What a way to start the week!  The surf is pumping down the road, up the road over the other side and everywhere.  On the weekend a few of the guys trekked over to the other coast.  It was busy but it was firing.

Thanks to the boys at Wavelength (still the best UK mag?) for whizzing this one out.  Those boys must have been up all night!  And, as they say, turn it up to 11, sit back and rock:

Birdsong is accompanying the gunshot crashes of breaking waves this morning, a gentle late-winter sunshiny day dawning pleasntly over us.  Is it only a couple of weeks since snow and frost and ice ruled our days?

Rob Erskine; neighbour, shaper, coach, ripper and enthusiastic snowball assassin.

And can it beonly a few more weeks ago since basking, solo in those Fuerte Beauties?

Big, bowling beauties offshore and no one else in sight.

Loving Dane Reynolds’ blog.  You can get to it from the list alongside.  And check out what Kelly is doing too (ignore the boardshorts ad, although, thanks to Toby D, I do actually have a pair of those swanky budgy smugglers, as witnessed by Pit pilot recently.  Very comfy they are too!):

Yep, Retro is all very nice but the present is pretty good too.  And the future?  That’s as bright as bright can be if the young’uns around here are anything to go by!

Toby D flying into the future.

Hot and sunny and bowling in the '70s

Rainy days and Harlyn waves go together like......

Quivers huh?  Check these little beauties from about 1974 maybe.

Tris Surfboards ruled but Paul Ryder (RIP) was the rebellious upstart, Graham Nile the old establishment.

Whatever you say, modern surfboards are a million billion times better.  But maybe there’s nothing wrong with having a backward glance occasionally.

There’s a lot of retro about, it’s a bit like deja vu again and again.

Big Tony Plant, he of  ’Surftwisted‘ and new editor of’ ‘Pit Pilot‘ called over for a cup of Cha the other morning and nagged for some old snapshots.  So he got me digging around.  I don’t have that many.  Back in the day the cost of a camera verged on the cost of a board.  And then you had all that developing stuff to do too.  But in those early Welsh days Peter Bounds was around and Gary Russell.

Sker Point, maybe 1971?

Don’t remember who took this but, strangely, I do remember the day and the wave.

There was a tight knit bunch of us hanging out back then

Almost forty years ago?  Could be yesterday!

Well done to Ness ‘n Neil and the rest of the crew at the Parish Hall yesterday on raising £1300 for Shelter Box

That’s three more boxes to wing their way to Haiti!

Neil having a nice cup 'o cha (pic nicked from Pete's blog).

And then we all had a nice cup of tea.

Boobys Bay in Spring. Just gorgeous.

Just every now and then you look around and think, ‘yep, it’s all pretty good’.

And it’s just about then that something often happens to stop you dead in your tracks.

I like to think that I’m pretty understanding, can see most things from most points of view, I don’t have strong feelings of hostility towards anyone or their beliefs or thinkings and believe that most people are quite happy just rubbing along taking care of their own with hopefully half an eye on the environment.

So, I’d just like to know how, how in any way of normal thinking, could anyone come up with the idea of digging a bloody great trench across common land, within an ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’, a ‘Site of Special Scientific Interest’, a C.C.S. conservation site (okay, I don’t know that one either) on a heritage coastline that is RSPB interest registered, to pop a cement pipe in that will take all their overflow, rainwater, swimming pool overflow water, sewerage, toxins and general assorted crap…..and then! And then!  Pour it all into a previously pristine Boobs Bay!  Surely that is just super bonkers!  And you just know that this one is coming at you;  they’ll be whingeing and whining that nobody likes them and that the local oiks can’t see opportunity when the application is torn into shreds and mightily binned.

I mean, it’s not like we’re back in the ‘Concrete and Cream Teas’, C4 planning expose days are we?

Ah well, there’s a Facebook campaign already up and running (http://www.facebook.com/n/group.php&gid=257718157389&mid=1be33f6G25d2a1e3G4e52389G6), and there’s a Parish Council meeting 7pm on Thursday.

So, 2010 huh?  How is it for you so far?  Those still here are loving  the weather, those away are loving the (warmer) weather.  We’re all loving the surf.