Winter surfing defines us as a surfing nation. Everything is cranked up a notch; the waves have more power and that combined with the extra rubber of a winter wettie make the paddle-outs long and hard – but the rewards are, of course worth it in an even more obviously clichéd way than this opening paragraph. The truth is that winter surfing is a completely different ball game and to thrive and enjoy these rewards you have to be on it and fit, if summer surfing is a walk in the park then winter surfing is camping on Neptune’s moon, Triton.

Like Triton, which incidentally is the only large moon in the solar system to travel in a retrograde (backwards) direction around its primary, winter surf can be dark and lonely with endless onshores and that just about sums January up.  (Or “shit” in surfer speak). However the weather changed and for three days at the start of  February while the rest of the country played in the snow, we in the south-west had the first clean swell of the year. Chilling easterly offshores howling from the steps of Russia across a frigid beach covered with a very bright coating of methane frost, hacked into the batteries life and froze my bits off.

A hardy crew of locals helped themselves to a generous portion, took a few pastings and generally relished the joy of being a Brit in the bleak mid winter. Water temp 8ºC, air temp 2ºC, stand out surfer :- the super fit Nick Thorn (who swims to Lundy for fun, these points are probably connected).

Click on the pix to have a better look.

Canon 1D mk2 c/w 600mm f4 IS & Canon 5D c/w 70-200mm f2.8 IS

Disclaimer. Triton has a tenuous atmosphere of nitrogen and methane, it is inadvisable to go there without proper and adequate equipment (and support from NASA probably) and this glob in no way endorses such reckless behaviour.

More pix in the next edition of Carve Magazine.

Happy New Year blogsters! Well January is almost out and last year has finally been put to bed with the ceremonial paying of tax bills and the christmas credit card. I’ve been laying low (which is normally the way I like to lay) recharging the batteries after what was a hectic and draining end to the year what with all the emotional turmoil of the ‘holidays‘ to add to the turmoil of working like a dog for most of the autumn. The main thing keeping my interest through January (along with winter walks and endless staring at a flat/ onshore/ generally shite, ocean) has been my boyhood passion of association football.

There’s been some great games and as always plenty of controversies and drama to keep the conversation and debate going on in the pub. What a great sport footie is, full of passion and skill, played at the top level by men and women at the peak of fitness and with tactical nous.  The same qualities apply to all good sports, rugby, cricket, basketball and even contest surfing to name but a few. This being Olympic year, sport is going to be a major topic of media interest and inevitably we all be saturated with all the bollocks that goes with hosting the ‘festival of sport’  that is the Olympics. I pity the poor Londoners who have to put up with all the shite, the delays and disruption that the security and traffic will inevitably lead to. Seriously though, what is the Olympics all about? Surely it’s just a glorified school sports day! Running and jumping is not a sport – it is training for a sport, and it’s boring too, (almost as bad as tennis or bat bat as I like to call it).

Oh, well, it is easily understood and understood by the easily pleased, so who am I to have an opinion that is different from the herd. Talking about photography, I have taken two photos this January and they probably sum up the month quite well. See y’all next month, which has been designated for the leaping and the hopelessly romantic.

Click on the photos to enlarge.

Canon 5D c/w 70-200mm f2.8 IS

Amazingly the blog has received over 11,000 visits since the first post on January 20th 2011 and because of the way wordpress correlates the statistics I can see which pieces and photos receive the most hits, assuming that there is a comparison between hits and likes I can now reveal your favourites dear reader, instead of mine. (The blogs are in the archives if you want to trawl back through and remind yourself of the year that was).

In sixth place was the previous blog to this one; Six of the Best.

In fifth was a blog from the spring about Lynmouth; Golden Wanderings.

Fourth place was all the Croyde groms hitting; Croyde Session.

Thrid most popular was an Ilfracombe event; lfracombe Pilot Gig Regatta.

Second was the UK Pro Surf Tour event report; Super Lynmouth Session.

And the most popular, not surprisingly, was the daily updates form the UK Pro Surf Tour as it hit 3 events in England, Scotland and Wales; The Three Degrees Tour.

The statistics also show that these were your six most favouritest photos; three obscure North Devon spots, that picture of Alex Baker and a couple from Scotland’s north shore:

Thanks for looking, have a safe and peaceful break and see you all again in the new year for more photos, ramblings and ineptitude.

Quite a lot of landscapes or more accurately ‘seacapes’ it seems, which may not be a bad thing – it may be a good excuse to justify buying a nice prime lens in the new year! Anyway out of the dozen here’s Six of the Best: my favourite photos wot I’ve taken this year, in reverse order (with a nauseatingly clichéd extended pause)……

Chris Noble at Thurso East

Alex Baker at Croyde

Autumn in Croyde

Ed Knight at Croyde

Croyde in Black & White

Dark Skies over the Moor

Click on any pic to view full size.

Prints, mounted, framed or canvas available (example 24″ x 16″ Canvas £55  incP&P)

Email for details <estpix@aol.com>

Canon 5D, 1D mk2, 600mm f4 IS, 70-200mm f2.8 IS, 24-70mm f2.8

Here’s another twist, pulled back action seascapes in portrait format; they are perfect for fitting onto the COVER or as stand alone single page in a picture frame. Inspired by this cover shot of Stuey busting one in front of Morte stone (600mm, taken last autumn and used on the front of the ‘Essential Contentment of Futile Wanderings’ book) and my favourite shot of Arugam Bay (135mm) – I have been practising at Croyde with the brief of having some 1. hot surfing action in a 2. nice line-up shot with some interesting features of Baggy point as the 3. back drop. Some work, some just miss it and some are plain crap but all are still worth the inclusion to show the process. Let me know which ones you like.

Click on the pic to make it bigger.

Canon 1D mk2 /600mm f4 IS

All pictures on this blog are available as prints, mounted prints and canvas prints (all signed and dated)

examples; A4 print £12 inc post, A3 print £24 inc post, Canvas 24″x 16″ £55 inc post

Post to UK only, email <estpix@aol.com> for details.

Congratulations to Russell Winter who won three titles yesterday in one epic day of surfing at a thumping Fistral Beach, which was a strength-sapping and grinding 4 – 8 feet and classic conditions for the season deciding final event on the UK Pro Surf Tour. Russ won the final Relentless Energy Drink Super Series contest to clinch the UKProTour title for the second time by beating the main contender, Gordon Fontaine, and united the championship title with the 3 event Super Series title by besting Micah Lester by three clear final places.

Russ was a teenage sensation (he won the British Cadet, U-16,title at the tender age of 12!) and by the time the very first issue of Carve was smacking down on the pavement outside of British newsagents in 1994 he was helping himself – still only 18 – to Grishka Roberts’ European Professional crown. The king of Europe then set about the established Pacific nation’s surfers in true bulldog style, from a launch pad of 186^th on the WQS he qualified for the CT three years later with the help of a mainly British group of sponsors.

Those three pioneering years on the grueling QS tour defined the man. It was a steep learning curve but the boy from Newquay toughed it out through thick and thin and clinched his CT place with a characteristic committed performances but his first year on the Dream tour was hampered by a knee injury suffered at Margaret River. The following year he re-qualified with single minded vehemence sealing his place with a massive second place finish in a six star event in Rio against all Brazilian opposition on their home turf.  Frustratingly he was sidelined again with a serious illness after being wounded at Teahupoo but earned the ASP injury wildcard for the following season. The year was 2001 and was probably the pinnacle of Russ’s competitive climb to the top; he was looking every bit the top 16 surfer he aspired to be, with memorable wins over Occy at J-Bay and Taylor Knox in big Sunset. Unfortunately it was also the year that Al Queda decided to attack the twin towers and Russell’s home events, the European leg of the Dream tour, were cancelled.

Russell’s gung-ho spirit surfing has seen him dogged by injuries in the later part of his career on the CT but when things come together he still rates with the best in the world, his victory at the six star Highland Open in 2006 proved that. He is a natural competitor and still competes on the WQS  ‘home’ events but he now has other priorities being a family man and embarking on a coaching career. For the past two years he has competed on the #UKProSurf Tour and has shown the grommets the step up needed to compete on the world stage. Whenever he competes he draws a crowd and you can often see them wince when he smashes his blazing top turn, “pound for pound he is the most powerful surfer in three foot” as Slater once said, and that is certainly still true today for British surfers as it once was for world tour surfers – and his recent blistering display at Tynemouth proved that.

As for comparisons with Slater, who is still on top of his game well into his thirty’s, well Russ certainly is by far the most difficult surfer to beat in the UK, you really do have to have a good day to get anywhere near him, and his tactical nous and confidence are second to none, (which is very slateresque). Russell has been on top of his game for twenty years and shows no sign of letting up, the man is a living legend and quite simply THE best UK surfer ever.

© Ester Spears

Pictures from the Relentless SS Fistral event taken on Canon 5D w/ 70-200mm f2.8 IS

Click on the image to make it bigger

All words and photos copyright protected

The new issue of Carve is out and I have been lucky enough to have a few shots published in the issue (thanks uncle Roge). Amazingly they are all from the same session, a nice three foot day at Croyde in September, which is quite unusual (for me). There are a myriad of reasons why a shot gets published and it is often difficult to explain to surfers and amateur fotohogs why their ‘shot of a lifetime’ does or doesn’t make it.  For surf mags the first prerequisite is the shot must be big enough to publish and be correctly exposed, (ie shots from your phone are no good for a dps – double page spread). Shots must be well lit and framed as well as containing awesome surf and/or mind-blowing action. However it doesn’t stop there, very few stand alone shots are used in the mags, because most of them are telling a story as part of a feature, a report or a travelogue, so they need to illustrate some key points in the text (the winner of a comp getting the wave of the day, or the guy or gurl on wave of the day, for example).

Magazines are expensive to staff and publish, the cover price barely covers the cost of distribution and profit for the newsagent, so most mags rely on advertising to survive and therefore have to form a partnership with the regular heavy investors. It might not be pretty but it is a fact of life. In normal speak that means that the advertisers get coverage of their team riders in editorial. Lastly magazines aren’t thrown together, they are a balanced entity and for a mag to ‘look’ right it has to have a mixture of lefts and rights, airs and carves, line ups and lifestyle – to be a complete.  Plus most pages  have the nose of the board pointing towards the crease in the centre of the mag, it just looks right. Lastly most of the shots published in UK magazine are taken by a handful of jobbing pro surf fotohogs, they have the rep and are struggling to earn dollar from one of the most difficult careers to pursue in this country of the most difficult light. If your shot is up against one of theirs then they will get the page everytime and rightly so. Anyway, there are more factors conspiring against you getting your shot in the mag than just a getting a pic of you screaming through a bullshit barrel. Have a look at the ‘best’ shots from the September session at Croyde and then checkout Carve to see which ones made it, then try to figure out why.

Click on the pic to make it bigger

Canon 1D mk2 c/w 600mm F4 IS

All photos taken on November 3rd 2011

Canon 5D w/ Canon L 70-200mm f2.8 IS

Click on any image to make it bigger

Reubyn Ash smashed his way to victory in the inaugural Relentless Lynmouth Super Series today with a mixture of old school grunt and new school cool. He combo’d Russell who sat on a 9.17 and a 8.60 in the final at Blacklands, which was perfect 3-4 foot, running and glassy, with a double alley-oop 9.77 and a perfect 10 for three monstrous hacks and a series of hyperspace floaters. All the finalists put on a display of groundbreaking and leg aching surfing at the break known for it’s long lefts and many moods by going round, up-over and through sections previously untouched by fibreglass and man.

Assisted by local Craig ‘Barny’ Berry the call was made 24 hours earlier to take atvantage of a strong swell and light and favourable winds but it meant an early start to get the most out of the mid morning high tide peak at ‘car parks’. Twenty eight of Britannia’s finest plus four local wild cards tucked into the feast and first upset was Woolly boy Stuey Campbell suffering from a British Champion hangover, however wildcards Charlie Charlesworth and Jordan Reed both showed the worth of local knowledge by getting into the money round. The quarters where held in almost perfect high tide conditions and Johnny Fryer, Oli Adams, Jayce Robinson and Sam Lamiroy latched onto the set waves to post some big scores with a fully committed and gung ho approach.

The semis suffered a bit from the dropping tide but long rides were still available on the infrequent sets with wave selection being the key factor for victors and finalists, Russell, Reubyn, Jayce Robinson and Toby Donachie. The contest was put on hold to wait for the pushing tide late in the afternoon and moved to the legendary long left at Blacklands. With the dark closing in all the finalist were jubilant to have been a part of  an epic final

Cant wait to see the photos from event fothog Rob Tibbles who must have some gold from that final.

Click on the pix to make them bigger.

Canon 1D mk2 w/ 600mm L f4 plus 5d w/ 70-200mm f2.8 L IS

I must have done the 2 hour trip to Newquay from North Devon along the A39 hundreds of times over the past 20 years. I’m always in a hurry and concentrating on overtaking a tractor, caravan or milk tanker but I have also seen some beautiful landscapes, sunrises and sights (especially in the misty season od early spring). Finally I have decided to take some pix of my favourite views, a five minute stop will make no difference either way. First shot is the abandoned Drapers at Kilkhampton.

Canon 5D c/w 70-200mm f2.8 IS L