Simmons still haunts this reef in La Jolla...
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
Sourcing the Rio Tijuana
Yesterday, March 16th 2008, was one of those pristine late winter days...
a cold low had passed overnight with pounding hail and thunder.
The Field Marshall and I decided to trace the northern drainage of the
Rio Tijuana from the mountains east of San Diego, across the border
at Tecate, and down into the Blade Runneresque metropolis of Tijuana.
We made really good time, as the roads follow the drainage, and water
seeks the fastest way downhill. Here are some images from the trek.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Reno and the Paipo quest
Here we have a pic I snapped in September 2003 of Reno Abellira
and Skip Frye at the first "Fish Fry" gathering. Reno was living
with my brother Peter at the time. My brother and I had both
grown up in awe of Reno's style...Peter's surfing style is very
Abelliraesque...So the fact that through serendipitous events
that are far too complex to go into now...the two ended up
as roomates for awhile. Anyway, Reno was the first interview
I did for Hydrodynamica back in 2003. He asked what I wanted
to start with and the first thing i said was "PAIPO." Reno proceeded
to break it down...Val Ching, Wally Froiseth...et al. For the next
five years we spent considerable time and energy documenting
the links between the paipo, the Lis fish, and the Simmons
hydrodynamic planing hull. We interviewed Wally Froiseth and
Valentine Ching...Tom Morey...Tom Henry...Ray Jr Hookano...
Peter Pope... Rabbit Kekai...I want to thank them all for sharing
something very personal and sacred with us. Above the
Skip and Reno pic are a few frame grabs from our paipo quest...
Friday, March 14, 2008
Mickey Munoz drops science on y'all...
Excerpt from Hydrodynamica interview with RK on 3/9/08:
Munoz:
"Shaping and designing has always been a balancing act between creating
speed and controlling it. Long and narrow is not necessarily faster, its just a
way to control speed, somewhat...short and wide is very fast, but very difficult
to control. I remember watching paipo guys at Waimea years ago...the paipo
board was basically a triangular piece of plywood with the corners turned
down in the tail which gave you a fin like appendage...they had a big wide
planing area...the guys just hung on prone, low center of gravity.
Buzzy Trent would take off on a 25 foot Waimea bomb, rocketing down the
face on an 11'6" elephant gun, a radical, drawn in gun...and these guys on paipos
would take off behind him and just rocket past him like he was standing still...
....So, you had Simmons on the one hand with this sort of paipo board, if you will,
only extended so he could paddle into waves, but if you were to cut it off three
feet from the tail it'd be a paipo board...and then on the other hand you've got
someone like Matt Kivlin who was this graceful, powerful surfer on a more
drawn out board, more like a gun, like Buzzy's elephant gun...
So as those opposite designs evolved, y'know, the modern thruster, fish,
quads, five fins...all of these combinations are basically just trying
to get that original paipo board under control."
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