Clingstone is a 103-year-old mansion in Narragansett Bay.
Brian Lam
ruby! Malcolm! Good doggies!
Classic Wipeouts
Style evolution has collected classic wipeouts from 1963 til 2005, from other forms of media, to preserve exactly what it looked like when our fathers and grandfathers (and mothers and grandmothers) ate shit on surfboards. [YouTube via Stokereport]
He swam 31-miles through shark infested waters to the Golden Gate Bridge
Ted Erikson made the only known swim from the shark infested Farralon islands, across 31 miles, to the Golden Gate Bridge in 1967. They wiped him down in “shark repellant grease” but I wonder how he dealt with the cold. Oh nice: his swim ended at the Dolphin rowing club in SF where he took a sauna. [YouTube via Mollusk]
The Volkswagen Westfalia Syncro Van
The VW Westfalia Syncro Van is an AWD camper van that can come with a pop top bed, two burner propane stove, sink, and sometimes shower. The Syncro version was sold up til 1991 and only 1500 of them in the US. Today the fifth generation VW camper van, the California, is ironically not sold in the states. Can’t say I haven’t dreamt of living in one of these, camping on a different beach all night and waking up to surf, ala surfwise. Maybe I’ll pick up a beater from some old hippie in the standard eurovan trim. Or a fully warranted and reconditioned model from Go Westy. I wish more car publications would write about things like this. Here’s an article about the vans at [The Adventure Life]
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Sometimes, the ocean, it might as well be space [FCDSurfboards on Flickr]
Here I am
When I was 6, I remember reading the New York Times upside down, aloud, to show off to my delighted parents. I wrote a dramatic short story later that year about an earache, with the word ‘suddenly’ in the lead and a crayon drawing of an ear with lightning attacking it for the cover art. I had an affinity towards the written word. They said I would be a writer when I grow up. I recall not liking that idea as much as I liked the idea of being any number of other dream jobs typical of boyhood; firefighter, cowboy, astronaut, race car driver. And I spend the next 20 years resisting that notion, resisting ever learning the formal rules of grammar as well as I should, wandering through business school with little interest, feeling the honest satisfaction of blue collar work while mopping up a boxing gym at the end of the day. And yet, somehow, everything’s lead up to this moment where I have a comfortable job writing without having ever planned for such a thing. Thinking about things like this, I feel powerless against fate.
