SurfSite Tin Type: An Interview with Photographer Joni Sternbach

In these digital times a culture is often defined by the imagery that portrays it, and the way that it is presented to the wider world.  By and large, modern surfing imagery is action-oriented, so what happens when an acclaimed photographer with no previous connection to surfing decides to document it in a decade long photography project?  SurfSite Tin Type happens, that’s what. 

Joni Sternbach is a Brooklyn based photographer whose tintype portraits of surfers, made using nineteenth-century “wet plate” techniques on large-format field cameras, have broken the mold for surf images and seem to have captured the essence of her international subjects, all of whom share surfing as a common bond. This is civil war era photography that involves setting up a darkroom on the beach, and Joni has travelled to California, Australia and finally to Europe to produce her images for her exhibitions and book.  That’s where I caught up with her, and after helping her to carry her dark room kit across the beach I sat down to ask her a few questions about her work.

Joni, your “Surfland” images are remarkably different from the sort of high-octane digital images that surf media is saturated with these days.  What inspired you to embark on creating this series of images?

Well, I learnt how to make a tintype in 1999 and I didn’t really intend to embark on a ten-year project with that process. I just went to a guy’s log cabin in upstate New York to learn about what it was and just fell in love with it immediately.  You were on the beach with us the other day and watched us pull a plate; you saw the way that people reacted to seeing their image fix on the beach, it just never fails to delight.  And so the immediacy of the process and the hand-made nature are these two things that work so brilliantly together to create…I don’t know, the kind of image they create feels a little more soulful – they look a little more tactile and real; they remind you of something that you’ve seen but not exactly.  You know what I mean?  So, they have this familiarity and yet they’re completely new and unknown.  I think those combinations of opposites work so well together to create an object that people find compelling.

How did you first come to have a surfer “sit” for your camera?

Well, my first surfer was shot from the same bluffs that I was shooting at for the previous five years – I was working the same landscape for a long time, I’ll just say that – and I ran into somebody on the top of the bluff and I asked him if he was a surfer, he said he was, I asked him to pose and he said no.  His girlfriend hit him gently in the head and said “of course you will” and he did.  So he ran down the bluff while I coated my plate and by the time he got down there, into his rash guard and posed, my plate was ready. There was no communication between us at that point –he was way far away on the beach and there were no directions given.  He stood still and was ready to move only when I gave the thumbs up or whistled that the shot was done.  So he stood there and we made a picture and he’s tiny in this great big landscape.  It was like, “holy crap, this is beautiful”.  It was a completely overcast day, my chemistry was probably really crapped out too, and he is this strong, white solid object in this very misty and mushy landscape.  My assistant and I looked at each other and said, “We’ve got to do this” and then we made our way down to the beach and started talking to people.  I was terrified!

Why surfers – what is it about surfers that interests you?

Exactly, why surfers!  There is absolutely no reason why surfers except, in 2002, I was out shooting a landscape of the sea and sky (this was a series I was working on) and I had my camera all set up.  It had been a really stormy, cloudy day the day before and foggy.  If you were to imagine the sun coming through here, all dark clouds and then the sun sends down these rays onto the ocean, where there just happen to be about 20-30 people in black wetsuits out on the water.  They’re not going anywhere, right?  And snap, you make this picture and the light goes off in such a way that gives you goose bumps and makes you think that you have experienced heaven.  So I took this one picture, and it was not a picture about surfing or surfers, it was a landscape picture.  But at that moment, I felt like I had a connection to all those people in the sea because, it was like I could hear them from the bluffs.  We all went off on this thing together.  I don’t know who it was in the water – I may know them now but I didn’t then, but we all experienced one of those most divine moments of light and ocean.  So the reason why I went back to the bluffs to photograph a surfer was because of that moment.

What is your take on the surfing tribe, as an artist making a study of them (us)?

Well, it’s funny that you should ask.  So, I had no idea about anything about surfing.  It wasn’t until two years into the project that I even looked at a book “History of Surfing,” right, I just went in blind and decided that blind was the best way to be.  Because, there’s an innocence to ignorance, right, and I wasn’t really like a surf enthusiast, I was just interested in this collection of people that have one thing in common but otherwise may have nothing in common.  And, they’re all different types of people and I could go to this one location with this very elaborate chemistry and set-up and find a huge cross-section of people and the uniting force is surfing.  It was, for me, this group of people that fit in so perfectly with this process that I was using.  Like, they were a tribe but I didn’t know anything – I didn’t even know that surfing really had such a history! 

The “tintype” images that you produce require large, antique photographic equipment (although not as antique as I originally thought) and an almost alchemic knowledge and skill.  What are the processes involved in making these photographs?

Most people who shoot with wetplate, like to use the actual period equipment and materials – it’s beautiful stuff, don’t get me wrong, it’s just very limited and doesn’t really work for what I’m doing here. I do use period lenses in some instances, but if I didn’t have a shutter on my lens then I don’t think that I could make these pictures that I’ve been making.

In terms of the process, which everybody likes to put center-stage, is to me a little bit like pulling the rabbit out of a hat. This trick that I could pull out, but to me the project is not so much about the process, yet the process is the thing that pulls everybody in to the project.  So there’s a little bit of a magician thing going on there. 

So basically what it is, is a piece of blackened metal that you pour this substance called collodion on.  Collodion is gun cotton, ether and alcohol combined with iodides and bromides to make it have tonalities.  You pour this on the piece of blackened metal and you sensitize it in a bath of silver nitrate and while it’s wet you take the picture and while it’s wet you develop the picture and while it’s wet you fix the picture (or you can just fix it later if you take it away wet and fix it at your studio) and then it’s washed.  The whole thing has to stay wet from start to finish so that’s why my dark box has to come with me to the beach and that’s why I have to haul around so much crap!

And how does this process translate to the beach environment?  (Logistical problems with sand and humidity etc.?)

First of all, wind is probably the biggest factor.  Wind is not your friend with wet plate.  It puts lines on your plate of collodion and it dries your plate out and makes you a little crazy because of everything blowing everywhere, so to me that’s the worst part.  Working on the sand is really not so bad – having your office be on the beach everyday and shooting is really the best part, it’s just that you often have to carry your gear over a lot of territory, then it’s hard work.

Recent images that you made in California (Horse-mounted ranchers carrying surfboards, and the Malloy brothers with their outrigger canoe for example) bring to mind a “pioneering” aesthetic similar to historic civil war era photographs.  Has this been a conscious decision or do you think it is an unavoidable link because of the tin–type process?

That’s a really good question!  I would like to say that I was channeling Timothy O’Sullivan and all of those forefathers when I made those pictures, but I don’t really know.  When I’m in places like that, I try and feel around the landscape and connect to certain parts of it. When I was photographing the Malloys with their big red plastic canoe, it looked at first a little ridiculous in the landscape. However, when I pulled the plate, the colour of the canoe went dark and the green landscape was kind of misty and so it looked strangely like they were in Asia somewhere!  It suddenly went from being California to Asia and, I don’t know, it just had this very out of time feel that I though was really quite amazing.  And it was like 40-second exposure – it was a really long exposure, it was really quite dark out. 

When I first met Chris he told me about it and he wanted to have a picture with his brothers with it, and we thought about all these places to take it, but it was really like the back yard was the best spot because that’s really where it lives until it goes somewhere for real.

Have you travelled specifically to shoot work for this series or has it been a sideline series?

Oh no, you have to travel specifically; there’s no sideline.  This work is all about planning and preparation, and in order to go somewhere you need to source your chemistry, you need to source out all of the stuff that makes “your” kit and for me my kit is very specific now.  You know, I went to Australia and had to figure it all out there, and it takes time to figure it out.  You have to be somewhere a while, you can’t just “pop-in” and make it happen, at least I can’t!  It takes a lot of prep – even just finding distilled water here was a pain!  If I’d known then I would’ve ordered it in advance.

How do you select your subjects?

Sometimes they select me! 

Explain how you have come to photograph some of the most famous names in surfing?

Well, they all showed up in different ways.  I have a friend in New York who introduced me to Kassia Meador and I took her picture in New York but I didn’t think that it was good enough, so when I went to California I got in touch with her and told her I’d love to shoot with her again.  She said, “Ok, why don’t you meet me at Donald Takayama’s shop, so we met there and Donald also came out for his picture and it was just one of those incredible days.  I just loved photographing him; he was so much fun and a real sweetheart.  I feel really honored that I got to take his picture, particularly since he died so soon afterwards, he was too young for that.

He struck a very classic pose as well.

He posed purposefully, that ‘first surfer’ photograph that struck me, also captivated him, he really wanted to embody that pose.  So that’s how I got to photograph him.  When I was in Australia I was at a gallery opening and I met Dave Rasta and his American girlfriend, and they invited me out to their farm and that’s how I photographed him. Not to forget that his girlfriend, Lauren gave me my first surf lesson. I photographed John John and Jordy for O’Neill, and after the job I snapped off one of my own! 

There are some people that I’ve sought after who are really big.  I photographed Robert August and Wingnut from Endless Summer. I recently met some amazing shapers in San Deigo, Jon Wegener and Rusty Priesendorfer. I met Tom Curren in California but the shot didn’t come out well, but then I met him again the next time and we did another shot and got to hang out a little bit.  I might be able to take a decent picture of him now that he’s more comfortable with me but he’s not somebody that is comfortable having his photograph taken.

What is the most rewarding thing about this body of work?

I think that the most rewarding thing is…it’s like the day in Santa Barbara when I was shooting this guy I’d never met before on this ranch that I had never been to before with this group of people who I had no idea who they were, and there’s a kind of  choreography that happens, a kind of flow of events that takes place while you’re shooting that leads to endlessly amazing pictures and at one point they guy that I was photographing said to me, “I don’t know if you noticed, but I think that we made a little bit of magic today,” and, we did.  It happened the other day at Towan too.  It’s just a series of people come in and things just flow – you move over here and you move over there and at the end of the day there’s this incredible feeling coupled with good pictures.  So whatever that is that I just described, I think is the best part of it.  You can meet people that you’ve never met before, make a little magic with them that’s called a photograph and everybody is just so happy.

Do you have a favorite image?  Why?

I do, I have a bunch.  Some are different than others.  I photographed Izzy and Lucy Kirkland and also Lucy Thorman the other day. They were up against these rocks and they just, I don’t know, there’s something about this picture.   It doesn’t look like any other picture I’ve ever taken.  It’s these two women who are caught in time; I don’t know how to describe it.  It kind of kills me.  Sometimes there are expressions – if you look at Izzy’s eyes, she has super light blue eyes and they went white, so it’s freaky the way that she looks and yet there’s a softness and it looks like if Woodstock were on a beach in 2014 this would be it.  They look like free spirits.

Where do you see this project going – will it be an ongoing documentary or does it have an end point?

It probably does have an end point, but it’s not yet.  I thought I was done with it – I used to tell everyone that not only am I done with this but also I’m done with collodion!  You have a very short collodion life because it beats you up.  But I might have a gig in South Africa and I might do a trip to Hawaii, and I think that if I went to those two places and maybe the North of Spain, south of Biarritz, maybe somewhere like that, then it could really be an important document, if I could make it broader.  I don’t know if it has an end, it probably does.

Are you tempted to capture Surfers now on different, more modern equipment or using colour photography techniques, or do you think that would spoil your relationship with photographing surfers?

I’ve started to shoot them using film as well; I don’t think that it just has to be collodion.  I mean I don’t know if the film will end up being fabulous in the same way that the collodion is, but I love shooting film and it’s nice to be able to make prints. 

Joni’s new book, Surf Site Tin Type is published by Damiani Editore and is available to purchase here.

The Way The Cookie Crumbles

Brad's backhand foam climb, somewhere north of Hossegor.

"We've got plenty of time, I'll definitely make my train." were the famous last words that I uttered as I walked backwards up the beach with Harry, still firing off shots of the rest of our friends surfing an empty, head-high peak on the beaches somewhere north of Hossegor.  We ran up the sand dune, got back to the car and set off along the track through the forest to rejoin the main road, both pretty confident that we would get there on time and that I'd catch my train.  Well, get me there on time we did, but I hadn't accounted for the queue that I would face at the ticket office which was clearly running on a skeleton staff.  I watched the clock tick down from quarter to twelve towards the departure time of midday; I was fidgeting, huffing and starting to get anxious.  With three minutes to go I left the queue and tackled the automatic machine which spat my ticket out at 11:59.  I ran under the underpass and up onto the platform where my train to Bordeaux was waiting and, just as I reached out to press the button to open the door, I heard the ominous clunk of the doors locking.  "Non, c'est parti monsieur.  Le prochain train est à quinze heures" the conductor shouted down to me, as I watched my train leave without me and taking with it any hopes of me making my flight home and getting back to work the next day.  Harry doubled back to pick me up, and on the drive back to Hossegor the exhaust fell off his car on the péage.  Clearly it wasn't our morning.  We limped back with the car sounding like a motorbike and rejoined the rest of our friends who were spending the afternoon watching the WCT surf contest, and I fired off a few frames of the world's best surfers in action.  

Sometimes a morning really doesn't go your way and there's nothing at all that you can do about it apart from try your best to make the most of the afternoon.  It's just the way that the cookie crumbles, but at the end of the day cookies still taste good.   

Julian Wilson, teasing me for missing my train 

by pointing straight at 12 o-clock.

Ol' green eyes on a nicely backlit green wave.

Contest winner John John Florence entertaining the crowd 

way down at the southern end of the contest zone.  

The beach was absolutely packed in front 

of the peak and the grandstand.

Miguel Pupo casting a shadow in round 3.

Taj Burrow and a rooster's tail.

Outside Food: ABC (Autumn Beach Chilli)

There are four key ingredients that elevate this beach campfire meal above a normal chilli:  bacon, beer, dark chocolate and accidental campfire ash.  It’s ideal for keeping the dream alive into the autumn, as you can keep warm around the fire on the beach after surfing if you’re at the sort of spot where you can light a discreet fire that won’t spoil anybody else’s enjoyment of the place.  Alternatively, you could always do it over a fire pit in your garden if you have one.

I’m going to assume that you’ve all cooked some sort of "minced beef and tomato" based meal at some point in your life (chilli, bolognaise, cottage pie etc) so will let you work out for yourself the quantities of ingredients based on the number of people that you’re feeding and how hungry they are.  This will do for about 4 hungry adults who’ve spent a few hours paddling in the sea.

You will need:

• Decent firewood (bits of tree that still look like bits of tree - nothing tanilised like garden decking and no crap gluey scrap wood like plywood or MDF)
• Charcoal (bag of)
• A dutch oven (big, heavy cast iron cauldron) or a heavy old casserole pot, and somebody willing and able to carry it to wherever you’re cooking.
• Tin foil
• Knife
• Wooden spoon
• Bowls + something to eat with
• Cup + scissors (optional)

• A couple of onions
• A couple of carrots
• A few cloves of garlic or a decent squirt from a handy tube of minced garlic.
• 10 or 12 Mushrooms
• Red and green chili pepper, more or less depending on heat
• Green and Yellow pepper
• 1 or 2 fancy long red Ramiro peppers
• Bunch of coriander
• Block of butter
• Small bar of dark chocolate
• Beef stock cube or pot
• Tin of red kidney beans
• 2 tins of chopped tomatoes
• Salt, pepper and paprika
• Beer – a couple of those small French stubbies in green glass bottles is ideal.
• Bacon lardons or cubed pancetta – handful of.
• Beef mince, about two handfuls is the way I describe the quantity that I need to my local butcher.  He has normal blokey hands, but I don’t know what this translates to in grams.
• Jacket potatoes or rice

Method:

• Light a small, hot fire surrounded by rocks somewhere that you’re not going to incur the anger of any busy bodies and where you can easily put out the fire and leave no trace of it ever having been your outside kitchen.
• Once it’s well established, add charcoal and allow to get to a nice, white, even cooking temperature just like a conventional bbq.
• Don’t cook over raging flames – wait for white, dusty, embers which give off an even heat.
• If you’re going with baked potatoes then spike them, wrap them in foil and place them in the embers to bake for an hour or so.
• Place the Dutch oven on the white coals.  If you’ve got a fancy tripod then hang it from that.
• Things happen quickly when Dutch ovens get hot, so be ready.
• Throw in a thick slice of butter and melt.
• Roughly cut onions and carrots into this and soften until the onion is translucent.
• Add bacon lardons or pancetta cubes.  Fry.
• Mix in minced beef, chopped chilis and garlic.  Brown.
• Season with salt, pepper and paprika.
• Add about half the bar of dark chocolate, in bits.
• Roughly chop in peppers and mushrooms (can be left whole).  Soften.
• Throw in both tins of tomatoes.
• Put in the beef stock cube or pot.
• Pour in a load of beer.
• If you’re having rice then put a pot of water on for the rice the appropriate amount of time before you plan to eat.
• Let it bubble away and keep stirring.  You can’t control the heat aside from moving it to a cooler part of the fire so just go with it.  Ash will most likely float into the pot too.  So what?  You can’t stop that and it’s just the same as burning meat on a bbq.
• If you need to add more liquid (beer or water) then do so.  Over the course of 45 minutes or so it should reduce down to a nice thick consistency with a gloopy, shiny gravy.
• 5 minutes before serving tip in the can of red kidney beans.
• Tear up the coriander or, alternatively, put it all in a cup and chop in the cup with scissors.  Throw that in.
• Check seasoning and adjust if necessary.
• Hook out the potatoes (hoping that they haven’t just turned to lumps of coal) and butter, or drain the rice.
• Pile into an enamel bowl.
• Serve with more beer and smoke in your eyes.

When you’re done make sure you kick out your fire or pour a few buckets of seawater on it and dig the ashes deep into the sand.  Take all of your stuff away and don’t leave any trace – there’s nothing worse than being the first person on the beach in the morning and seeing a beautiful beach with a blemish of somebody’s campfire from the night before spoiling the pristine sand.

Also...

Wavelength Issue 235 Out Now from Wavelength Media on Vimeo.

If you're UK based and have wandered past the magazine rack in your local newsagent in the past week then you may have seen the latest issue of Wavelength Magazine (#235 Autumn 2014), and if you're particularly eagle-eyed then you may have seen my name on the new-look front cover.  I feel honoured that Tim Nunn and the team at Wavelength thought my photography worthy of a portfolio feature and ran some of my favourite surf images across several double page spreads.  These are images that I've been sitting on for a while, only letting them see the light of day at exhibitions as I was hoping that they might eventually appear at size in print.  I'm so pleased that they're now out there for others to see rather than just sitting on my hard drive.  I'm also really grateful to Mr Chris Nelson (of Approaching Lines and the London Surf/Film Festival) for writing an introduction that made me both laugh and blush in equal measure...and for giving me a new nickname.  

I'd be stoked if you take a moment to check it out, and hopefully see fit to purchase a copy to help support print media.

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.

Don't Buy It, Build It: My Yellow Submarine

Surfing and making photographs are two pretty defining passions of mine, and every now and then they inevitably cross over. 

But, if I’m honest, I’d always choose to be in the sea rather than stood on the beach watching it.  With the cheapest commercially available waterhousing for a decent camera costing at least a grand (I’m not talking about swimming out with a go-pro here) it would seem that water-based surf photography is a game for an ever-shrinking number of professionals or those with a hefty hobby budget.  I mean, how many jobbing photographers these days have at least a grand burning a hole in their pockets for a piece of kit that they’d be lucky to see generate a few hundred quid in sold images?  

Not me.  So I made one.

Measure twice and make a model.

I ended up making two waterhousings actually.  I have long held on to the philosophy that if you’re able to do something yourself then you should do so – not just as a way of saving money or acquiring something that you couldn’t otherwise afford, but as a means of learning new skills and challenging oneself.  Perhaps it’s just that I have a problem with writing to-do lists and not sitting still, born of an awareness that time is a precious commodity. 

I started out researching waterhousings for surf photography – commonly known as “splash” housings and different to their deep-sea diving counterparts.  I had the choice of fiberglass and resin as construction materials (the honours project for my degree involved the use of advanced composite materials for marine engineering applications, so I was comfortable with that option) or folded and welded aluminium which I'm slightly less au-fait with.  I went with the aluminium challenge.  

A photographer who runs a gallery at the end of my street, Nick Wapshott, kindly lent me his commercially bought waterhousing overnight to take a look at, and I asked a few questions of Tim Nunn (editor of Wavelength Magazine and professional surf-lensman) who gave me some advice on how to trigger the shutter mechanism.  This was the biggest issue – I had no problems making a waterproof box of some description to put my camera in, but finding a way of pressing the button without springing a leak was a challenge.  As with most of my projects, I started out with fairly modest intentions until I realised how much time and effort I was investing and then figured that I might as well do a proper job.

I measured up my cameras (I shoot with the slightly puffed-up digital version of an older analogue camera and they’re such similar sizes that I wanted to make a housing that they would both fit and function in) and made cardboard models.  Friends and acquaintances kindly rummaged in the scrap bins of their workshops and garages, and from a range of sources I ended up with some odd lengths of aluminium tubing that I could machine into lens ports, a bigger piece that might fit a camera, and some offcuts of thin-guage sheet aluminium that I could fold into a box. 

Now, I like to think that I’m fairly handy but I definitely know my limits and one of those is TIG welding aluminium and another one is precision milling.  Luckily for me, just down the raod from me on Bradfords Quay in Wadebridge are two companies who specialise in fettling metal:  Daften Die-Casting specialise in precision aluminium work and Grant and Kevin there took my crude CAD designs and machined the face plates for my housings with the incredibly fiddly grooves for the o-ring seals.  I then delivered a box of bits to Will Irons at MGC Engineering a couple of doors along for the guys there to TIG weld together for me.  Where I would undoubtably have blown holes in the thin aluminum they executed seamless joints that are not only functional, but beautiful in that functional raw metalwork sort of way.

The MGC magicians worked wonders with welding.

I now had two containers that looked a lot like camera housings.  I took them back to Daftens where they were powdercoated bright yellow because if you’re going to make a submarine then it really ought to be a yellow one, right?  I’m sure that there’s a functional reason for marine submersible equipment often being this colour but I don’t need to know about it.

The "Soucoupe" and "Jacqui" nearing completion.

I sourced some thick, clear acrylic and had it cut to fit the face plates and ports then got back at the handles of a lathe and surprised myself at my ability to actually work accurately when I turn my mind to it, turning down the tubing into lens ports to accept my 50mm prime lens.  A fisheye lens would require a domed port, something that there is no way I could produce, so I settled for the fact that I would be shooting from slightly further away from the action and capturing a realistic point of view of what the human eye would normally see.

I stayed late at Otter Surfboards one Friday and mixed up a small batch of epoxy glue to nervously assemble the faceplates and ports, horribly aware that just one tiny smudge of resin on the lens port would bin the entire project.  Finally, to solve my switch concern, I found a company that produces housings for underwater dive cameras and scientific survey equipment (Greenaway Marine) and ordered a simple mechanical switch from them that I could machine to fit my housing and camera.  I assembled everything and then, in early December, took one of the empty containers for a swim in the waves, relieved that it didn’t fill up with seawater and drag me down to the seabed like an anchor.  I then put a roll of film in my analogue camera and took that out, realising just what surf photographers would have had to go through in the days before the digital revolution – swimming back to the beach every thirty-six shots to take the whole business apart and change the film must have been hard work: Thirty-six shots really doesn’t last very long in the sea.

Then the “weather” arrived, and the sea was near enough off-limits for any sane attempts at water photography for weeks on end.  Until this week.  Torn between making up for a lot of lost wave-riding opportunities and testing my handiwork, I tried my best to strike a balance in between actually doing some work.  Having surfed on one day with great waves and beautiful flat, grey, wintery light that looked as cold as it was, I returned to the following spot with my housemate Ben the following day with my digital camera nervously ensconced in it’s (hopefully) waterproof yellow case.  With more than thirty-six exposures to play with, I think that in between swimming against a rip like a river, wearing some monstrously thick wedges on my head and getting bounced off the seabed a lot, I got some alright shots for a trial run.

Here below are some of the results:

Under a pitching lip.

Foam textures.

Scratching over a lump.

Difficult conditions for surfing and shooting.

Benny dodged this barrel and tore into a massive turn just as the whitewater engulfed me.  He's been kicking himself ever since for not tucking himself in there.

The lefts here are normally not much good.  

Not on this day though.

Pitching