Pumping pre Xmas days

The usual Xmas getaway was planned beforehand anyways but we didn´t expect to score waves like that from day 1 and things are looking like it´s gonna pump on and on with one large long-period swell after the other slamming Europe´s coastlines full-on. NOAA is throwing record-numbers on their facebook page for the low-pressures, significant wave heights and so on, which basically says the Jetstream´s in full swing for back to back swells for Danger Island. So far we didn´t do anything besides surf, eat & sleep and to close the year off it seems there is no better thing to do...

Mareggiata

November is known to be one of the prime months for Surf in the Med, however it does take some knowldege, effort, patience and luck to score the place. This was one pretty anticipated weekend as there´s been a good run of weather patterns and swells lately for Italy. Since the swell came spot on for the weekend there was a ridiculous amount of crew from Germany, Austria, Switzerland around which forced us to choose some other options than the famed mainbreak of Liguria´s Surf-Capital Varazze. In the end we scored tons of waves to ourselves in these 2 days ranging from chest-high slop to solid double-overhead+ maelstrom in Tuscany´s big-wave capital. A classic roadtrip with awesome waves, not much more to say, simply happy...

Birthday in Portugal

The last couple of years I didn´t manage to get away for my birthday so it was awesome to find a week off around the 16th and head off with the boyz to Portugal. Weather looked great in the south, but the forecast for waves average so we decided to make the run up far north. We knew weather would be shit but we were rewarded with pumping beachbreaks all week pretty much to ourselves, I reckon we saw the first surfers after a couple of days. Days faded into the same routine, we had our 7 hours of surf every day and the meantimes were filled with plenty of Galaos, Sandes mistas and heaps of different types of sweets to get our energy back. Even on my birthday we just had a beer and went to bed. We scored real fun waves, met up with local legend & shaper Manila and caught up with our friend and charger Simon with family who was on the way down south. Awesome times with the boys indeed, can´t wait for the next trip down there…

PRT with my girl

I´ve been really slack recently with posting stuff for a couple of reasons:

- Injuries have been going up and down this year which made 2013 rather frustrating in a way, from recovering the broken foot to a back injury from kissing the notorious rocks once again    ---   due to that there hasn´t been much travelling happening and there´s only so many river-pics one wants to see I reckon

However this was a real fun trip, spent some quality time with my girl Jil end of August with beautiful weather, surpsingly fun waves at times, a quick visit to the capital Lisboa, plenty of Galaos and Pastel de Nata and a couple of hidden beaches that were so obviously good (not a soul in sight) that people didn´t even realize they were there - Humans are a funny bunch. This trip was right what I needed after a year with hardly any travelling and shaking the injury off, good food, warm weather, hanging out on the beach and crusing around...

Anyways Winter´s coming, the first couple of swells have been meeting perfectly groomed sandbanks in France and elsewhere along Europe´s Shores. My back is hopefully back to normal soon and Portugal´s on the schedule for my Birthday with da boys, yeewwww

back in Business & enjoying Summer

Yeeww, 6 weeks with the Cast-Shoe were enough and another 5 weeks later I was already able to try standing on the board again...  I had to do a lot of Physio to get movement, stability and muscles back but now - 2 months later - everything looks pretty fine. I even had a few tries on the standing wave at Munich´s Airport which was real fun. So happy all the efforts with physio and training are paying off and things are getting back to normal. I think everyone takes being able to move properly for granted, whereas you really see what´s missing when you´re on crutches and every step is a pain in the ass. Lucky I got to enjoy some of the warmest weeks in a long time already without that big shoe...

thanks to Gottfried & Dieter for the pics

3 months off

What a great start to Summer breaking a foot, well so far a non existing Summer as well with rain and snowfalls down to 800m beginning of June, what a joke...   Well, after spending heaps of time on the river and finding more fun again in the river-thing, especially at uncrowded nighttimes, I managed to break my foot while having a nightsession with the boys. Not even while launching some decent airs which i tried a bit recently, but hitting one of the infamous rocks down the bottom.

8 days in hospital, 1 operation, a freakin big cast shoe and a pair of crutches later I had to spend some time at home, getting the leg up and being bored. So far healing is great and hope to get the the thing off in a couple of weeks and get back into things with physio and stuff. On the weekend I couldn´t resist to come on my bosses bachelor party to Mallorca which was a great change and the sun & a epic crew helped to get the mood up a bit.

My destinations Chile and Easter Islands for July are cancelled, so it looks like a bit of surfing small waves is gonna happen in autumn if everything goes as planned.

Being helpless shows as well what a good crew of friends is worth, actually priceless; doing some shopping, driving me around or coming round to have a beer. Thanks as well to everyone at station 1/4 at Rechts der Isar and Dres Sauerschnig, Delhey and crew!

pretty moments on the Danger Place

After the initial mad swell, there´s been some pretty moments as well on Danger Island and another couple of dreamy days with a solid West Swell running. that being said, those "pretty" lineups are double to triple overhead waves with heaps of punch and the usual nightmare of getting in & out  ;-)

Carnage week

With Germany showing no sign of anything even close to summer coming soon it was time to burn off the last holidays from ´12 and head for another couple of swells to Danger Island. With a 6m 17 sec. swell right in the first 3 days the place was as crazy as it comes despite too much wind on most of the spots. In addition to that I got sick a week before the trip as soon as I had booked my flight, my body kinda shut down and I arrived pretty much like a wreck. I got my fair share of beatings and a couple of bombs the first days before having some magical clean days to myself. However, it showed again what a f...n violent piece of ocean it is out there, ripping solid concrete walls at a harbour to pieces and get the ground shaking. happy to finish the winter season with a bang and some memorable sessions at my favourite breaks. So here´s a couple of pics of the first half of the week, the Carnage...

Winter livin in Munich

well, not much to say about this one, just that it´s been f...n cold since weeks  with minuses day and night. keeping entertained with playing around on the river in hope that summer will come back one day.

thanks Quik for some great wetties that make silly things like that possible and even enjoyable :-)   also props to the local paparazzi crew Dieter Verstl and Gottfried, cheerio

a good way to start 2013

from before xmas the high pressure weather pattern just continued and back to back swells kept coming, providing awesome heavy waves to pretty much ourselves. With 6-8 hours surf a day for weeks it´s been a good chance to work on my approach to surf those gnarly waves in a slightly different way. With really good surfers around, I tried to push myself to sit a little deeper, do proper bottom- and top-turns, ride shorter boards, get the odd barrel every once in a while and approach solid waves with less fear...   it really helped I guess and at the end I felt good on boards I never liked, snapped fins doing bottom turns and really got some nice hacks and barrels in, still lightyears away from some of the powersurfing you see there in the water by the crew. A lot of beatings and holddowns also were the proper reality check, when things got too "easy" if you speak of that in waves 2-4 times overhead. A truely magic place that will always take care of itself, though needs to be approached with the right attitude and respect.