Friday, November 23, 2007

Are you kidding me?: Good People/Good Surf

Sweet waves rolled into town. Good surf and good people out today. Mike Gillard was out on a clean Marbella 10'6" SUB. Stoked to see Mike back in the water, he rips and best of all the guy's always smiling and passing the on the stoke.

Chad Kavanaugh scored some outside bombs- using every inch of his 12'1" Laird to power all the way through into the shorebreak. Nobody turns that board like big Chad.


Here are four photos of Kelly K. on the C4 BK Pro. Kelly takes exception to Thanksgiving List #21 (Being born goofy foot) and from the side of the peak he keeps choosing, I bet you can guess why.


All Photos: Spidey

Tomorrow: I've obtained full clearance to do a little up the coast run. Swell is dying but there'll still be surf- we'll see what the super high tide does to it. Photos and report to follow!

4 comments:

linter said...

great shots, those really are some puckerworthy bombs!

John Ashley said...

Hey Linter- on some of the bigger sets there was a little... excitement... I guess you could say. On one particular set, three leashes were snapped sending two stand up guys and surfer for long swims in. I got there as the tide was dropping- the outer reef started breaking and there were some solid 8 - 10' faces out there- nothing too gnarly, especially since it doesn't break top-to-bottom like in Hawaii but a lot of water moving. Plus, it's so far out that it gets creepy!

srfnff said...

Awesome! My hats off to you guys for even paddling out in that stuff. I can't imagine paddling through the mountains of whitewater to get back out to the peaks. I'd be exhausted before catching my first wave.

How did the SUPs perform in overhead waves? Most of the stuff I'm reading gives an upper limit of about six feet. Que pasa amigo?

John Ashley said...

The 10' green surf pickle (Stamps) did well- lots of open face, so lots of speed.

I did make an adjustment for that day. I took Tim's advice and switched the side bites to a less angled set. I had Future fin 3/2 side fins, I guess the deal with these is that they have two different cants to them, quite a bit of angle to them. Tim sent me a pair of regular, thruster side fins the idea being that with more speed the fins would give less lift allowing more bite. Worked really well- very positive even when coming hard off the bottom. I did spin out once but that was my fault.

I'd just gone off the bottom and then off the top and was looking down the line at a PERFECT lined up wall- and my mind was one turn ahead of where it should've been- so when I took it straight down into the flats and then laid it over I didn't keep my weight over the fins and skipped out... right in front of everyone.

It does get nuts out there but there are little sneaky spots to avoid getting destroyed.

Kelly's got a great little story about watching everybody get caught inside- I've just got to coax it out of him. Crazy thing is that that day was just the outside shorebreak not even the real peak which is another 300 yards outside of that- and those are waves that I just don't want to think about right now!

Just got back from a paddle up in HB with Tim and my buddy Steve who just picked up a board like mine from Stamps. He showed me some CAD drawings of a carve machine we want to do for dealing just with the thick lumps at our spot down here. It looks really promising, I'm excited!