Bonza!

Eaton/Swift Bonzer by Joe Bauguess

It seems like you can't be a real blogger without posting a picture of a bonzer, so here's one from me. Joe's in town and busy shaping away so hopefully I'll be seeing my 5'5" mini Simmons very soon. I'm excited like schoolkid the day before holidays.
As the year is about 1/4 gone, I'm seriously facing up to what I need to get done. Hopefully it's going to be a productive year for us all, and by posting this I'm hoping I'll have added incentive to get these things finished. In relative order of expected production, here's my aims:
-Swift website up and running (soon I hope)
-Brown Birds From Windy Hill vinyl released
-Joe Curren book done and released
-'Bird Down Under' book finished and released
-Albie Falzon book started
-Hopefully a couple more 'Ether' shows in there too, Andrew's talking about Spain and I'd like to get those East Coast shows done, and maybe another LA/SD one if he's back in the US. I'm agitating for the full slide show/Hydrodynamica clip performance again as it went over very well.
There's also some tenative fun with Australian surfboards and shapers,and I'll hopefully also be helping Patrick Trefz sell his 'Thread' book (again- that's a really good film) but more on that as it becomes more concrete.I need to pay my rent and eat over this time too, so no doubt Jan 09 will come and I'll be staring at this list in dismay. Don't forget this Saturday is the Shelter reopening which I will most certainly attend, 'with bells on' as they say in my part of the world.

Brazil

Jair in Brazil sent me a couple of emails loaded with photos. He'd been hanging with Mike Vallely and acting as a defacto guide/translator. They went to a youth program in a Sao Paolo juvey prison and into some very harsh favela zones. Whole time Jair is taking some very epic photos. He's doing some great work and he's got a blog that I've now linked.

Surfing

A wave, south of where I was.

Went south on a very weak work pretext and managed to get in the water in a good spot while a swell was running again. After a terrible couple of months I've lucked out twice. Last week during the south/west combo I gambled on the tide making Santa Monica OK and it was, peaks all over, offshores and nicely bowly chest to head high waves. Probably was better elsewhere but I had pretty damn good all to myself. Yesterday I got nice sized and clean N. San Diego beachbreak for an hour or two, then went down to visit the Swift headquarters. RK had surfed Windansea for about 5 hours over two great sessions and had some footage to prove it. The first swell totally lit up La Jolla, insane Waimea-esque monsters in the sunset, but Ed Wood struck and the footage is a bit too mysto for it's own good. However I think the fine lads over at Shipworm have inspired him with their blogging prowess and he's up and running with Hydrodynamica, so we all get to see the fine stash of images he has, and he's started with some nice shots from yesterday. I've linked him over there along with the Grey Ghost who's shaping some truly righteous looking boards out in NYC. I'd like also to say that a visit to Warbles to see the Jeff Beck foam/wood sandwich board is well worth it. If I'm avoiding work by looking at surfboard pictures then you should too.

Purcho

Purcho pic swiped from Solace Surf Au

I've been slack about posting as I've had a week of computer malfunction that was fortunately simply fixed, and now I'm trying to get back on it and caught up with everything. Meanwhile, down in Australia the Noosa Surf Festival has been progressing with all manner of fun including a Brown Birds From Windy Hill show. Here's their guitar hero and the inventor of the rail machine, Neal Purchase Jnr, with a couple of his shapes. There was probably beer involved in the production.

Fish!

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