Hello, San Francisco

We stayed in San Francisco for three nights at a friends house right on Ocean Beach. Gee and Ross surfed Ocean Beach as well as Pacifica which is a bit further south. The wind has been pretty hefty, and there was a strong rip which made things challenging for the guys. I just knew better and stayed on land!

We got some sight seeing in, crossed the Golden Gate and cruised around the Head Lands in Marin County. The last time I was in this city I couldn't see anything because of the fog, it's a cool looking city, but not much beats the view of the local Vancouver mountains.

This morning we drove further south to Santa Cruz where there was a nice south swell with some good waves. I caught one wave, and another caught me. I'm not sure I'm cut out for this surfing lark at all!

Some of the locals were shredding waves that were breaking right on the beach. It looked pretty gnarly. If a fella was to fall, he'd bounce on the sand just before getting pummeled by these waves. Cool to watch though!

After we finished up in Santa Cruz we headed for Monterey, where we registered for our races. We got a pretty big land when we found out that the organizers wanted $60 bucks a night for a camp spot. Feckin ludicrous! We ended up paying a total of $70 a night for a motel with a double bed each. Nice!

We got a cheeky run in on the course this evening too. Basically the organizers just left the cource dry out from last year, and added some new corners just by getting creative with the course tape. They spent some effort on building some sort of wooden humpty bendy back bridge at the bottom, which adds no value to the course.

But at least it's not raining! There is rain forecast for next Saturday, so heres hoping we won't have a repeat of last years nasty mud fest!

Hoo dang!

We hits San Fran at about 00:30 last night, staying with a old buddy of mine from back home in Macroom, Co.Cork. We are right off Ocean Beach, you can't get more ideal than that for surfing in the city!

How we got this far;

We left Vancouver, BC Thursday (5th April) night, and got just shy of Olympia in Washington, camped out, and hit the minty high road on Friday morning which took us down to Cannon Beach. One of the local surf shop guys pointed us up to Indian Point, which is actually Bells Beach in Point Break, it's totally recognizable from the movie. So yeah, my second time surfing was in Bells Beach, yeah baby! Calling it surfing is a stretch though, I just got beat up by the sea. Ross and Gee got on pretty well though.



That night we camped in some random town, and the next morning we headed south along the cost to Florence where we rented some Polaris Trail Blazer ATVs. Butty little 250cc automatics, we were told they wouldn't be powerful enough to jump, but we got some sweet air!

When we got done at the Dunes we darted inland to the I-5 and south as far as Ashland.

Not let me tell ya, Ashland is good people. We rocked into Ashland at around 7pm and stopped at Great American Pizza for some food and hydration. We ended up with a lot of beer in us, a place to stay and some good new friends. The Sunday after one of the guys (Abe) was good enough to hook us up with shuttles on one of the local mountains, even though he doesn't ride. There is a race down there in May, but it conflicts with the Rat Race on the Sunshine Coast, so we won't make it down.

That's it for now. More updates later....