Surfing Every Day
Since I got back from italy aned Norway, I've been surfing every day, 8hr or more a day. Actually, I've been teaching surf classes most of the time, but basically that means that I stand on the wave for 10 minutes at a time while my students swim down, surf the wave, and then flush off. I then get about a minute of hard driving surfing while the next student comes down.

So this makes for some pretty long days, surfing in the sun and warm water. But of course the real fun is surfing with your friends at the end of the day, pushing each other.

Habitat right now is more than spectacular - a giant green wall of water 10m wide and 2m high, with a small catch pile on the right.


The wave is sometimes fast, and sometimes mushy and slow. It walls out and you can get aerials off the lip (small ones right now) and 360's, shuvvits etc, and even some cool green grinding down the face out of a lip smash. Very cool. I designed a board especially for this wave (the black and white one I'm riding here) which is a short, super turny squashtail, but has the necessary width and thickness to still float me when the wave turns mushy. Carbon Fibre of course... I havn't seen a single glass board at Habitat that is not broken.

My main surfing partner is Andreanne Dumas (who is also my salsa dancing partner). I met her through her boyfriend, and one of my best mates, Olivier Languedoc (who is also a ripping kayaker that we're trying to convert to surfing). I taught her to surf this spring, and she has already evolved into a very good surfer - natural abilities on a board which are unusual. In fact, its our favorite past time to give Olivier shit because they both started to surf at the same time, and Andreanne figured it out much faster tha he did.

Andreanne progressed so fast that I made a prototype board for her in plastic (plastic is the way to go unless you're willing to put $1000 into a performance carbon board - I just think spending $500 on a glass board that explodes in 3 months is pointless). It's a 20" x 2 3/4" x 6'0" Fish, and since being on this her surfing has leapt to another level. I suspect that we're going to see a lot of Andreanne on the local surf sceene.
Jean Louis, my room mate, has turned into a great surfer. At the beginning of the year he was still super shaky. I made him a good board, and he's been out there 8hrs a day with me every day, and he's ripping it up.

He's decided to go for the full "trucker" style, surfing with a trucker hat, Mullet hair cut, cop sunglasses and of course, he's goofy footed....

But hey, he rips.
360's are currently my favorite thing to do out there (other than high speed bottom turns into lip snaps of course). That feeling of coming off the railing edge, and letting the tail wash and the momentary pause surfing backwards... super fun. Snap it around, and off you go again .
I've recently signed up with O'Neill as my primary surfing sponsor, and we're hoping to be able to do some cool things together. Yesterday we were out filming for a short O'Neill prmomo video. Unfortunately, after 12 consecutive days of surfing, I was totally burned, and surfed like a rank beginner. I didn't manage to catch Mavericks one time (and even though it was a weird level and the wave was super tough, I still should have been able to catch it), I wasn't sticking any aerials or 360's... hardly impressive when your sponsor is sitting on the jet boat watching you ;-).

I've also developed tendonitis in my elbow from all the swimming, and frankly every muscle and ligement in my body hurts, so today I'm taking a day off. But here are some of the photo's from yesterdays filming session (These are on Hibitat again - I'll post the Mavericks one later).