All aboard the good ship Drift

It must be a slow news week in the surf media, as the good people over at the European edition of Drift online surf magazine have decided to run a piece on my portfolio.

They've also asked me to step aboard as a regular contributor. I tried my best to play it cool but pretty much bit their hand off in accepting, so I'll be patching together some feature pieces, photo essays and interviews for them over the coming months. I've been a big fan of Drift for a good while now, their refreshing perspective on surf culture is firmly to the left of centre and encompasses the travel, art, board design and environmental aspects of this lifestyle of ours, and I'm super stoked to be joining the ranks alongside some full surfing luminaries.

So if you don't mind my opinions and crummy photos, you'll soon be able to get a double dose.

Subscription's free, you just sign up to the newsletter. There's not a single reason not to.

Jump straight to the article here.

Or hit the European Edition or North American Editions by clicking through.

I hope you dig it as much as I do.

The End of the Line

“Turn your television on right this second!”
I tend to take my Dads advice, he’s generally pretty spot-on. I also tend to not watch very much TV, except for in this instance. End of the Line had its terrestrial premiere last night on Channel 4 and it was an eye opener – a documentary heralded as “An Inconvenient Truth for the oceans” it shines a light on the plight of our marine environment and just what we are doing to it. Destroying it.
If humans continue pulling fish out of the oceans for consumption at our current rates, BY 2048 THERE WILL BE NOTHING LEFT bar plankton, algae and worms. 1.2 billion humans on this planet depend on fish as the key source of protein in their diets, and furthermore in terms of not only impact upon humans, fish poo has been shown to actively absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. No more fish=no more fish poo=more CO2 and accelerated global warming and ocean acidification. These kinds of facts scare me.
Humanities current capacity for fishing far exceeds the amount of fish in the oceans. Four fold. Some more scary facts: Illegal fishing is worth $50 billion per year effectively making every other fish on your plate stolen, and of all the fish caught every year, approximately 7 billion tons (1/10 of the total world catch) goes back overboard dead because it’s by-catch. Harvesting wild fish from our oceans has become a highly industrialised, military-esque operation, hunting down every fish in the ocean until there are none left. Annually, the number of long lines laid could circle the planet 550 times, whilst the mouth of the largest purse seiner net would easily accommodate 13 747’s. It’s not really a fair fight. Many fish stocks, such as Atlantic Cod, have crashed beyond retrieval whilst others like Blue Fin Tuna are critically endangered. That doesn’t stop them showing up on menus, but can you imagine the out cry if a restaurant advertised Orang-utan steaks or fillet of White Rhino? It’s really no different.
There are solutions however, which if pressed into mass action could push that ominous 2048 date back a bit: Only buy sustainably sourced seafood bearing the Marine Stewardship Council mark or that caught in Alaska, one of the most sensitively and well managed fisheries out there. Don’t buy farmed fish because it’s a bag of crap; it takes 5kg of “other” fish to produce 1kg of salmon. That just doesn’t add up.
Pressure politicians to listen to fisheries scientists when setting catch limits; or better still to push for the creation of marine protected areas. If all of the money spent on subsidising the fishing industry was redirected to maintaining marine protected areas then they would be protecting 30% of the worlds’ oceans rather than the current 0.6%.
I’m not saying stop eating fish, perhaps just go about it in a different way, armed with a bit of knowledge and some realistic facts. I plan on catching a lot of what I eat this summer, and when I do buy fish, checking the source. I urge you to do the same.

http://www.endoftheline.com/film

Photography: Various shots from Tsukiji fish market, Tokyo Japan. This is the largest fish market on the planet and the venue for the infamous Tuna Auctions. I hit the place at 5am to get a realistic view of what goes down there.
Below that, Blue Basque boats in the harbour at Mundaka, Northern Spain, and some rusty old trawlers at dock in Portland, Victoria, Australia.

Who can? Pelican can.

They look like pterodactyls, those crazy flying dinosaurs (yes I did check that I spelt pterodactyl correctly) and they ride waves better than most of us. Pelicans are incredible birds; their fossils have been found dating from as far back as 40 million years ago so they've had plenty of time to adapt to the twin arts of flying and fishing, and inbetween those they've become pretty good at riding waves. There are several reasons why you may have seen them speeding so elegantly along the wall of a clean, unbroken wave while other seabirds are flapping awkwardly out of the way. With a skeleton that contributes to only 10% of their total body weight and a higher than average number of secondary "flight" feathers they are well adapted to either glide to altitudes upwards of a kilometer or skim the surface of a wave. I'd always wondered how they managed to glide mere millimeters above the face of a wave without clipping a wing and splashing in. I was told that they have what can only be described as "fingers" at their wingtips, allowing them to make minute micro-adjustments to their trim, much as we surfers make tiny adjustments to our weight distribution and foot positioning whilst in motion.

Why do they ride waves? I've no idea, but I'd guess that it's purely for the enjoyment of it much as we do, as I can see no practical reason. Perhaps the updraught coming up the face of the wave provides them with more speed, perhaps they just plain dig the view as they race down the line.

If the link betwen the way surfers, animals and birds ride waves preens your feathers then check out "Way of the Bird", a beautiful illustrated childrens book that uses Andy Davis' iconic artwork to tell the story over the background of Andrew Kidmans wavescape photographs. A fantastic concept and an incredible book, whether it's aimed at grommets or not.

Top: Australian Pelican, Kiama, NSW.

Bottom: Crazy pelican symmetry and all the colours blue, Dunsborough, WA.

Books are rad.

If you've never read any books by John Steinbeck, purveyor of stories that capture the beauty, comedy and inescapable tradegy of humanity, then take my advice and go raid your local bookshop.

The Importance of Curiosity

You'll have experienced it if you've ever wandered a little way off the beaten track, and if you're carrying surfboards with you then it's a dead cert. Curiosity.

It's your curiosity that has taken you there, so it's only natural that that curiosity is returned.

Adults will often be more restrained, perhaps out of politeness or because they've seen your type before, maybe just because they're not all that surprised; but it's children who have that real insatiable sense of "who, what, where, how?" when they see a stranger in their midst, one who looks radically different and may be dragging a big funny shaped plank around with them.

But there's one important thing to remember if you're seeking or the subject of curiosity. It doesn't happen if you distance yourself from experience: a nice hotel, restaurants, taking a taxi.
It happens when you're immersed in the experience - trying to load your boardbag on, in or under the chicken bus, buying food from a market or from a roadside stall, making a mess of trying to speak the local language, bartering, mucking in and getting amongst it.
Curiosity is how we learn. Mine, yours and theirs. Embrace it.

Surfing's Baby Brother

Surfing's baby brother skateboarding has gone and gotten all grown up. Spawned on flat days or windy afternoons to scratch that whole sideways slipping itch, it has grown and grown, spreading where surfing can’t; to anywhere on the planet with a solid smooth surface.

Skate photography has developed with it and quite frankly blows my hair back. The majority of surf action images are restricted to sky, sea and surfer in various combinations and with a narrow range of colours (blue or grey sky, blue, green or grey water and a surfer in boardshorts or a wetsuit…) and it’s pretty rare to find a good eye catching background or foreground.
But look at the options available to the image makers for skating…a static environment, the chance to repeat a trick or run until the shot’s nailed, lighting rigs, colour, outfits, props, long exposures and rear curtain flashes, shooting inside studios, and all manner of complicated photographic techniques that I don’t know enough about because I don’t have to.

I’m not putting down surf photography in the slightest, it’s incredibly difficult and you’re at the mercy of the elements and chance a whole heap more, not to say dangerous for the guys who swim around with heavy water-housings. But I’m envious of the opportunities that skate photogs have to manipulate their subjects and settings, and I’m certain that if I lived in a city I’d spend a lot of time chasing skate rats with my camera. The closest surfing has come is probably the award winning Insight51 “Dopamine” campaign shot by Dustin Humphrey under the artistic direction of Steve Gorrow, but guys are out there trying new things all the time. I can’t wait to see where it takes us.

How can you OWN a wave???

Can a person or organisation OWN a wave? It’s a tough question, and a pretty contentious issue in the world of surfing. Waves are simply energy moving through the medium of water. The water doesn’t travel, the wave energy does. So how can the culmination of kinetic energy suddenly become a possession once it reaches a certain physical location?
Some truly great waves are affected by this issue, and it’s something that, it could be argued, goes all the way back to the Sport of Kings in pre-contact Hawaii.
If it didn’t affect great waves of course, it wouldn’t be such a problem.
Cloudbreak, pictured above, is a perfect example. In the mid to late 1970’s two surf entrepreneurs made a deal with the Fijian tribe who own the island to develop a surf camp there. The tribe’s land rights extend over their fishing grounds which happen to be the coral reefs over which not just one, but two world class waves break. The island is now an exclusive surf resort accommodating up to 36 guests at a time and costing somewhere in the region of $300 per day. But you get Cloudbreak or Restaurants to yourself. In fact, the only time that other surfers can sneak a look in is to do as I did and get out to the island on a Saturday morning (changeover day) and pay to surf in the few hours between one set of guests leaving and a new load arriving - usually by helicopter.
For me it was worth it, but is it right?
In pre-contact Hawaii, certain breaks such as Sunset were the sole playgrounds of Royalty and off limits to commoners. In 1950’s and 1960’s California ranch owners made access to spots along vast stretches of coast available only to those with access to a boat under threat of prosecution for trespassing.
These days more often than not the reason for off-limits surf is down to National Defence.
In the UK, The Pole in Pembrokeshire and Broadbench in Kimmeridge, Dorset both fall under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defence and access is strictly controlled, most recently to much public outcry at Kimmeridge.
If they’re firing, and the reef’s firing, you ain’t surfing.
And if you’ve ever travelled between LA and San Diego you’ll know that a large tract of land and 15 miles of prime pacific coastline on the infamous Camp Pendleton Marine Base is off limits to surfers – a recent Surfer’s Journal/marine R&R incursion excepting. The flip side of this though, is that apart from tank tracks on the beach this is probably the closest to an untouched piece of coastline in Southern California and the only thing preventing an LA/San Diego megatropolis. So perhaps not such a bad state of affairs after all in this case.
But it’s a valid issue and one that will only grow as the number of active surfer’s grows, particularly in surf travel Edens such as the Mentawais. Competition for waves and a demand to score perfect UNCROWDED surf when paying over the odds for your one surf trip per year will lead to more and more “exclusive” resorts fighting to keep their waves private and off limits to overland explorers on lower budgets or bro’s on their boat trips.
The thing is, wave “ownership” has been a sticking point for this long, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be solved any time soon. Catch ‘em while you can.