).  They're perfectly placed to craft and collate interesting and relevant content to satiate your appetite for wave riding cultural goodness.  As such, I am still bemused as to why they approached me to contribute.  I am massively honoured though, and really made up to see my work alongside the work of some really talented people such as Tim Nunn, Mark Leary, Chris McLean and Calum Creasy to name but a few.  
The idea, as Chris explained to me, is to create a platform to share the stories of surfing from our corner of the planet with surfers from our corner of the planet, to provide an alternative to the Californian and Australian mouthpieces of surf culture;  Stories of surfing that are real, true and accessible rather than sensationalistic or aspirational, and work that transcends the internet, spilling out into printed pages, special events and trips.  Here it is in Chris', far more concise and eloquent words:

"Approaching Lines is about ideas – big and small. It’s about the lines we draw in the water, the words we’re compelled to put down, the inspirations and images we want to share. It’s the lines traced on a finger-worn map. It’s about championing creativity, celebrating the makers and the doers; the artists and artisans, the films and filmmakers, the waveriders and purveyors of the glide. It’s the people and places that stoke the fires. Approaching Lines is a chronicle of our times and tides. It’s a haven for tall tales, and home spun yarns, a place to share. You can find us online, or at our regular socials and happenings. And we’re suckers for the smell of the freshly printed page. Above all Approaching Lines is about the stories, the stoke and the surfing."

The site went live a couple of days ago, and there will be new stuff going up all the time so it's one to bookmark and keep checking back on.  
The first social event is the Slyder Cup, an annual "friction affliction spring convention" where fins will be off-limits:  it'll be all about bodysurfing, mat-surfing, alaias, paipos and laughing and having fun.  It'll be going down at Lusty Glaze in Newquay on Saturday April 13th.  Bring yourself and something to catch a wave with, there's even a "run-what-you-brung" expression session planned if you want to catch a wave on a fast-food tray or inflatable pool toy.

So stop reading this, click through to Approaching Lines and have a dig around all of the good oil on there already.  But please come back to An Tor Orth An Mor next Sunday...