Strange Days

It's the middle of the day in the middle of summer and it's so dark I have all the lights on so I can see the keyboard. The rain has been non-stop for ever. It seems. A part of my old tin roof is leaking. Intermittently. But I am dry. This is Australia. Bushfires and floods in the same week are standard.

The poor weather has motivated me to once again arm wrestle the digital demons that rule my little laptop. Most of the time I don't understand the digital realm. It has its own logic and pecking order. A truce has been settled and the 11001101 army allow me to log into my own blog. Well I didn't buy my blog but I have visited it for awhile and I do feed it type and pixels. So it's mine. Like Granite Bay is mine because I have visited it for 40+ years.

Ownership is an odd concept around here - especially on Australia Day, which we just had. One of my friends once said "we don't own the land, the land owns us". Her family has been here for thousands of years. The rest of us came here on boats some time in the last 200 years or maybe even last week.

When I whinge about crowds on all manner of crafts, my friend will gently remind me that Australia ain't the same as it was 250 years ago and the crowded surf point is a metaphor for the country. We all arrived here on all manner of crafts. Hoping for a better life. There's ample opportunity for aggro selfishness or for sharing, for being well mannered or being rude. 

Happy belated birthday to Australia. Here's to a better life for all of us - traditional owners, long term locals, fly-in-fly-out miners, wage slaves in the city, battlers in the bush, aliens in UFO's, nature spirits, new migrants and refugees on leaky boats.

(materials used in today's blog were sourced from Germany (cameras), Japan (cameras, film, scanner), USA (film), Great Britain (film), Australia (images, food, electricity, water), China (clothing, analogue camera), Brazil (thongs), Switzerland (watch), New Guinea (coffee) and the whole earth (air))

Empty Vertical

One day my friend Andrew and I went searching everywhere for waves. Eventually we were rewarded. The strange thing was expending all those hyrdrocabons trying to "get away from it all". The banner image is one that Andrew snapped while we were chewing through the fuel and the rubber and the horsepower, so that we could spend a few idle hours in the brine forgetting that we remain intrinsically linked to the petro-chemical industrial complex. Thanks Andrew. The search is always more enjoyable with a mate.

More Mystery of Camping

Totally Random

Thought I would throw a quick random JPEG. Granite Bay x NikonosV. I hope to get 5 rolls back tomorrow. Ant..tici....pation......

Calling it

This is the type of surf we usually get in summer when we get crazy rain and overcast days. But some are calling it the flattest they have ever seen it.
Always good for shooting monochrome.

Fin vs Rock

In the epic battles between Fin and Rock this is why Rock remains unfazed while Fin is sometimes left broken and shattered.

Granite Grinder

Monday Morning Gunk

"Early morning rise

Got my guts in my eyes

Got my soul on fire

All right"

from Radio Birdman Monday Morning Gunk

Sunny 16

I am excited and humbled to be reacquainting myself with Jacques Cousteau's best ever surfing invention - the underwater 35mm camera. OK I'm not talking his 1963 original "Calypso-phot" but the next model the Nikonos II - manual hyperfocal distance focusing, manual wind on, manual exposure released in 1968. Manual exposure???? Could be interesting given that I have been spoilt by the benefit of hand held lightmeters, flashmeters or meters built into the camera.

Nikonos V Bay of Granite Spring 1984?

After 19 cameras, I have travelled a meandering route that takes me back to learnings buried under a couple of decades worth of hype and sound bites. Back to Photo 101 class and the wonderful, left brain mathematicality of the Sunny 16 rule - on a sunny day F16 and 1/ISO or in my case and taking no chances with ISO400 film (a four pack and dirt cheap) exposure should be F16 and 1/400th sec.

Big Thanks to my brine brother and legend longboarder Tony Stewart for loaning me this camera. I'm truly stoked and humbled.

Hughie Don't Surf II

Photo: Gered Mankowitz

Page 33 of this month's Rolling Stone magazine features an article about surfing "back in the day" as viewed by Andrew Crockett's tome Switchfoot II. Page 333 of that book features a bunch of my words and pictures including a sepia version of this shot of a mate at Granite Bay. I have left the complete scan in, so you can see it was the last exposure on a roll of Kodak 35mm transparency film. Lucky.

"Hughie don’t surf anymore. 

Actually, he never surfed on a board 

like that guy The Duke. 

Instead, he preferred to immerse himself in the wave 

and just relied on his hands and feet. 

He was old skool before the term existed."

from Hughie Don't Surf 2009 by Neil Griffith

4 to 6 (foot)

42SIX Jeep seen in the Noosa Lions Park car park adjacent to what is now a mini Surf City where folks like Ash Grunwald and Band of Frequencies will be pulsing out some mesmerizing tunes during the annual telling of tall tales known as the Noosa International Festival of Surf. 

Four to six foot is about all I need these days. Just throw in long wall and a barrel section and sunshine and clear water and my mates but no crowds or underwater beasties and that's about it. The simple life. Kinda.

Saddle Up My Pony II

This pony got us across the 300 miles of dirt that was the Nullabor Highway at the bottom of Oz - 3 speed manual column shift, 161 cubic inches spread across 6 cylinders. No power steering. Radio was optional extra. All hail the 1971 Holden Belmont. When bumpers were made of metal and seat belts were a novelty.

Weather forecast for the next few days says there's a mighty blow coming across the waters to Brinetopia. Or as the meteorologists say "a large slow moving high pressure system in the great Australian Bight will extend a strengthening ridge over much of the east coast, maintaining a strong south easterly flow over coastal waters into early next week" 
Wind + Brine = Waves. And I'm on holidays! Better saddle up my pony.

Summertime = Party Time

Kinda how I feel today - happy and shabby.

The dawn patrol has never been a problem for me as I have always been an early riser. When I was a kid, one of my chores was to meet the baker out in the street with 46 cents for the two loaves of white bread that would feed our family of eight for a day. But today is proving tough. I only got to sleep a few hours ago and some guy up the road sounds like he’s a logger in the old growth Kin Kin scrubs. Obviously another morning person.

Dawn patrol. Big Granite. 1980's

First coffee of the day. I need to post something about the great party we went to last night for my old buddy Gaz. Last century, we skated, sailed, camped, surfed and partied hard together. He was my co-pilot to the original Tannelorn Music Festival, though wasn’t much use keeping me awake on the New England highway on the way home. A take away coffee scalded me as I nodded off at the wheel of the Holden Gemini in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. At least that kept me awake down the steep descent after Cunningham’s Gap.

Apart from sleep deprivation, I have this almighty pain in the finger normally used for giving negative non-verbal advice. Maybe it’s arthritis. As Captain Jimmy said last night at Gaz’s party, “In my mind, I’m still 18, but my body tells me that I’m 60”. He’s still sailing hard after seven Sydney to Hobart’s and quite a few Melbourne to Osaka’s.

Don’t know if Jimmy ever surfed, but Capain Steve, Gaz’s brother used to before their parents built the Swiss Chalet overlooking Point Perry. He got roused on by the well built bouncer last night for drinking his rum and coke outside of the designated drinking area. Steve sails his boat Graffitti like a 45’ surfboard so land boundaries become difficult to conceptualise.

The noisey logger up the road has been joined by a swarm of cicadas reminding me that summertime = party time. Another coffee should do it.