Monochrome Monday (Spray)

Left

The Bluff

Backhand

Salt Therapy

There's another "salt therapy" in town and it doesn't involve waxing up a board or cramming feet into flippers (fins).

It's the salt cave, where you hang out in a salt laden room, like a salt mine, for an hour after paying $50AU. 

I haven't tried it. But if I was going to I'd over to the team at Salt Caves in Mooloolaba.

Monochrome Monday (is back)

Beneath the eyelids

TC

I have no idea how many goofy footer world champion surfers there have been. Apart from Tom Caroll, I can't think of many. Maybe that question and others from the crowd will be answered when TC talks about his biography next week on the Sunshine Coast at Annie's Books in Peregian. Their blurb for the event reads:



"The long-awaited autobiography of one of Australia's surfing legends.

On the surface he was Tom Carroll, dreamer, cheeky grommet, brilliant surfer, Australian sporting hero, fitness fanatic, businessman, family man, big wave charger. Inside turned the terrible wheel of drug addiction, part family curse, part legacy of the footloose surf culture he'd done so much to legitimise. Tom's family and friends struggled with him, kept his secrets, and looked on in anger and fear as the wheel began to grind him down. Then a window opened – but getting through it made charging Pipeline look like a piece of cake ...

This is the story of an unlikely moral education: of humility, family, damage, brotherhood, youth, stupidity, glory, single-mindedness and surrender, and about the feeling of water moving under a surfboard, how it can bind past to present and make sense of lives."




Santa, please add this book to my stocking.

Losing One's Marbles is Optional

I've known my best mate since he moved into our street when we were both nine years old. Unlike me, he's a goofy footer. I have archives of classic shots of him and although this old shot is not him, it reminds me of the wave of the trip my mate scored in the Maldives. As I'm paddling back out at Sultans, I get caught inside as he comes screaming across the reef at high speed on his bright orange Southcoast longboard. 

The sight of him way above me as I duck dive is etched deep in the memory bank. We rate our surf sessions in marbles, as in "that was a two marble surf".  If you don't surf enough, you'll lose your marbles (go crazy). I'm pretty sure that Sultans session was a three or four marble surf.

For some reason, foggy mornings like today remind me of an epic day when my best mate and I were teenagers editing our sociology video assignment at university. We thought our "mockumentary" parody of Academia was pretty awesome after one whole day of editing. The lecturer, a famous person from The Film Industry, deemed it "unfit for human consumption". We took that as a compliment.

Happy holidays, buddy and get some marbles back in the barrel.

Moonset

If you saw the full moon setting this morning in our arid western skies you'd agree it was a pretty awesome experience, difficult to describe. If you didn't see it, then I can't really explain the magnetic hypnotism of a glowing heavenly blob edging towards the rim of our planet through a screen of silhouetted branches. The feeling is somewhere between a thrilling barrel and finding a green oasis after traversing a monotonous, barren lunar desert for hours.

 Have a thrilling weekend.

Mr Ed

Former editor of Tracks surf magazine and the Australian edition of Playboy, Phil Jarratt snares glassy beach at Miller's Left during the annual Wrecks and Relics gathering of briney old raconteurs.

Monochrome Monday (sax x sax)

Monochrome Monday (randoms and remembrances)

Hughie parks the old car west facing the surf and grabs his leather bound Petri and hand held light meter. He knows its f8 and 1/125 second but checks anyway. He's been disciplined by poverty, the War and life on the sea.

He takes a shot of the line up at The Point and one of the family leaning against the wire fence above the cliff. It will be a few months before he finishes the roll of 36 and sends it off to the Kodak lab in Melbourne. Money's tight.

1970, the family's last holiday together . The oldest boy could soon be off to Vietnam, if his number comes up. Long haired hippies with bell bottom jeans and bare feet are everywhere. 

Hughie can smell smoke but it's nothing like his MacBarrens Navy Cut pipe tobacco. 

Looking Back

I've just spent the last hour before this wintery dawn listening to various versions of the Rolling Stones song Gimme Shelter, which is my favourite song of all time. Yep OF ALL TIME.

OK, I actually do listen to new stuff to find something better. Music is a BIG part of my experience of this bizarre phenomenon called LIFE.
But right now, that old nugget from 44 years ago is The One in my biased opinion. There's live versions by the Stones and all manner of guest vocalists from  Lady Gaga and Fergie to the awesome Lisa Fischer, but they are no match for Merry Clayton the original backup singer.

This was a tune of it's era - more Altamont than Woodstock, as The Singer once said:

"Well, it's a very rough, very violent era, 

Violence on the screens, pillage and burning. 

And Vietnam was not war as we knew it in the conventional sense..." 

"That's a kind of end-of-the-world song, really. 

It's apocalypse; the whole record's like that."

^{Mick Jagger}

Finally, there's a new documentary that shines a light on the critical role back up singers play and making a tune into something huge. They never got much recognition or cash, but they were the glassers who tied the whole package together.Gimme Shelter is a wonderfully crafted tune - a great riff, evocative lyrics but it's the back-up singer that makes it. Sorry boys.

The Other Steve Miller

Monochrome Monday (Seapunk)

 Todays post 

is for all the wrecks, 

relics and 

sea punks.