Began the year with a trip out to the Seymour Center to play with the touch tanks.

Replaced the patio uplights that had been installed in the new patio in 2012. The constant moisture and exposure had dulled the lights and in some cases they were shorted out. So we bought replacements and I rewired them back up. Here's a before, during and after look.

I spent a lot of time in the Fall months rewatching some old videos on YouTube about slalom improvements. Given the much longer runs at Crows Landing, I was thinking that this was an area I might be able to see some time improvements. That may not have panned out, but I think I got better at understanding car positioning for back siding; understanding the entry/exit points relative to the next course obstacle and getting back to full speed in the last two cones in a slalom.

Here are a couple of videos from last week after the huge swell passed through. As usual, the swell moved the sandbars around so that there were multiple sections to take advantage of.

I'm experimenting here with the Ultrawide lens for my GoPro 13. We're shooting at 1:1 to see how it works. I'm noticing more water spots than on the default lens but I may have gummed it up with hand oils or surf wax. I cleaned it after the first day.

Today we're going to work on thirds. No, not musically, long-istically; e.g., rear and mid sections of a 9' longboard. Here you can see where I removed the wax so I could do a quick check of foot positioning. What we're hoping for is to successfully move back to get better pivoting for carving turns and move forward to get a better trim position. The latter should produce better speed to setup for better turns.

January has been nice so far. We had some rain after the big December storms and I’ve been surfing a few times per week. I’ve also been working on night lapse star trails and trying to capture meteor showers when the sky is clear with my GoPro.

Here's a poor resolution video from early Dec 2024 at Private's. Starting to move through turns a bit better. I'm the foreground wave for a few seconds.

Here are a collection of shots of a board that belonged to Norman Crowell. Norm was married to my mother-in-law for many years. This board hung in the garage rafters of the home we moved into in 1999. After he passed away, we gave the board back to his daughter Leslie. I think it probably still lives in her home on the Westside of Santa Cruz.

Norm was part of the first generation of surfers in Santa Cruz. He made this board based on instructions found in Popular Mechanics in 1936.

As I started thinking about surfing in summer 2023, I pulled out two old boards to check their conditions. They'd been stored under the deck since we moved from the Westside up to Felton. The shorter green board is 7'11" x 22" x3" and was shaped for me by my old friend Mark Goin in 1991. I'm betting I got this to do more surfing at Getchell's with my old boss at UCSC Tim Price.

In late 2023, I sent the green board into Brian Ebert at https://besanding.com to have the major dings fixed. Here are a before and after.

Thoughts from my notes over the 2024 season.

I'm still not smooth enough with some turns. Need to watch for multiple input changes during sweeping turns. Good place to try a cue word like smooth (breathe, eyes up, increase gas, smooth turn input).

I've plateaued a lot and need to force myself to get some help from other drivers. 

Overdriving; going too hard pushes me off the line and a few times into a spin out.

AM sessions are almost always faster than PM sessions. So, what we need to dig into is how to optimize for the entire day.

As my head fills with surf training from various sources, I went back in the time machine to find some old classics. The shot above is recent as of Nov 2024 (new picture, old guy).