The Rain and Spain

Hello again strangers!

Sorry for the lack of posting in recent weeks. Last time we spoke I was on a ship on the way to Spain... soon after I threw up in the cabin toilet, and apparently it was dead calm. Anyway I was out in Spain for a longboard comp and a little photo trip with some of the UK's top longdongers. As you might imagine it was a very civilized, relaxing trip with fun waves, good food and the odd spanish beer. Unfortunately, although it was very much still work for the mag, it was a holiday from the County Limits project and I returned to the UK with only a couple of weeks before our deadline to score a new county. Not sure why it always seems to be so last minute with these trips, but anyway with not long to go, two good looking charts appeared for the same few days. One for South Wales and one for a small Scottish Island. Right up until I picked up the surfers, I still hadn't decided which to go for, but after a group talk, we decided to hit Wales and drove up that night. The following morning revealed small waves and lots of rain, a real reality check after the glorious Spanish weather. Luckily, as predicted the clouds cleared for the next day just in time for the waves to pump. It was a sick trip and it means that I've now ticked off two more counties, Bridgend and Vale of Glamorgan. New issue of Wavelength is out next week so check out the shots in there.

Out and Aboat

I'm somewhere in the middle of the ocean, with no land in sight, bobbing up and down on a big floating naff hotel that smells of school dinners. Obviously, I'm not on my way to any of the British counties, but instead I'm on a short little photo trip for Wavelength that isn't part of County Limits, crossing my fingers that I don't miss anything back home, (yes, I realize Cornwall and Devon have waves today, but I've done them, and I can see that Wales will have a small wave.)

Anyway, back on the County Limits next week but in the meantime, Essex and Suffolk are in the shops now wrapped up in the spanking new issue of Wavelength. Check it out!

New issue of Wavelength out later this week, meanwhile check out the trailer. This issue has the feature on Suffolk and Essex in (not the sunny looking barrel shots.)

From the archives

Been digging through the massive slide archive of John Conway, the guy who set up Wavelength almost 30 years ago. Amongst the treasures, I found this little beauty of the Severn Bore, my one hope of getting surf in Gloucestershire. I reckon it actually looks pretty fun, and I'm digging the guy sat in the way with a homemade '80s GoPro gaffered onto the nose of his board.

Caithness

Pretty sure Thurso East must have a wave on it today. Maybe not quite as good as it was when this shot of Stokesy was taken a couple of years ago, but probably clean and barreling none the less. Problem is, Thurso is a helluva drive for just one day, and Caithness is such a bounteous county of waves that I'd really want to save it for a better chart. So that's the gamble, miss a day of surf in the hope that something else comes up before the next deadline.

I should have been there tomorrow

New issue of Length has just gone to print with the feature on Essex and Suffolk in there. I was almost off to an early start on the next county when Oli saw a chart for this little sweet spot which looks like it's gonna be similar but bigger than in this vid tomorrow.

Anyway, in the end we didn't leave at the crack of dawn this morning for the mammoth mission up North, because of a few transport issues. Transport is definitely one of the hardest bits about this whole project, what with the cost of fuel and needing a vehicle that won't break down half way there. Anyone got a spare chopper they're not using for the next year or so? (as in the flying variety, not the 80's bike.)

Labour Intensive

Well that's two more counties ticked off the list... just. It was a hell of a gamble but at the start of this week we managed to find a half decent looking wave in Essex! Now I wouldn't necessarily recommend Essex as a surfing destination, it's cold, brown and very, very fickle, but there is definitely potential there.

Whilst we were waiting for this little left to start working, we hossed up to the more reliable, but still relatively surf-starved Suffolk. Considering the short lived swells and months of flatness, this county actually has a pretty big, hardcore community of surfers who are keen as fook all through the year... unlike Essex, where apparently no-one has ever heard of surfing.

Even Gordon didn't have a clue where to suggest looking for waves south of Lowestoft when I randomly bumped into him there and tried to pick his brain... but that's what happens when you don't get in the water enough and spend all your time trying to get re-elected.

Anyway check out the full story and shots in the next Wavelength out in a couple of weeks. That's two of the trickiest counties done, so surely it will get easier from now on?

Say No Go

Sooner or later with this project I was going to have to face some inconvenient truths. I figure out of the 50 ish coastal counties I've go on my hit list, at least 10 will be widely regarded as unsurfable. Today... I'm heading off to one of those 10.

I tried researching it on the net, but there are no matches for surfing and this county. Then I tried asking the only two people I knew who had some surfing knowledge of that area of the UK. Both laughed, both asked if I was serious, then both told me not to go.

So for now I've given up talking to people about this particular county trip... mainly because there's only so many 'I told you so's I can handle if and when we arrive in a flat county this afternoon. I've managed to talk two pro surfers into joining me on this road trip. For now, at least, our destination is a 'secret spot', but sometime later today I'm going to have to break it to them.

It doesn't have to be big, pretty or particularly good, just surfable...

...it's borderline stuff.

Back from the lab

Pretty pleased with the results back from the lab for the rolls of film shot on my Mamiya C220 and that car booty Bencini. The Mamiya is great for portraits as I was hoping. It was fun workig with it and the slowness actually seems to be way more suited to taking portraits than the speed of digital. The shot above (top) is of longboarder Candice O'Donnell and was taken as part of a shoot for the next Longboarding and Freeride magazine which will be bagged up and free with the next Wavelength.

As for the Bencini... the lady in the photo shop apologised and said it looked like the camera was a duff and not really working, but I love it! Lots of magical light leakage and randomness, perfect for little lifestyle shots and 'fingers-crossed photography'.

Oh and the County Limits project? I don't want to talk about it... one week to go to score a new county and things are not looking good!

The lemon next to the pie

So the first installment of County Limits is out in the new issue of Wavelength now. It features scores from Cornwall and Devon... the easy counties. In the meantime I'm back in Cornwall and have less than a week to try and score a new county. I'm determined to get somewhere so this project doesn't fall at the first hurdle... hopefully this is just the beginning... it's gonna get bigger.

Cuba Crisis

I lived in Bristol for about 6 years. In all that time I never really knew which county it is in, and I'm still not 100% sure. Some people say it's in North Somerset, others reckon Bristol is not really in any and is sort of a county itself, and then there are people... apparently, who refer to Bristol as being located in CUBA (the County that Used to Be Avon.) Sounds tenuous to me, but nevertheless, here I am, holed up in CUBA.

I came up at the weekend to represent Wavelength at the Bristol Surf Show. My little day dream was that a flakey chart for south Wales would improve over the weekend and give me reason to travel on from here and score Glamorgan, or maybe Pembrokeshire. But instead, it's got worse. So here I sit, deciding whether to stay in Bristol and hope there is a window of lighter onshores to persuade me to pay the Severn Bridge toll, or, head back down to Cornwall and keep an eye on some swell forecast to move down the East coast next weekend. Next weekend is a long way off for an East coast chart, and the pressure is now on as we get very close to deadline and the rest of the team are talking to me about contingency plans if I fail to score a new county in the next week.

The stress is building... I think I need a cigar

Tools

I've been buying a few little toys recently...

I'm a sucker for collecting things so I am trying my hardest to hold back on spending any more cash on cameras and lenses, but this little one was only a few quid so it doesn't count, right?

Anyway, I'm keen to shoot this project with a mixture of cameras, all of which have their own strengths and personalities, so it I thought I'd let you know what's in my tool box in case you were wondering.

1. Canon 50D - the workhorse digi camera I use for the majority of my surf shots. With a 300m lens, a 1.4x convertor and the cropped sensor, I can get in pretty tight on the action, then I've got a few other lens for more pulled stuff and a tokina fisheye faker for the water shots.

2. Olympus E-P1 PEN - bit of a luxury item. Basically it's a high quality digi with a couple of decent lenses and styled like a retro rangefinder. It's really good for quick lifestyle shots and street photography, plus the HD video on it is pretty sick for such a small camera.

3. Mamiya C220 - an old school medium format Twin Lens Reflex camera, which takes 120 film (the big square photos.) Taking photos with this is quite a slow process, but it's sharpness, shallow depth of field and special quality makes it perfect for portraits. I'm still getting used to it but the shot above was taken with the Mamiya.

4. Bencini Koroll II - pictured above, I picked up this little beauty at the car boot sale the other day. It takes the same square format film as the Mamiya but it splits them in two so you get kind of panoramics. Quality-wise I think it will be a bit dodge like a Holga, but hopefully quite special. Haven't seen the results yet so I'll let you know.

Now all I need is some waves to shoot. (in any county apart from Cornwall or Devon)

No Fly Zone

The silver lining on the Icelandic ashen clouds that are still calmly bringing the European airline industry to it's knees, was that on Sunday morning, instead pulling over in laybys to be sick all the way to Newcastle, I got to nurse my hangover from the sunny comfort of my neighbour's garden. The fact that the surfer who was going to be my Northern county guide was stuck overseas without a flight to get home, was the nail in the coffin to scoring a county on the East coast today. It's always a gamble pulling out of a trip, and the worst bit is checking the waves on the net when it comes to the day you were meant to be there. But sunrise today showed a slightly smaller than expected swell hitting the NE counties... fun, yes, and better than any surf down in Cornwall just now, but a shadow of it's true potential. So I was nudged into making a call, and if we get some swell hitting the UK in the next 2 weeks it will probably have been the right call, but only time will tell. In the meantime, here's a leftover sequence of an Oli shove-it from the Cornwall/Devon score.

Eastern Promise

hmmm... little chart shaping up for the East coast next week. Could be fun, but unfortunately I've got 2 problems; getting there without a car, and the surfer I want to shoot with being grounded in another country due to volcanic ash. Nothing's ever simple...

2 down... forty something to go

Went a bit quiet on the blog there whilst I tried to understand the techy possibilities for embedding this blog into the Wavelength site and keeping everything branded up. I didn't manage so for now I'm glad to say the blog is staying right here.

So in the last week or so I've been pretty busy on the County Limits project. Just in time for the mag deadline, I cruised up to Devon and met up with Oli Adams and Josh Hughes at a semi secret spot I'd never been to before. It was a pretty sick set up, a sucky right that had the odd barrel and good end section for airs. We were pretty lucky to score a bit of sunshine too. On the way back we stopped in at a left point break back in Kernow, which was pretty busy, rainy, but pumping.

I got the shots in and wrote up the first installment of County Limits for the next issue of Wavelength, which has now gone off to the printers so they can work their magic.

No rest for the wicked though. I've got a super tight deadline for the next issue already and only a couple of weeks to score the next county. With Cornwall and Devon done, the reliable, easy options have been used up... my phone a friend, ask the audience and 50:50 lifelines are spent, so from now on it's about adventure to whichever random spot might be working. Should be interesting.

Dying Swell

Against all predictions the swell actually looked like it was dropping last night, and in the end it was just too small at St Ives to do a proper shoot. There was still the odd set here and there, but not what I was expecting at all. The trouble is, that means today is no longer the massive day that we were all hoping for. The wind sounds strong against the windows and it's looking dark and cloudy out there, but the hunt for a decent wave continues anyway...

The Cornish Wobble

So after a few nearly charts for Wales, the North East and Somerset, and with a deadline for the next issue looming, I've gone for the supposedly easy option to kick off the Breaking Boundaries project... Cornwall. For all it's fickle faults, the one thing Cornwall has going for it surf-wise is consistency, and after a month long wave drought across Britain, a lumpy swell has turned up to save the day in Kernow. Saturday was a typically tricky call. Southerly winds going South Easterly, Easterly and then Northerly. I followed the wind around the coast, keeping my back to it, and the difficulty of making a call on the right place to go meant I lost a few surfers to other spots, but I ended up at a special little cove with a hell of a punch in it.

It wasn't exactly the gold I was after, but today has served up some more windy swell, so I'm off to St Ives now to see if I can get anything more interesting. The next few days should be interesting too... if a little wobbly.

The Big Idea

Working at Wavelength, the longest running surf magazine in the UK, there is a lot of office banter and arguments about just how good the waves around the coastline of Britain get. One such discussion, this time about which British county had the best waves, got us thinking about how many coastal counties in Britain are actually surfable. A non-surfer would most likely name Cornwall as the prime shire for riding waves, whereas those of us who love this sport and have enjoyed waves in England, Scotland and Wales, would probably add Yorkshire, Caithness and Pembrokshire to that list... but is that it? I count 46 counties in Britain that have coastline, so surely most of those get swell that is surfable now and then?

Straight away I can foresee some counties that are unlikely to get much in the way of peeling waves, but this project, which has very quickly become something that I can't stop thinking about, is more of an investigation rather than a challenge... I want to know for certain that you can't surf in Cheshire.

So this blog is not only meant as a diary of my trips, successes and failures around the British coastline, but also, and more importantly, as a call out for help, advice and tip offs for when those rarer, surf-starved counties are about to start firing. If Anglesey is going to go nuts, I need to be there!