Slide Magazine...

I'm Not Dead...

In Sri Lanka, not found any Internet access yet, waves are v average! Have seen elephants and monkeys. Doing this from my phone so prob cost me a fiver...

Slide Mag Vs The Orange Blob

  A large, scary orangey thing covered in arrows is heading rapidly towards the idyllic Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka. It's going to hit the coast sometime on Sunday. We are gonna be there to help tame the beast. No idea how you stop a ocean basin sized orange thing but we're gonna give it a shot. Maybe calling it names will make it go back to tempestuous seas off Antarctica where it came from? Who knows. We will have elephants on our side. Photo's, video and more will be coming from the weekend- unless the big orange thing gets us.

MVP You Decide... Lyndon Wake

Lyndon is a nice man. Prone to pole dancing but still a nice man-

10 Things You Didn't Know About: Sri Lanka

1. It used to be called Ceylon…
So you knew that already? Well, aren’t you clever? Did you know it should have been called Sinhela? But the colonial Brits couldn’t pronounce it easily so it became Ceylon and way back when the island was called Serendip from whence we get the word serendipity. As for the reason that the name changed from Ceylon to Sri Lanka? Well, with all the thorough and exhaustive research I’ve done it seems to have been changed because they could. Much like the Marathon to Snickers debacle it seems the idea was to take a world renowned and recognised brand name like Ceylon (read it and you immediately think ‘tea’) and change it to something which means nothing to anyone. Good marketing skills!

What's Grinding My Gears- Clampers

Is there anything worse than being financially raped by clampers? It stings way more than a parking ticket cos most times you get a parking ticket you deserve it. Clampers lurk in the shadows to catch you out in benign, non-yellow lined areas known as 'car parks'... places you think you are allowed to park without concern. Like the one out the back of my girlfriends house in the Big Smoke. You need a permit to park there and I have one. It lives on the dashboard. Only problem is my foil sunvisor thing had slowly but surely slipped down millimetre by millimetre over the course of four days and obscured the thing. £140 extortionate quid later my car is sitting in the exact same place with the exact same permit now visible without resorting to crazy ideas like looking in the SIDE window.

Oli's Baggies Bomb...

Surfing Sri Lanka- First Timer Questions...

Now I've not been to Sri Lanka... Indo and the Maldives, yes, many times but I've never made it to Sri Lanka. That's all set to change next week when I'm out there for the UK Pro Tour Champion of Champions event. Am looking forward to it and not just because of the tea or the thumping forecast. So being a good traveller I asked some of the pro's a few pertinent questions, my main concerns if you will-
1. Describe the wave at Arugam Bay.
2. Is Sri Lanka the hottest place you've ever been? And if so how do you cope?
3. Are there elephants? and of so is elephant dung an issue at night?
4. Is there any food apart from curry? and as someone that's not really into curry will I starve?
Answers after the jump.... (and you can add yours in the comments)

The Laird/Chopes Ting...

The wanderin' minstrel that is Mickey Smith has been in Taheets where him, Ferg and Lowey had a pop at Chopes (as you'll have seen from the cover of Carve below) he's just whacked a riveting account of their experience on his blog that makes for good reading. Here's a quote for ya-
"Then it all went a bit tits up with the hype of the first mega swell there in a coupla years, and the subsequent arrival of big wig film crews, hookers and photographers everywhere, all trying to get a piece of Chopes and a godlike Laird Hamilton. The mega swell was a non event, but as there were some perfect waves Laird merrily obliged the ogling masses with some pretty dangerous displays of blatant disregard for anyone else - by surfing all day on his SUP, taking every decent set on a very slow swell along with his buddies, not caring how frickin lethal those boards are in 1ft waves - let alone 6-8ft waves at Chopes, and especially when there's 30 other people trying to ride them - most of whom are spending their own hard earned money camping in the valley hoping to get a once in a lifetime chance at riding a setwave out there".

The Fix...

It’s one of those nondescript community buildings, a once proud edifice now run at minimal cost by the council, decorated in cheerless shades of grey and beige, a feint whiff of floor cleaner mixed with cheap coffee gives it that spooky, public building smell, overly jolly day-glo posters for the WI add the only dash of colour. Upstairs in a random room a group is meeting. The hastily handwritten sign on the door has the simple inscription: G.A. 7.00p.m. Free Coffee.

SOTW- Reubs Alley...

Carve's Surf Rap Battle?

The new Carve is out featuring Lowey@Chopes on page 1, it's another Mickatron shot from the three legged media factory that is Mick, Ferg and Tom. Unfortunately Mr Lowe popped his shoulder again in a tangle with Laird's SUP/boat/supertanker. Which sucks balls. Two shoulder pops means surgery according to my sports massage therapist friend and repeated dislocations will be a big concern. We wish him the best of luck and with Stef training his ass we're sure he'll be fighting fit in no time.
In other news theres a competition inside to win tickets to the Relentless (not Rip Curl anymore) Boardmasters- all you need to do is write a rap. We suggest modelling your rap on the Barnes rap from World In Motion... Post yours in the comments... The original is after the jump-

The Biggest Wave Ever?

For as long as I can remember 'Lituya Bay' has been lodged in my deep subconscious. I don't know where I picked it up, probably as a kid whilst reading the Readers Digest Bumper Book of Essential Knowledge on a bored, rainy day...

Lituya Bay, somewhere in deepest Alaska, the scene of the world’s biggest recorded wave. As a junior surfer this annoyed me. You see it wasn't a proper wave, not a mighty ocean swell from an explosively cyclogenic 'perfect' storm, not even a tsunami, the ungodly offspring produced by tectonic plates coupling. It was a con, a hoax, a one in a million shot, an aberration of nature. Originally it was also misunderstood. American geologists first noticed something strange at Lituya during the early fifties whilst surveying for oil. Normally the primordial forest reaches right down to the shoreline but in the bay they found an unusual demarcation. At about one hundred and fifty metres above sea level the mature growth ceased and below it much younger trees sprouted.

Jordy's All Time Rodeo Flip...

Best air ever?

GUL Night Surf...

Only got a tiny bit of battery on the 'pute and have to get a wriggle on so will update more later... It was a great event, plenty of decent surf and some real progressive surfing. Check a few sequences after the jump...

Thought For The Day...

Oli's Nearly Bonkers Air...

Bit of a freesurf froth before the GUL UK Pro Tour event kicked off a few minutes ago, Oli, Matty, Gadge, Russ Mullins, Reubs P, Egor and more loving the head high walls @North Fistral. Mainly hacks but Oli felt a bit experimental- check out this sequence- I don't even know what you'd call it. If the wave had a bit more of a whitewater cushion to land on I reckon he'd of made it as well... The events on all day til velly late this evening, the waves are cooking (as in it's not actually 1-foot windblown NW slop for a comp for a change) so it should be a good one. On yesterdays form I reckon Skindog is heading for the final; he was killing it on his little Bufo fish.

MVP You Decide... Joss Ash

Joss Ash surfs smoother than a smooth thing on National Smooth Day in the year of the Smoothy. Check his entry to the MVP comp here...

UK Pro Tour Stuff...

The Gul Night Surf Event takes place this weekend with check in at Fistral from 1.00pm for Open, Longboard and Women. The juniors will be in on Sunday from 8.00am. The forecast isn't looking too shabby. In other tour news Rip Curl have just announced a mini womens series tied in with their girls surfing days. First up 28th of June at Bournemouth at the new reef (fingers crossed it finished!) with Steph Gilmore in attendance. 26th of July @ Croyde and 28/29th @ Porthmeor in St Ives. The winner of the three events will come away with a £1000 prize and 2* event points for the UK tour... which is pretty cool.

New iPhone 3GS...

  The new iPhone 3GS and version 3.0 software for current iPhones was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference yesterday. Geek boy here followed the live feed on Mac Rumours with much joy. The new software for current users gives us turn by turn GPS, cut, copy & paste and MMS messaging plus a brace of cool new features including tethering which is a real bonus for photogs...

20 Questions- Alan Stokes...

Don't you find it a bit weird that your main sponsors name- ANIMAL is an anagram of I'M ALAN? And is it not about time they did some signature t-shirts emblazoned with those very words?
I tried to get them to do that but for some reason they said only people called Alan would buy them plus one of those Alans would get one for free, I couldn't argue with that so I ordered some more free clothes.

Gwen Vs The Brain Drain...

Some call it luck, others call it fate; if you have eastern leanings then you might describe it as Karma. Whatever you call it, it all comes down to probability- the mathematical chance that really good things or terribly bad things are going to happen. Most people live a vanilla life- they go from cradle to the grave bothering no one, achieving nothing much, it’s all just a bit beige, the universe doesn’t bother them much. Other people achieve: they may achieve greatness, they may perpetrate great evil or they may spend the whole lives helping other people. It doesn’t seem to matter which way you make a difference in life, probability doesn’t care, good things happen to bad people and vice versa…

Jamie O'Brien @ Pipeline...

I wish I had Pipeline and Backdoor at the bottom of my garden like Jamie O'Brien does. As it is I have a cow field... which is nice and all but it's not quite as good.

Batty's Helmet...

Jerry-rigged, fogged-up, Go-Pro gold!

Vaults From The Vaults...

Not shot anything since Scotland and have been rifling through the archive to help Mr B out on his revised new version of 21 Days Later where I came across this sequence of Mr Stokes. Good times, three weeks in the Mentawais with an ace crew of riders...

What's Grinding My Gears... Indo Special.

The Horn
In Indo the MOT consists of one test. It takes less than 10-seconds for the whole thing to be conducted. You drive your wagon into the test-bay, the inspector reaches in, honks your horn once, just a quick beep, then gives it a long, aggressive 5-second blast. As long as it makes a noise and doesn’t sound like you are running over a dogs chew toy then you pass. This is the only mandatory requirement for a vehicle in Indo. It can be a rusty death trap with no floor that is partially on fire but that’s no matter. Your horn works you’re good to go. Equally being a paid taxi/bemo driver it seems the only thing you need to know is where the horn is (that and how to do the steering wheel mime and say ‘transport?’ to every white honky tourist). All driving is based around it. This is why -with the exception of Portugal- Indo is the most terrifying place in the world to be in a vehicle. But it is arguably safer to get driven than try and drive; that is just crazy talk.