A group of teens from “the New South Wales far south coast” are going to keep surfing even though they spotted a big white pointer shark in the surf zone, according to a story on ABC News.
“The young surfers came within a metre of the 5m to 6m shark that has been sighted between Merimbula’s bar and Pambula Beach over the past week,” the story said. . . “As the boys said, if it’d wanted to eat them, they couldn’t have done anything about it”, he said. . . “So it was obvious that the shark saw them and didn’t realise it was dinner time, I suppose, which is obviously a great thing.”
Photographer Michael Halsband shoots up all the hot little surfer girls we know and love in the July issue of Vanity Fair with a story titled Tubular Girls. The first line is really about all you need to read to know where this story is headed:
Fifty years after Gidget stirred up waves in the male-dominated surfing world, a new set of young women in their teens and 20s are revolutionizing the sport, from the beaches of Montauk to Australia. The best will be stoked to flaunt their tailslides and aerial maneuvers at this month’s U.S. Open of Surfing, in Huntington Beach, California—the Kentucky Derby of the ocean.
The what? Oh well. The story features Sierra Partridge, Sofia Mulanovich, Leila Hurst, Alana Blanchard, Malia Manuel, Sally Fitzgibbons, Coco Ho, Laura Enever, Sage Erickson, Quincy Davis, Courtney Conlogue, and Hailey Partridge.
Coolhunting.com featured a collection of Jesse White sketches for the new Shaun White For Target Collection. If you’re into fashion’s backside check them out. As for the Target clothes, they maybe cheap, but they’re made in the same kinds of Chinese factories that make all the major label stuff, so really, what is the difference?
Watch live as Transworld Skateboarding hands out their 11th Annual TWS Awards to skateboarding’s finest. The action begins at 6 PM Friday June 12, 2009. Trust it, you’ll get a lot less beer spilled on you by checking it out online.
According to a story on AppleInsider.com, Apple has patented a new technology that will allow snowboarders to track their airtime and pretty much everything else they could want to know riding including:
. . . loft time; a speed of the vehicle; a peak loft time; an average loft time; a total loft time; a dead time; a real activity time; an average speed; . . . successive records of loft information; successive records of speed information; a distance traveled by the vehicle; a height achieved by the vehicle off of the surface; and an indication of a number of a successive record relative to all successive records.
It’s going to be like a dashboard for your snowboard. Guess there will be no more guessing who got the most air. It will be right there on your iPhone and we’ll finally have the charts and the graphs to prove that we suck. How nice will that be?
Sometimes it’s good for all of us to be reminded of how much we all love skater/artist/ human Ed Templeton. ESPN (with help from Micah Abrams) has been kind enough to give us this reminder in both text and video form all on one page. Check it out.
Mt. Baker snowboarder Sean “Donkey” Mansfield and photographer Gunther Frank are both missing and presumed drowned after Frank’s 18 foot sailboat apparently capsized near Washington State’s Bellingham Bay in the early morning hours of Friday June 5, 2009 with six people on board, according to a story on the Frequency The Snowboard Journal website.
At approximately 1:40 am on Friday, June 5, Bellingham Police responded to a call from a resident, reporting a woman at her door, wet and cold, describing a capsizing. While the police were taking statements another survivor came up the street. The Port Angeles Coast Guard station dispatched a rescue helo along with a cutter from the Bellingham CG station at 2 am. As well, Whatcom County Sheriff, Bellingham Fire, Search and Rescue and US Border Patrol assisted in the search. At approximately 4 am another woman, stranded on a tidal cliff, was rescued by the Coast Guard Cutter.
The four others (two who reportedly stayed with the boat and the two women who swam to shore) survived. According to Frequency publisher Jeff Galbraith Donkey, who was sponsored by Volcom, Lib Tech and the Mt. Baker Snwoboard Shop, was “one of the most respected and creative riders to grace the slopes of Mt. Baker in the last 15 years.” Friends have posted a website (http://donkeyandgunther.blogspot.com) with more information. Our thoughts are with the family and friends of Mansfield and Frank.
It’s a bit of the strange interviewing the weird scenario (or vise versa) as snowboard visionary Peter Line is questioned by “Internet sensation” Sarah Morrison . . . but compelling all the same.
Skateistan, the organization that is using skateboarding to help teach peace and personal empowerment to the children of Afghanistan, is now building out a skatepark/classroom facility that will include “rooms for launguage and music classes,” according to a story in The Toronto Star.
The organization in October asked the Canadian government for $5,000 and was given $15,000. The German embassy has invested $140,000 and Denmark has contributed $125,000. Percovich has raised enough to build a 1,750-square-metre indoor skate park, a $200,000 steel-roofed building that will be completed this August. He hopes to attract hundreds of children and teenagers.
But it’s not all happiness. Some see the school as teaching a “western indulgence” and one girl has been reportedly beaten by her brothers for skateboarding.
