All the Fish!

The 2012 Fish Fry(e) was a roaring success with delicious waves, tasty winds, and more Fish than you could shake a spear at.

Kris putting pedal to metal.  You know he's serious when his hand never leaves the yogurt.

Chris Gentile of Pilgrim Surf & Supply, giving the Chicken Petter a shaka hood ornament.

Piles of keel fish, one of the original Mini Simmons, hand planes, even a Lightning Bolt.  Didn't get a picture of it but there was a fiberglass handplane that was one big deep concave and looked sick.

Petro of Faktion Surfboards, petting the Chicken.

 Todd of the Endless Bummer blog.  Love this brother.  He's like a stoke amplifier.

This Sunset stinger single fin ruled.  Gave me one of my favorite rides of the day. 

Enough geekery, time to get the Chicken Petter wet!  It did great in the 4' waves.  I felt like I was riding an antigravity skateboard.  Floaty, caught waves easy, rode loose, and just wanted to dance like James Brown.

Huge thanks to Tyler Breuer, Chris Gentile and SMASH Surf for organizing this event and all the other things they do to make surfing in NY more fun!

Greenlight Wants You - To D.I.Y.

I'm not interested in shaping.  It's best left to the experts.  It's too much work.  There's no place to shape.  It's hard to get blanks and supplies around here.  There's no one to teach me.

My kick-ass Honduran super lets me store and repair some boards in the basement of my Brooklyn apartment building, but no way am I going to get away with mowing foam and glassing a whole deck down there.

Enter Greenlight Surfboard Supply, known by word of mouth to surfers on the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic coast mainly as a place to order supplies.  Having heard from some Philly surfers about this cool dude who runs it out of New Jersey, Brian Gagliana, I ordered some resin and a few odds and ends last year from his tiny 500 square foot warehouse to repair my boards.  Little did I know they had bigger plans for 2012.

Now at a new Manasquan location, with a showroom, a shaping bay, and ample space for everything from finished boards, blanks, supplies and lessons, if you're within striking distance of the northern Jersey coastline, the argument against at least trying your hand at shaping is pretty much devastated.  For around the going price of a new board, you can get a blank, materials, space, plus one-on-one instruction, and shape and glass your own.

Matt Henderson (photo at right) explained how this process encourages people to experiment, and shape things you might not find on the racks of your average surf shop.

"It's nice, because we get to try out a lot of stuff.  For example, Kevin Rider (photo above) has been shaping double stringer shortboards, and you don't see a lot of that out there. Everybody's trying to add a little something else."

What I saw in the shop would seem to bear this out.  Such as this fruity double bump number.  True, it looks like a popsicle (do they still make the "Bomb Pop" that used to rule back in the pre-GWOT days?) but check out them rails!














Some chunky old school single fins, fins with winglets, a fat Simmons-style quad, a gorgeous step-deck log, and even an elegant asym model give this place a refreshing experimental feel, like a handmade east coast Skunk Works, minus the military industrial aroma.


The one thing they're missing is a teleporter to skip the turnpike and tolls (course given all the juice they'd pull, it would be a hard sell to my super without a third in Tegucigalpa).

Let's face it - this place freaking rules.  Let a thousand backyard shapers bloom. I wonder if they'll let me pitch a tent in their parking lot.

You can find out more at greenlightsurfsupply.com

Morning of the Earth Live in Sydney

The magical locations, the beyond-epic waves, the leashless single fin boards, the dancing transition-era style of riders like Lopez, Young, Peterson, the spiritual consciousness that creeps out from between the frames and embedded in the soulful original songs and yearning captured in brilliant guitar playing.

That alone would make the film a classic. However, filmmaker Albee Fazon even transcends this, by framing his work as a kind of love poem to the Earth that also manages to ask important questions about life and human values.

Playing this weekend in a restored print and some of the original musicians on hand to perform the songs live.

Thanks to Damion Fuller at Board Collector for the tip, and to Justin for turning me on to the film. Feeling the pain to be here in NYC.

The 15th Burleigh Singlefin festival

I pulled this from Dead Kooks. Looks like a fun event.

15th Annual Single Fin Festival Burleigh Heads from Billabong on Vimeo.

Rincon Snapshots

Photo credits:
1, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 Michael Baron Shaw
2, 3, 4, 6, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 Freaky Born Wings

Which way, the green room?

OK, I admit it: I've gotten a little obsessed with barrels. My bodyboarder friends have all gotten their share. Somebody once compared it to losing your virginity. Maybe because everyone has been in that situation at one time in their life, but until you've popped your cherry you're not so interested in talking about it. Or maybe that's just a guy thing?

A week ago Friday was hollow with howling offshores and sets at least head high. My heart jumping, I grabbed my single fin pintail and ran to the water. Every wave, I was cranking a bottom turn, pulling in tight and trying to get inside. I got destroyed a lot in closeout barrels. But there were some good ones between the closeouts. Once I briefly saw the inside of a tube but it squeezed shut on me.

Later in the day my friends showed up. I was pretty tired and chilled, but they razzed me until I got back in the water. (That's one of the things friends are good for.) The swell dropped a foot or so in size, but lined up a little better. I stopped trying to pull in, and instead went for longer rides. A woman snapped my picture.

So I guess the ocean won't give it up to me yet, but damn I'm so in love with single fins.

Rusty Single Fins. The Single Life

I was flipping through the latest issue of Transworld and stumbled across a spread of Josh Kerr sitting among some short/wide single fined surf craft. I could not beleave my eyes. A single fin in the pages of Transworld? What gives? Well it turns out that Rusty has been exparimenting with the these little rockets for some time. Check out the footage below. I have never seen a single fin ridden this way. Say good by to everything you thought you new about mono fined craft. Kerr even states that under the right conditions he will take one out during a heat. I would love to see that and hear the commentators reaction.
I am stoked to see all of the experimentation going on in board design and fin use!


RUSTY Single Life | teaser from rustyintl on Vimeo.

THE SINGLE LIFE from rustyintl on Vimeo.

Dude, Lightning Bolt?

As I finished prepping an old board for sale this week, a pretty rare opportunity presented itself.

I grew the quiver to a fair size this year, picking up interesting cheap used boards to experiment with. Now, as I'm looking to sell off a bunch to narrow the quiver to perhaps 4 boards, a semi gun was on the list. I'd envisioned more of a 7'2-7'4 pintail thruster, but suddenly what appears online?



A 7'1 single fin pintail semi gun. With a Lightning Bolt on the deck. At a good price. After a quick consult with the helpful, Bolt-obsessed Damion Fuller over at Boardcollector.com (thanks D!), I immediately began a campaign of begging the seller via email for first crack at this piece of history. I imagined he probably thought me a bit weird.



I showed up at his place and not only did it turn out we'd met briefly at my home break a couple weeks prior, he turned out to be quite a nice guy and very interesting - a German photographer named Marian living and working in NY.

After he helped me pack up the bolt in cardboard for the subway ride home, he was kind enough to take his quiver down off a high shelf, and here (pictured below) are three more Lightning Bolts! At right is a classic Vespa he and a friend dragged 5 stories up a narrow Chinatown staircase to his studio apt for restoration.



My new acquisition has a number of layers and unsightly (though watertight) repairs. The green bolt and pinlines are made of some kind of thin, very strong tape that's bonded tightly to the top. A thin layer of resin below the tape is an "Ed Angulo/Hawaii" decal. Who knows what the story is behind this board? But it's clearly been around for a while, and as I'm a rider not a curator, at 7'1 x 19.5 x 3, my new friend looks like it's begging for some big hurricane waves. And I hope that maybe, just maybe, on the right day, my feet will feel a soft whisper from 1975 Hawaii.