Homies from the hood

Way back in October the Beacon Road boys came over for the last leg in the Dutch Playboat Cup. Held at Dutch Water Dreams (DWD), this competition is the highlight of the series of 5 events and saved for the finale.

If you remember I helped judge the freestyle event at the opening of DWD but this year there was more time for a larger kayaking only event. So worthy of the trip from the UK, Mark, James and Kate flew over to see what was on offer.

I collected them from Schipol and we ate at a nice pancake house on route to DWD. My guests were easily impressed with the food which was a good thing cos as soon as we arrived and unpacked the car it became obvious I had left my tent behind - doh! So James and Kate took Marks tent whilst Mark and I setup a cosy dwelling together in the back of my car. There was no time for relaxing though as we got geared up and on the water for the late night practice session. I hardly paddle over here anymore, with just 1 other DWD and a couple of surfing sessions under my belt. So it was great to be with some friends paddling again.

However, after a few races down the course against Mark and James, I was quick to realise any previous paddling fitness I may have had has definitely been replaced by beer belly. Nevertheless, I could still hold my own in the competition hole and managed not to swim so met my most feared goal!

Mark and James entered me for both the Boatercross and the Freestyle with the amusing bib number 13. Boatercross I was looking forward to as it's a head to head race with 4 riders down the course making a couple of must moves to touch banners on the way down. It was the Freestyle I was not so keen on. I've been cheekily proud of my 100% freestyle competition record since winning the 2000 student championships and therefore not entering any other events ;-) But now I struggle to name all the new moves and combos the new kids on the block are performing today.

So being the performance athletes that we are, we all hit the sack nice and early on Friday to get a good nights sleep ready for the days competition on Saturday. Yeah right, as with any kayaking event anywhere in the world, we were staggering around a campsite carpark still drinking at 4am in the morning. Not such as bad thing if it wasn't for James setting his alarm clock an hour late. I exited our passion wagon about 8am busting for the loo. There I was standing in my boxers shaking the snake against a tree struggling to stand up without wobbling when Casper came running up yelling at me to get ready for our heats. Within 15 minutes all three of us were geared up, on the water and heading up the conveyor belt for our freestyle heats - messy :-(

But not knowing which way up was probably a good thing as in between gagging in the eddy, I managed to cartwheel my way a few points above Mark. Which I was stoked at and thoroughly enjoyed pointing out to Mark as often as I could. My favourite dig was that I think I have been paddling the same number of times this year as Mark normally does during a typical summer week! Ha ha, below is the results sheet showing my name clearly above Marks on a whole different sheet!

The freestyle heats were a great new method I have not seen in a kayaking event before. With 5 people in a heat for 15 mins, it was held like a Jam session, 30 second runs each and the best moves you performed in all of your runs counted. Perhaps this counted towards my success with my slightly more cannonball attitude than Mark. Although I did get 6 ends at one point which I think I can count on one hand the number of times I have done that in my life! Next up was a quick blast on the Flowaves which Mark was styling as shown below.

Even James in the pictures below was showing that Adam and I must've been even more hungover when we tried it last time.

The rest of the day was spent lazy about in the surprisingly warm October sun. Here's a favourite picture of a view of mine kicking back at the beach bar.

Later that day was the boatercross heats. I've never entered a boatercross event as what I have seen from the ones in the UK they rely heavily on fitness. However, the DWD course already flows at a fairly fast rate so I had a chance! I have never been so tired from kayaking before though. I was properly out of breath and coughing up my guts afterwards!

I made it through my heat which again I was chuffed at cos there was only us three and a couple of others in freestyle boats. 95% of paddlers were in big fast creek boats. So it was a nice feeling that I can still pick a good line and a better one than half of the paddlers there in faster boats.

Even more enjoyable was the fact that Mark failed to make it through his heat - see how far behind he is in the picture above! James and I had a field day ribbing Mark to the point that maybe we were a little to harsh on the old man ;-) Ha ha ha

James has come a long way since paddling like an aggressive obnoxious punk in his attak in the Loughborough EHB swimming pool. So he managed to get as far as the semis in both the freestyle and the boatercross. Possibly even deserving more support than the 30 seconds we gave him (the bar was much more cosy). I took a few snaps of the final but as it was dark it was difficult to get a good shot. However, some of the blurred shots really show the movement like the one below:

The Dutch awards ceremony lasted hours and probably contributed to our lack of commitment when it came to the crunch time of decided should we head to the dodgy local nightclub or not. The thought of scaling the 8 foot barbed wire fence to get back into the locked campsite didn't help either. So we had a relatively early night and made tracks to Amsterdam on the Sunday.

Sunday was a day of recovery with just a short blast at the funfair which was setup in the Trafalgar Square of Amsterdam. Cheers lads and Kate for a great weekend and I hope to see you here again soon. Credit to James and Kate for some of the photos of which you can view the full set here or in slideshow format here.

Speaking of photos, I have used Aperture for the first time with these photos. I've been highly impressed at the difference it has made adjusting the shadows and highlights of the photos with whitewater. The difference between the shades of white are much more noticeable after a little tweaking than with the original shot. For example the shot below:

One last thing before I go is to put a copy of the video that Teva, the main sponsors of the event, put together of the whole event. It's pretty impressive and shows what was missed to all those back in the UK who were too lazy to make it over - you know who you are!

The Adam weekend of stiff necks

Adam visited last weekend for what seemed like an eternity! Hope you didn't get too bored whilst I was at work Adam? He stayed from Weds night through to Tues morning and I'm knackered for it. We managed to cram quite a bit in to his time here as you can see from yet another mighty blog entry...

There was no holding back right from the word go. As soon as I picked Adam up from the airport, we headed straight to the local indoor ski slope. It was a good start to his trip as after the half time beer we were hitting the bigger jump that I have yet to have the courage to play with. And also getting some 360's off the roller hip shaped lump next to the jump. OK so they were a little more like 270's for me, cheating a bit by carving hard into the hip ;-) But hey I was stoked, don't usually have the bottle to try those. Cheers Adam :-)

Friday night we went to the Melkweg again where I was the previous week with Emma. This time to see a hip hop act called Peeping Tom with Rahzel the legendary human beatboxer. Rahzel was really the main reason we went and it was a little disappointing that he only did one set on his own. But during that set he managed to reproduce Justin Timberlakes Sexyback sounding just like the real thing! It was quality - checkout this video that I found for an example.

We hung around in Melkweg to see if the resident DJ was going to get any better. He didn't - not even after the JD and cokes we started to knock back. So we hooked up with Sophie and yet another night in Winstons. I was steaming and made everyone aware by jumping in all the puddles on the way home in the pouring rain. I think I did a good job of soaking Sophie - Sorry!

In the morning there was a bit of deja vu from the previous weekend with Emma. I found myself waking up waaaaaaaaayyyy too late for the flow riding I had planned for the both of us. I await the speeding tickets, but we did still get there in time for the majority of our two hour session. Unlike with the girls on bodyboards, I opted for a standing up session for us guys. I'm glad we booked two hours cos it took a good 45 mins to get the hang of it. It's much harder than bodyboarding and our previous snowboarding skills did not help much. Yes we might have reasonable balance but on a snowboard all your weight is on the front leg, on a flow board you need to put all your weight on the back leg. A bit like riding powder? - NO - even more weight back than that so it took a while to get that. But once we mastered it we were ripping it up (kinda). Checkout the following video footage of us masters in action - note Adams 360 is entirely by fluke the jammy bastard! And I can confirm it's not as painful as it looks. Well not during anyway. Oh and by the way, you can click on the google logo to watch a larger version.



Once the wet fun was over the hangovers hit home and we generally lounged around the DWD white water course eating ham and cheese toasties before agreeing that was a waste of a day. I showed Adam another nearby indoor ski slope that had an "airbag" setup but more on that later. Then we went to checkout the local kayak store for a few shots at the ski ramp but the cold and dark got the better of us so we wimped out. With nothing else to do it was back home, pizzas and back on the sauce meeting the disco twins for another night on the town. Equally as messy, equally as late (6am) but at least we had a lie in the next day.

Now the flow waves don't hurt when you fall off, but both Adam and I had screwed ourselves somehow cos on Sunday morning our necks were well stiff. It even hurt to yawn - which we were doing a fair bit! What better way to treat a stiff neck than to go launching off a 2m high snowboard ramp. I say launching but a better word for it was hucking - spins & flips. No me and Adam have not become overnight snowboard pros but remember I mentioned the airbag? Well this was the setup ->


Coming second close to a fresh tracks day on Whistler back in Jan 2001, this is one of the best things I have ever done on my snowboard. After a few warm up runs we joined the back of the line for hitting this monster. Adam was up first followed by myself and for the first few runs we found it really difficult to even get just a grab in. The speed you have to hit the jump at felt quite unusual. Normally we are jumping off smaller jumps so a lot slower and know how much the ramp is going to kick you up in the air. This thing was a beast and with quite a rutted run in that I found myself nearly binning on a few times! But once used to the feeling (not that we ever really got a good grab in) it was time to step it up and I am proud to say for once I was the first to start the rotations flinging myself in all directions off the lip. Needless to say, Adam followed and skooled me but I'm chuffed I went for it first :-) I was the first to try a 180 (that actually ended up being a 360!) and the first to try a front flip (god knows what happened there but I didn't do it right I know that for sure!) Checkout the video footage below, the guys at the end of the video show us how it should be done. Quality!



That night we crashed early after attempting to watch "Ferris Buellers day off" - a movie I got from Gary. Gary mate if your reading then that was shite!

It got to Monday and both of us realised we had not done the standard issue red light district cruise so that kept us entertained for the night. Adam didn't quite have as bad an experience as Charlie tho! We had a few strolls around interspersed with games of pool until yet again it was waaaaaay beyond midnight.

I've finally caught up with my sleep so hope you enjoy the video clips and the collections of photos below. Cheers Adam for a class weekend :-) I've got a couple of weeks break until the Irish invade with Olaf...

Flash Slideshow

The Emma & Kate weekend

So now that Adam has left, I can finally get round to writing a bit about the weekend I had with Emma and Kate. Both came over on Thurs 2nd Nov for a long weekend. It was Emma's second trip, so now an expert, and Kate's first visit to see me.

A delayed flight meant that there was nothing left to do on Thursday except catch up over a cuppa. Then on Friday, the girls explored the city whilst I finished off the week at work then the fun began...

We got a bite to eat at a nice place in De Pijp area of Amsterdam. Then Sophie met us in a bar called Chocolate but it was rammed so we only had one there. But I think there was already enough drink inside us cos we left on our bikes and headed for Winstons. At first Kate was on the back of my bike till she fell off at some traffic lights so we collected another bike from Sophie's home for Kate. Both Emma and Kate full with wine provided such a good laugh for myself, sorry girls but I've not laughed so much in quite a while. The bikes over here are quite large and well lets just say the girls are not! But the laughter soon stopped as the crashes began. Yes "crashes" - your right I did use the plural!

When we got to Winstons, Emma did not quite hear my calls of "slow down we are here" and spanked into the back of my bike, falling flat on her face right outside the nightclub. Thank god for the alcohol numbing her pain. And thank god we kept the alcohol flowing in Winstons cos when we came out crash number two happened for Emma. None of us saw that one but it was the most painful and involved someone getting in her way and some serious arse to floor move :-( Not satisfied with only two crashes, Emma decided to take a further tumble in the Vondelpark. Deciding that travelling in a straight line was getting boring she preferred to weave into my back wheel. This time sliding along the floor on her hands, knees, boots and chin. Yes chin - checkout the pictures below for the attractive chin graze!

Getting up on Saturday was an effort but spurred on by the thought that we were going bodyboarding on the flow waves at DWD we some how managed to rush out the door for 10am. I'd booked a 1 hour introduction session for each of us and it was a blast - a perfect hangover cure! It was not that difficult so we all had a good few rides on the wave as you can see from the photos.

After a wonder round the white water course we decided to hit the local beach, Scheveningen, for some fresh sea are and some grub in a really nice Italian restaurant. I'll be back there someday :-) But that knocked us out, the girls were asleep in the car on the way home and we all crashed out for a few hours that afternoon. Saturday night was a quiet affair, there was a Museum night going on around town so we met Sandra and Sophie for a quick beer. As you can imagine the bikes got left at home that night so we tried to catch the last tram home but just missed it by ten mins so I had my first taxi ride home. €15 - thieving gypo's!

Sunday, we went for a blast round the park on the bikes before heading to see a band called Children Sumandre. They were performing at a really strange hippy commune place outside of town. It was rather spooky but a real good vibe - there was a lot of love in the house people!

We bumped into Pia, Timbo and Shauny there and as it was also Sophie birthday they kindly invited us all round to theirs for dinner. A glass of bubbly and some nice nosh rounded off a great weekend. Kate was on the first flight home Monday morning. Thanks for visiting Kate - hope you enjoyed it?!

But lucky me managed to get Emma to myself for another night. We went to see Dick Dale at Melkweg and he was brilliant. I had an idea he would probably be a dab hand on the guitar due to knowing his music from the film Pulp Fiction. But he managed to make all those sounds on his guitar with no wammy bar and later played the bass, drums and trumpet. He played the bass whilst the main bass player was also playing the same guitar - he also managed to play the bass guitar using the drum sticks! When he played the drums, there was also the main drummer still playing - two people on one drum kit sounds awesome.

Well that's me - another long post. Checkout the pictures from our weekend below and come back soon for another equally as long post about my weekend with Adam just gone...

Flash Slideshow