Tuesday, June 22, 2010

24 Hour Surf Comp???




So a couple weeks back when my team manager from Firewire Surfboards called and asked if I would be able to be compete in a tag team surf comp in Huntington, I clearly did not see what I was committing too. The event was the surf 24. It is put on by the project save our surf organization as a major fundraiser to support there efforts of keeping our beaches and oceans clean and healthy. This event differs from most of the surf comps that I compete in throughout the year in several huge ways. First off, it is a team event, which is fun because it creates little rivalries between the different teams and makes for some good trash talking. Another major difference with this event is that it started Saturday at noon, and ended the following day at noon. That's right, 24 hours of surfing, where 1 team member had to be in the water for each of the 24 hours. The event also paired each surf team with both one Hollywood actor or actress, and one professional stand up paddle boarder. We ended up with Sam Trammel, one of the leading actors on the True Blood series. I was pretty psyched because he actually looked like he could surf while entering the water, that was until I saw him try to surf..haha He managed to post a little score in his heat though, so we couldn't ask much more from him. The event organizers lined the Huntington Beach pier with major stadium lighting and let us battle through the night. Our team started with around 7 guys who were all scheduled to surf a couple times each. to make sure that we all would be rested and have energy to make it through the event. This was all going as planned until around 7 or 8, when the drinks started flowing freely on the beach in and out of the teams tents. Needless to say this resulted in half of the competition being to wasted to paddle out, much less actually score solid waves. By around 9, Noah Ericson (Firewire team rider from LA) and I were the last ones left from our team that were still able to surf, so we just took it over and powered through the whole night switching jerseys hour after hour. I felt like a little grom again, I didn't take my wetsuit off for literally close to 30 hours. It became pretty evident that the top two teams competing for the win were Billabong and us. We were severely outnumbered by there army of team riders, but held our own up until the final heat of the event, where we just completely ran out of gas. We ended up taking second in the event, but throughout the 24 hour period both Noah and I were dropping higher scores than most everyone. I actually took top honors as the MVP of the surf 24 for scoring the highest single wave total of a 9.83, which I scored during my 1:00 AM heat on a little pier bowl left. For me, the event really could not have gone much better, I think Noah and I held it down for the Firewire team, and had most of the other teams fearing us the whole time. Being awarded the MVP and the custom gold Nixon watch was just icing on the cake.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Viva La Mexico






Well I was headed back out to California to hang with the one and only Jeff Weatherall (pro wakeboarder from New Zealand/fellow Astars rider) when I get the call from him at the airport letting me know that we are headed straight down to Mexico the next morning to surf, and hang with a bunch of his friends for a few days. My past Mexico road trip experiences have been pretty hellacious, mix in an adrenaline junky Kiwi, and a trip sponsored by Peligroso Tequilla, Needless to say, I was a little nervous.haha Trip ended up going awesome, got some fun waves, and met a ton of new friends from much different walks of life. On our trip we had pro wakeboarders Scotty Broom and Jeff Wetherall, pro snowboarder Marius Otterstad, Pro Moto racer Ami Houde, Insane musicians Cindy Santini, Marc Beauregard, and Kellen Malloy, Pro female surfer/photog Leah Dawson, photographer Jen Jones, and of course we brought our favorite lawyer Becky Mendoza just incase anything popped off.haha We had a few sketchy moments crossing the boarder with passports from several different countries, some with expired visas, and missing pages,ha, but lucky for everyone in our car I purchased a Lucha Libre Mask from one of the street vendors, so they passed us through no questions asked....haha All in all it was an amazing trip, we didn't get the best surf, but we all had a blast and got our fill of world class roadside tacos....