Aquaboy rides out
Feb. 13th, 2007 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andygatesToday's theme is water:
Swim is coming on a bit. 500m set in 11:54, which was nice and on-target for my 35:00 1500 lake goal (also warm-up, 200, 400 sets). Still having to really concentrate on everything, but there you go. The new pool is massively more suitable than my local one: cooler, with three paced lanes so I can trundle away in the Mediums without having to play Space Invaders through a wall of marching grannies. At last, a use for flexitime that isn't just legalising tardiness.
A convergence of nudges has me Jonesing for more surf.ravenbait sent me a nifty pic of the surf firing up the East Coast, and I traded the Tales Of The Old Horsemen (a "reminiscences of toothless old gimmers" genre piece) which I mistakenly got for Dad [1] for a UK surf break gazetteer. Add to that a start on the Zombie Board Project and, well, meep.
The Zombie Board is a karmic nugget of niceness: a freebie from a hitcher I used to give occasional lifts into town. It had been lurking in the back of his workshop, unsurfable with a huge ding in the back. But it's a vintage three-fin Watercooled shortie, and despite the yellowed glass and the fist-sized divot missing from the belly, and the deck so battered it looks like it's been ball-peened, and the thrice-repaired nose and twice-repaired tail and wholesale delamination - despite all that, it has character, so I'm going to restore it. Starting with getting a decade of wax off, stickers embedded in its strata, and getting the damn thing clean; then it gets plugged and glassed, the old repairs get tidied up, I investigate injecting epoxy under the glass to re-bond the deck, and it ends up with a halftone comix zombie babe paint job. Just because.
Back at New Year, there was some muttering about some of us n00bs taking a day at a surf school. Who's interested, and can anyone recommend a decent one?
[1] Dad's too far gone now to read, which, to be honest, is the first time that neurological degeneration has frightened me in a long time. Walking, shakes, moods, continence - no worries. Not being able to read? That's terrifying. But I'm not going to dwell, as I'm sure to find a much swifter or more stupid death.
Swim is coming on a bit. 500m set in 11:54, which was nice and on-target for my 35:00 1500 lake goal (also warm-up, 200, 400 sets). Still having to really concentrate on everything, but there you go. The new pool is massively more suitable than my local one: cooler, with three paced lanes so I can trundle away in the Mediums without having to play Space Invaders through a wall of marching grannies. At last, a use for flexitime that isn't just legalising tardiness.
A convergence of nudges has me Jonesing for more surf.
ravenbait sent me a nifty pic of the surf firing up the East Coast, and I traded the Tales Of The Old Horsemen (a "reminiscences of toothless old gimmers" genre piece) which I mistakenly got for Dad [1] for a UK surf break gazetteer. Add to that a start on the Zombie Board Project and, well, meep. The Zombie Board is a karmic nugget of niceness: a freebie from a hitcher I used to give occasional lifts into town. It had been lurking in the back of his workshop, unsurfable with a huge ding in the back. But it's a vintage three-fin Watercooled shortie, and despite the yellowed glass and the fist-sized divot missing from the belly, and the deck so battered it looks like it's been ball-peened, and the thrice-repaired nose and twice-repaired tail and wholesale delamination - despite all that, it has character, so I'm going to restore it. Starting with getting a decade of wax off, stickers embedded in its strata, and getting the damn thing clean; then it gets plugged and glassed, the old repairs get tidied up, I investigate injecting epoxy under the glass to re-bond the deck, and it ends up with a halftone comix zombie babe paint job. Just because.
Back at New Year, there was some muttering about some of us n00bs taking a day at a surf school. Who's interested, and can anyone recommend a decent one?
[1] Dad's too far gone now to read, which, to be honest, is the first time that neurological degeneration has frightened me in a long time. Walking, shakes, moods, continence - no worries. Not being able to read? That's terrifying. But I'm not going to dwell, as I'm sure to find a much swifter or more stupid death.
