Niceness

In these days of overpopulation, pollution and bad vibes there are still moments. Moments when the wind is offshore, the light is fading, and you and a buddy can snag a peak to yourselves at a crowded city beach. A moment when you paddle out the farthest, look straight out to sea and feel like your alone. Tranquility amongst turmoil and a beautiful moment when you feel your head clear...

Thanks for the photos chris

sweet home

it's where the heart is.

vacation

These waves are still out there. Warm air and water. To be surfed by your lonesome, gliding over sand bottom, riding in glee. Always wondering what lurks beneath, and swimming like a flash of light when your log slips away.

Represent

Terry

A true surfer. Terry Chung of Kauai, Hawaii. You'll probably never surf as stylish and smooth in your entire life, so give up now and save yourself from the despair...

bringin home the bacon

pelagic was meant for words of wisdom and ramblings of this irate bum that enjoys our time-wasting pursuit. time becomes an issue, and excuses as i like to say 'are like an arsehole - everyone has one and they all stink.' so i only can offer this; I've been surfing. Sorry, try back soon. in the meantime here are some images, straight from the camera to you. i am eternally grateful to the ocean, 'cause if i'm not catching waves i'm able to catch dinner. I love you you big blue beautiful you.

matt the fish

my friend matt the traveler sent me these, rocking the balls blue from the cold bodysurf life with a hand plane i gave him... is it New Jersey? or Norway? who knows, and who knows when the winds will blow little matty back to these shores down under.

city life

what a town. a major city, and it still has semi-secret spots 15 min from the cbd... blazes if they only work a handful of times a year. when they do they're goooood. i checked all these spots the other morning and there wasn't a soul out. me and my buddy surfed the one just bellow the boat pic. i was surfing with only one other dude, city and port as a backdrop. amazing. then i got scared out of the water by a friendly seal posing as a shark... but was right back out after i realized how much of a pussy i was... good times

two is better than one

little bit on the nose, looked alright, put the same on the tail. 6' double-ender. Rides like only a two headed horse could...

travel to the soul

Australia is big, beautiful and has adventure ready for you whenever you want it. For the types like us the coastline is dotted with places of great cultural significance; Snapper Rocks, Lennox Head, Angourie, Bells to name a few... Most of these places can be singular destinations, but littered with such places of pure stoke as Australia is, you can hit two, three or four of them on a single trip if you are keen. We loaded the dented white toyota van with boards and put it's wheels on the road. It was after work when we left and drove through the night, through rainstorms and star-filled skies, past little towns and lonley gas stations. For a week we slept in the van and surfed right pointbreaks. Travel for kilometeres to get to them, then travel kilometers more on the face of waves. Sunshine and cloud, wind and calm, hours spent in the water. Life is good. Aus provides...

Pics: The Pass, Lennox Head, Cresent Head, Seal Rocks...

clean and new

all newborn, ready to be taken out and drowned...

southcoast

Easter break with the crew, down on the beautiful south coast.


check out the posse in action: Los Log Gos
thanks to Danger and his dog Bob for the talented camera work...

home sweet home...

Due to the perils of technology i no longer have a computer. surfing the net i wiped out bigtime and my ride was snapped. i did manage to pull this barrel though:

This is my home break, doing it's thing.

handplane part deuce

so shit man i wanna check them so i can get them. WAXA and PO co. Handmade by crusty bob himself. (Click this text.)

handplanes

Handplanes. Fun as a can of jumping beans. I've never actually seen a jumping bean, much less a whole can of them, but I can imagine it and it seems like a whole lot of fun. These are waaay funner. True story: I was out with a mate the other day and he got a full barrel, sectioned over, in there, came out clean (on the one in the second image.) Epic.
Get them for 50 bucks aussie a pop. Will send them all around the world free of charge. Pick a shape and it's off in the mail. Made of marine ply, sealed with surfboard resin, with surf-rescue board staps.
(word of note; they're not finished absolutely perfect, but are not meant to be, because frankly you're not perfect either.)
shapes are:
swallow flyer
fat-ass
whale-tail
chubby stinger
order through:

crustybobandthesaltycrew@gmail.com

ch chc ch changes

Allow the following to be read as motivation for all of us with issues;
It's not easy to make a change. Take giving up smoking for an example, you go through withdrawals, get grumpy and snappy, your friends keep smoking and it drives you crazy. I'm glad I never had to go through that. I'm only addicted to waves an women, to channel Spicoli for a moment.
Other changes are easy, like separating with the love of your life. All that has to happen is she dumps you and moves on. Then you're left sitting on your ass and kinda have to get on with it.
Yeah, changes suck.
So lifestyles and life-cycles are altered, focus is redirected and the world keeps spinning.
Through these changes loneliness and self-reflection abounds, but these are best utilized as moments for contemplation. Those still moments in the surf, out the back waiting for a set, with a vast sky stretching out above you and the ocean disappearing into the horizon. This is a focal moment in surfing. I know I've paddled out on a less then appetizing day just for those moments.
Change your scenery, change your mind. Change your fin setup, the toilet roll, your underwear and what you have for breakfast. If life throws you a change that is unexpected and unwanted, then change things on your own to balance the cosmos.

I got up early for a change and went for a surf. It was a little thing, but I sat on my board and looked out to sea and waited, and life was fine.
Benefits counter the negatives, so on so forth.
Man, since that moment of clarity I lost 6 kilos, got a tan, and wake up at 8 every morning. I'm a fucking specimen of a man and I owe it all to surfing. images from aquabumps.com

another wave will always come...

summer in the under

A year of winter is no place to live. Clerical errors, lapses in judgment, mistakes in planning. Reasons abound for traveling from the throes of winter to another hemisphere and to repeat it again. For the likes of my complexion, it starts as a fading of melanin and corresponds with the fading of spirit. By the time my skin reached a level of paleness not matched since my birth, the desire for summer reached a crescendo. Then back! Back in the glorious sunlight! No better place to enjoy it exists then the wide brown land. Terra Firma is an island ringed with stretches of golden sand. Aqua Marina is crystalline and every shade of blue. And the sun, oh the glorious sun, a ball of fire pashing your every cell with heat. But like allot of pashing it's when you sober up from the initial enjoyment you realize the ill effect. The sun is not to be trusted. Sunlight can be like saliva, containing herpes and who knows what, that the girl, that looked a lot more attractive when you didn't see as clear, had hidden unknown. In my case i entered the warm season straight from the cold season, no graduating with spring for me. So skin, so white as to seem translucent first meets the sun on the arm, hanging out the window of a driving car. One arm red, the body follows suit while laying on the longboard. Red turns to tan and a feeling of invincibility sets in. So when the first real swell of summer hits, sunscreen is less of a priority then long hours sitting on fiberglass floating on ocean surges. Now my face is red again, and flaps of it are falling off. The freckles on my shoulders have multiplied to the point i think they may mutiny and overwhelm me. This is not 'cool' this is a shit way to live. I want to catch waves, not cancer. Consuming humanity have eaten most our earth has to offer, and the atmosphere was not passed over in the feast. Here in the land down under the hole we've left in the atmos is hanging above. Like a hole in a condom letting everything you don't want through, to relate back to earlier analogy. With over 1,600 deaths here a year, and over 100% increase in cases since 1985 the sun's sneaky side affect is very real and traumatizing. The sun doesn't give a call a few months later to say' yeah we had some fun, but hey, i think you might need to get yourself checked out.' A nice chunk of info is available from the 'department of health and aging', very appropriate name for a bureau on this type of thing. so remember kids practice safe sun and safe sex this summer.

love it or leave it, pink-o.

Most Beautiful House

This is the opening paragraph of a wonderful book, entitled "The most Beautiful House in the World." The author uses a parable of wanting to build a boat in order to run a narrative on our relation to the domestic built environment. I replaced all his personal and nautical references, with my own.

It began with the dream of a wave. At a certain moment in my life (i was 27), i was struck with what seemed like an irresistible urge to become a surfer-or more accurately, to acquire a board.
This idiosyncrasy was not hereditary. There were no surfers in my background; my ancestral roots were in middle usa, several hundred miles from the pacific. As far as i knew, my american forebearers were sober, professional men, men of land, not water-not a kahanamoku among them. I don't want to give the impression that i wanted to run away to sea. I was no armchair Robert Lewis Stevenson, i had no fantasy of surfing the south seas. Still, every wave dream has some suggestion of escape-in my case, escape from responsibilities, from the perils of everyday life.

original exert from;
'The Most Beautiful House in the World' by, Witold Rybczynski. Peguin Books 1990

be back soon

wala'au

My childhood home was one of the few houses lived in year-round, down past where the road turned from paved to gravel, just before it dead-ended. On one side there is a reef sheltered lagoon with a beach, and on the other a sheer hill lush with mango, hau, bamboo and a larger mix of native and scrub plants. My pops kept his fishing boat out on a channel in the reef, and our small house sat just at the base of the hill nearly on the sand. One neighbor was auntie Kaui, a beautiful old Hawaiian woman in floral mu'mu. When we would bring her fish my father caught, she would give me and my sister treats. She used to tell us stories, like how she rode a horse to school in the days before they put the bridge in. A lot of the other kids where poor, so she'd hide the horse on the side of the road halfway and walk, so they wouldn't tease her for having one. Her school was underneath a big Banyan tree that is still growing. On the other side of our house there was the Ainu Family. For a while all the girls in the family danced Tahitian, at a restaurant called 'Tahiti Nui.' I could hear the drumbeats from the tape come through our screen windows when they practiced. They would host massive luau for any event, i used to love the opi'hi and the sushi. Being one of the only haole boys there, and being small and skinny compared to almost everyone else, I'd eat the load to prove myself. You get respect trying keep pace with the 300lb braddahs.
When i was in my teens we moved up the road to our new house. The home was bigger and my dad no longer parked his boat in the lagoon. I got to surf more, but i always missed the feeling of being at the end of the road.
Now I'm far away ready to move yet again, and flights are getting canceled because of snow storms. Totally different trip, but everything is an experience. We build on our experiences, so the more variety the better. Live and learn. Live with Aloha.
savekauai.org

like your momma's hugs

Our ocean coastline is a giant embrace, hugging the big 'ol momma ocean. We always care about big momma ocean, but sometimes we don't have much thought of where the land embraces her. I'm not some old boar, some bristled and sun-spotted dude on a three inch thick board. I'm still young, and in my lifetime have been witness to tree lined coasts morph into million dollar mcmansions. I've seen haoles move from hick-ville nowherestown and lay down a hefty chunk to buy oceanfront property, then represent like they're monarchy. I've been to the most out of the way secret spots, and had to step over beer bottles and garbage bags to wet my soul in the waves. I've spat caution into the wind and sprinted through peoples lawns chased by fuck-off big dogs, saliva dripping off their fangs, screaming like a little girl. me screaming, not the dogs.
Surfers can be one of the coastal hazards as well. We all know of the places that are dodgy to leave the car. From the grumpy locals and their bars of wax and windshield art. The fact the ride is out of sight, and some punk might have a crack at it, because they don't make wallet pockets on a wetsuit. I heard someone say 'trust in god, but lock your door.' Not very deep but fair enough.
I remember one Christmas eve, some guy paddled out at a heavy locals spot and made a bit of a kook of himself. The braddahs where having none of it, birth of Christ completely out of mind. The dudes innocently smoking a spliff and talking story in the parking lot, they saw where he stashed his keys. The keys where locked in the car, tires flattened, car covered in mud and the alarm set off. So this poor joe had to come in and deal, surrounded with a crew of guys all over 200lbs breathing down his neck, and the alarm going woop woop. Yuletide doesn't mean shit if in those shoes.
Back to the coast though. I watch houses sprout like mushrooms along the ocean front and it bums me out. Not to come off as mustering a rallying cry mind you, I'm not all about living in caves and foraging, or some pseudo spiritual 'no one really owns the land man' tripper. I wouldn't mind having my own place someday, and mosquitoes and lack of flush toilets would finish me off in about 15 minutes if i lived in a cave and foraged. It's that surfers have a unique perspective. Not a cosmo lovey-lovey one, but unique in the sense that the general populace looks out to sea from land, surfers look back at land from the sea as well.
Inspired? Surfers in eastern Canada were so burnt on the idea of not being able to access the coast they didn't just sit around drinking and bitching. They do have a lot to bitch about too, it gets real cold, so having more hassles really just shits you. They posse'd up and worked on that shit. Petitioned the government, got Tom Curren to play a concert, this and that. These go-to guys managed to get the government to commit to buying piece of land for a cool quarter mil, all for the coast access and preservation. With a side benefit; if unwitting private landowners did consume all the land, they'd be seeing a steady steam of men in tight black hooded suits running by, and be fearing it was an attack of ninjas of something.

hassle

I got a mate of mine named mat. Hails from the free-spirited beauty of Byron Bay, Australia. Unreal guy mat, little but big in spirit. He doesn't stand much over 5', and he's got a natty lock of dreads that makes up about a third of his total body weight. Full of vegan hooey and all the rest of that hippy crap. Mat rode his bike, with a board rack, a couple hundred, or is it thousand, miles to get to where we are today. He started out in Mexico City, rode to Austin Texas, somehow ended up in New Jersey. Then bused and biked to this here outpost on the Atlantic, in chilly Canada.
I don't know how much of the journey was fact, fiction, or exaggeration, but nonetheless it's still the stuff of legend.
As soon as his toes tickled the ocean he's become a fixture in the surf here. Soul style from the not very lofty tip of his head to the soles of his feet. Bonzer grooving, and yanking grab-rail turns, tai-chi cutbacks and other moves smooth as velvet pajamas on silk sheets.
Some fuckers hassled him the other day. Out at a somewhat secret spot with the unimaginative name of right point. These guys, could have been same geniuses who named the place, decided he was too much of an outside influence. Seems he's not from here, and had a friend from Jersey visiting the other week. Even heard tell of other foreigner types in these parts yokel bob, might be he brought them too!
This place has an abundance of spots as much as any other I've visited. Much more than most places. The waves are long enough to spread and accommodate a crowd. Not that there is enough of a surf population to make a real crowd. And the weather separates out all those but the most pure of heart.
So hassling? Get real. Learn some aloha. Welcome what you have and appreciate it, don't make it sour. With hundreds of miles of coast and a disgusting load of potential spots, if you cant mesh with society go find your own niche. That's what founded this place for fucks sake, keep it alive rather then trying to smother it to death!
One of this maritime magic-land's most famous sons is a surf photographer. They call him Snazzy Yassie. No they don't, they just call him Yassie. Yassine Ouhilal was the 7th most published surf photographer of 2007 according to Transworld. The cold coasts are the last untapped surf frontier on our ever shrinking earth, and Yassie happens to thrive on them. He snaps his home here, and travels shooting the Arctic to the tropics. A friend told me the crusty dogs here used to hate on the guy because he's 'publicizing' the place. Hasn't happened yet, and because the cold, won't happen soon. What he has done has publicized the stoke. He has put a lens to the spirit and the adventure that is a major draw for us surfers. Someone bitching about him showing a spot off? Man, the fat cat reading in California isn't gonna make the effort. Majority of 'surf travelers' will take the tailored and tamed surf trip. Where they don't have to do much more than swipe a credit card to get into a wave, and their only taste of culture comes from the private chef and the brand of beer available.
So mahalo to mat for have a different sense of adventure,and putting up with the small mindset encountered. And mahalo to Yassie for taking a difficult path and following it to the creation of beautiful images.

Yassie's had a show on at Nova Scotia's Happenin' new shop Ifonly, sat, dec 13 @ 7pm.

happy

Pōhaku ʻau waʻa lā leʻaleʻa i kai nei, literally translated to: fleet of canoes at anchor. Figuratively meaning: happy here at sea.