The Man who Loved Water

You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who loves water more than Tim Palmer. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who loves the natural world more than Tim Palmer, who has authored twenty books on rivers, river conservation, mountains, California, the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite...etc. He grew up canoeing the waters of Pennsylvania, then bought a rad van (pictured in below photo), converted it into a mobile outdoor-lover/writer/photographer transport module, and set to exploring America's wild places.
Tim's as hardcore as it gets. He walks, runs, wades, backpacks, paddles, drifts, or floats every inch of his subject material. The guy's up before dawn each day, and has probably seen more sunrises than Robert Downey Jr. He is understated about his lifetime of adventures, but his speaking and slideshow tours always reveal some true narrative gems.
His new book, Rivers of California, is a gorgeous display of photography and writing at its finest and would make a great holiday gift for any nature lover. Check it here!
Our own Russian River even makes it into the edition.
Tim is currently touring with a slideshow. He's in Sonoma County tonight at Copperfield's Books in Sebastopol at 7pm. He'll have a mindblowing presentation, his new book Rivers of California, as well as some of his other offerings. They're all great. He can even sign one for you.
If you can't make it tonight, he'll be at Guerneville's River Reader at 7pm for the same deal. Still can't make it? Here are some tour dates.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

When the Weird sisters, foretellers of Macbeth’s fate in Shakespeare’s play of the same name, describe Scotland with, “fair is foul, and foul is fair,” they may as well have been talking about surfing the Northcoast. Surfers get absolutely jazzed about conditions up here that are, by most standards, terrible. Wind, cold, rain, wind, cold, fog, wind, thunder, whitecaps, monstrous sucking beachbreak dumpers, sharks, wind. Whatever.
The first year I surfed up here I made the mistake of bitching about the wind to another surfer as we hunkered in the lineup, sideshores blowing so hard we had to keep our eyes squeezed shut. “Not a big fan of whitecaps,” I confessed after an hour of this nonsense.
“Whitecaps?” he asked, spinning his board and clawing into an absurdly thick double-up. “Up here we call ‘em glassycaps!” he shouted, then disappeared over the ledge.
Several years ago I was checking a sandbar at one of our local beachbreaks on a typical day: windy, blown-to-bits closeouts, glassycaps galore, and not even the hint of an open face. Still, five guys were on it.
As I watched, absolute in my decision to head back home to a hot cup of coffee, all five spun on their boards and made haste to the beach. Not a common sight up here, but not an uncommon one, either.
“See a fin?” I stupidly asked one of the guys as we stood on the shore, squinting toward the ocean.
“Couple,” he said.
“Gonna pack it in?” I asked.
He shot me a what-you-talking-about-Willis face and said, “and miss out on this?” His hand gestured to the malevolent shorebreak, the pounders beyond unloading onto an ill-formed sandbar barely visible through the pea-soup air.
Five minutes later the five men huddled, agreed the two sharks were long gone, then paddled straight back into the fog. I made my way back to the parking lot, quickly pulled on my wetsuit, and agreed with the dude on the beach: who would miss out on this?
It’s not until the fourth act that the Northcoast/Macbeth parallel dissolves.
“Such welcome and unwelcome things at once,” says McDuff, the play’s moral champion. “’tis hard to reconcile.”
If he were a surfer up here, it wouldn’t be hard to reconcile at all.
This 9’something LB is for local shredder/teacher JL, stranger neither to The Bard nor our frigid waters. Shaping boards for teachers is a pleasure—these guys understand community better than almost anyone I can think of. Plus, you can say something like, “let’s screw our courage to the sticking place” when suiting up on a big day and they don’t think you’re insane.
Win win.
As per usual, all color is pigmented resin, and all glasswork by Leslie Anderson at Fatty Fiberglass who may or may not be making out with some dude in Alaska at this very moment. Much to give thanks for this year!

The Semi-Conductor

Shaping boards for smaller waves is groovy. The ouija-board dance of wave, wavecraft, and rider is vast, and projecting what lines the surfer will take is an exercise in limitlessness—over the wave, under the wave, on top of, through, around, out, in, whatever.
It’s a different experience in the shaping room with a bigger-wave board on the racks. The lines a surfer takes on gun or semi-gun are more prescribed, the choices fewer. The drop. The turn. The race for the shoulder. The paddle back to the peak.
Rather than possibility, the bigger-wave board is about the experience itself. The fierce, watery thing of it. It’s about size, and about the fingernails-into-the-palms grip of fear and adrenaline and pure marine energy.
This 7’5 for MendoShredder BigL isn’t meant for the biggest our coast can handle, but rather for long paddles through coves thick with urchin-encrusted rocks and kelp. For thick, riotous masses of salwater pumping onto rock reefs that are about 600,000 years shy of perfect. And the cold of the Northcoast--not just the fog or the wind or the rain, but the cold of not knowing when the next cleanup set is coming through or how long you’re going to float, legs dangling, in water as dark as iodine for the right wave to come.
And, of course, the warmth: the joy and relief of putting the head down and feeling the unmistakable surge of water pushing surfboard. The moment when everything is crisp and decided, and the head only chants, quietly now, “go, go, go.”

Three Fin Twin Pin

Carl Ekstrom developed the first asymmetrical surfboard in 1965. He was twenty-four years old. Although the concept of asymmetry never really gained traction in the surfing mainstream, sailboards and snowboards have been capitalizing on the design idea for decades.
Re-inspired by fish designs of the last few years, Ekstrom again put planer to foam and has been coming up with some cool asymmetrical stuff. This board is inspired by Ekstrom, a low-rockered EPS blank that I’ve had lying around for years, and a demo fish that was returned to me with one keel fin missing. Not broken, just gone.
When I asked the borrower if the board looked at all off, he took a hard look, scratched his head, and said, “well, the color’s kinda girlie.”
So, what to do with an EPS fish blank and one keel fin?
This.
And this.
And this.
Resin pigment work by Leslie Anderson of Fatty Fiberglass. When I asked her what she thought of the board she said, "who cares? I'm in love."

The Best Fiance You Never Had

The title of this post refers to a short story by Pam Houston, selected by none other than John Updike for his Greatest American Short Stories of the Century anthology. Upon completion of a writing class with Ms. Houston many years ago, I was left with two memorable bits: the first is that if you ever get a novel published, make sure that the cover is blue. They sell better.
Next, she really likes dogs.
That's about it, but not a bad takeaway as far as writing workshops go.
The spirit of the post refers to soon to be married SF surf enthusiast Sara, who ordered this longboard for her fiance. What a lady!
Let's get technical in our discussion of the pigment work on this board: all color except the orange stripes were added via resin tinting during the lamination.
Ok, not really that technical, but impressive nonetheless.
Speaking of love, Fatty's got it bad, and in her ardor has been flipping boards at a fever pitch. Good time to add a new stick to her queue.
Pictured alongside 9'2" surfboard is a 33"tall 3 1/2 year old (seated) for perspective.

Rastaman Vibrations

Positive.
Tofurkris's new acquisition comes from Northern California, and has rasta resin pinlines by Leslie Anderson. A beachbreak slasher of the Broadsword variety.
My family's new acquisition comes from the pound, and has a killer dogstache. Ben's a fuzzy wolfhound of the toe-licking variety.

War Pony Chronicles: Cars and Stripes

Aloha amigos, much going on up here NoTB. For starters, the recent south swell seemed to offer many things to many surfers—from glassy peelers to dredging sphincter bombs, depending on where, when, and whether or not there were any eyewitnesses. The Gulf of Alaska is quietly waking up, eyeing the California coastline lying next to him in bed, and thinking, “Let's do this.”
It’s been many moons since we’ve seen ‘overhead++’ on Surfline’s Northern California forecast (though not so many moons, perhaps, since Surfline overcalled a swell), so our fingers are crossed, our minds already selecting boards, breaks, and tidal conditions.
As if this isn’t enough—the bounty of Fall is indeed colossal!—the fourth annual Great Handcar Regatta takes place this Sunday, September 26th, from 10am until 6pm in Santa Rosa’s historic Railroad Square. In case you’ve been stuck on the 101 for a year, the Handcar Regatta is like a shot of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade dropped into a hot glass of Burning Man, then chased with a nose-clearing dose of what would happen if Federico Fellini and Tom Waits made a baby. Handmade and handpowered rail cars, unwholesome costumes, belly dancers, freaks on stilts, outmoded facial hair combinations, nipples, and more ass cleavage than a whole season of NASCAR.
This year’s theme is Magical India, whatever the hell that means.
Here’s a sample :


This turning of the seasons also requires a tuning of the quiver, and Dr. J’s new War Pony will take him through all of Autumn’s graces—from doily, bubblegum and lace southswell playthings to, stomach-churning, sawed-off, deep water discharges.
Plus, it’s got stripes.