One newsflash is that I have been secretly working on a new version of jbaysurfcam.com and as soon as I have a break from my regular development work, I'll do the switch. Spike gave me a call this morning about some technical stuff and before he said anything else he explained to me in very certain terms that we are up for some serious swell in J-Bay in the next couple of days.
It is so like me to blurt everything out all the time, but I did manage to get hold of a 170 - 500mm Sigma APO in excellent condition to nearly complete my current kit.. The lady who I bought it from also do quite a bit of surf and kite surf photography, and she sold it for a very decent price.
Okay. On Friday, I made the very impulsive move to book a Kulula and hop to Capetown, since the courier with insurance for the camera cost more than a ticket. Steve Pike, the Surf Forecasting Guru from http://www.wavescape.co.za opened his house for me, as he was also the guy that checked the camera out for me before I transferred the money. We had a way overdue meeting, since I had been grafting on Wavescape for the last three months and we still haven't met in person. We made great progress on Wavescape and even had some time for more serious things like "board meetings"
All I can say is that I had an awesome two days with the Pike family and Steve took me to Muizenberg for a surf the one day and yesterday we went to this place where we had to paddle over about 50m of kelp. My first experience with kelp. Weird. We both had some lekker waves and it was a real adventure. Stoked
I just had to share this with somebody.
I made my mind up about the camera, and just bought it a couple of minutes ago. I needed a cam for a long time now, since the unfortunate water housing leak incident in heavy seas with the previous model. And the winner is...
Lately, I've really been grafting hard on some websites and also helping a client to migrate away from Windows to Linux. (Let me rather not go into that, because it is going to become a lengthy discussion. More stuff on Linux: http://www.paulvanjaarsveld.com)
Since I was grafting that hard, I never noticed that we had some pretty nice barrels all day (Thursday 21/05/2009) and as I drove to the mall and back via the R102 behind J-Bay, I noticed that the lines were stacked up and I could see good waves breaking everywhere.
It was already going towards 15:00 and I made a promise that I would mow the lawn. To cut to the chase, after I mowed the lawn and dropped my wife and son at her parents for a cup of tea, I got suited and paddled out through the keyhole. It was already late, and the sun had just dropped under the dunes behind me. A couple of guys were out, including Ryan and Shaun Payne, Brad, Rasool and guy called Steven who is really good company between sets.
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