While I was down staying in a hotel in an industrial shit hole of a town, Spreitenbach, which is near the grand city of Zürich, Switzerland I was contacted by Lars Greiwe and Bertrand Trichet to let me know they’d be taking care of business in Basel, about 45 minutes from where I was staying. I decided to get out of the hotel and join them for an evening in Basel and a small adventure across the border to Germany.
Nathan Fletcher surfing a quad (four) fin Stretch surfboard. With three broken boards within 1 week, you know these were some heavy tubes. While others were doing tow-ins and jet ski assists, Nathan stroked in the old fashioned way, with his arms. He thinks the whole jet ski thing is a bit too “jock”.
Any given Sunday in Cologne, our crew attempts to motivate to go skateboarding. Either to the Factory/OMSA Bowl in Düsseldorf, or to the outside concrete bowl in Siegburg, Germany. We all talk about how we aren’t going to drink much the night before so we can be fit to skate the next day. That never works out. “Just a couple beers” turns into “too many beers”, and before we know it, we’re stumbling home at 4 in the morning, with plans for meeting at 1pm the next “morning” to go skate.
Powells Point, up in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, is the latest in small town America to get a new concrete Skate park!
Born in Bosnia and later moving to Croatia, Sergej is currently living in Germany and continues to work on various film & art projects in the Balkans.
FDR local Adam Benson skates dirty & raw. Relocating from his home state of Delaware to California, where younger brother Colin Benson has already been lurking out in Santa Cruz for the last few years, the Benson Brothers are always up for raising havoc wherever they roam. Whether it’s the local watering whole, skatepark, or most recent DIY project, they don’t give up without a fight.
Josh Mattson testing out the Roosevelt Park in San Jose.
The Roosevelt Park in San Jose is similar to the Santa Cruz skatepark. Not surprisingly, both are designed by everyone’s favorite skatepark designer, Zack Wormhoudt, who arguably has increasingly improved his skills by his 100th design attempt.
Digging around on my hard drive this afternoon I stumbled upon some unused footage of Matt Neely (RIP 1999) and considering this is the 10th anniversary of his untimely death, I figured I’d post the clip as a tribute to Mr. Neely, one of the best underground pool rippers of all time.
The Cachagua Land project is a DIY “skate park” that Zarosh has been working on for the last few years. People come out to the land, deep in the Carmel Valley in central California to bring concrete, help dig, build and skate the ever changing concrete contraption. The project is a work-in-progress as cinder blocks, rebar, parking blocks, man holes, and hundreds of bags of concrete are collected piece by piece and bag by bag.
Santa Cruz Harbor is a wave that rarely breaks, but when it does it’s the most hollow wave in all of Santa Cruz.
German ex-pat Patrick Trefz has been living in Santa Cruz for the better part of the last 2 decades. He’s a staff photographer for Surfer Magazine even though lately it seems he prefers to shoot films about the actual characters that shape the surfing community.
So it was time to migrate south for the winter, or at least for a … Keep reading