Surfing ‘Peaks and Barrels’ Is Announcing a New Internet Swell
New surfing website moving into an interactive way to plan your “surf.”
Surfing ‘Peaks and Barrels’ is taking the country by storm and is proving to be more than just your run-of-the-mill surf site. The wave has swelled and has become a Facebook favorite for surfers and beach lovers alike. P&B has been in the works since April ‘09 and is now launching the first version of it’s website, where it will offer popular gear, such as it’s “classic style” T-shirt.
PeaksandBarrels.com is thrilled to soon offer an interactive tool for surfers to plan surf sessions and get in touch with your local surfing community. In the meantime, Peaks and Barrels will have many other interesting promotions and products for fans to check out.
PeaksandBarrels.com is a supporter of non-profit organizations like SurfAid International, Saving the Waves, Saving the Firepits, and Surfrider foundation. Invite PeaksandBarrels.com to your event and let them assist in the fund raising and getting the word out.
Peaks and Barrels, it’s what you surf.
If you would like to learn more information visit http://PeaksandBarrels.com and enter your name & email, then click ‘Get Barreled‘.
Peaks and Barrels Set up for the Board Recycling Project.
San Diego’s Rob Machado, one of the most stylish surfers alive, discusses last summer’s Indonesian sojourn and his new movie chronicling his experiences abroad.
You were drifting around Indonesia on a motor scooter most of last summer; tell us about your Indo experience cruising around Indo.
I prefer to call it a motorcycle. Motor scooter makes it sound like a Vespa or something. I actually bought a Honda CB 100. I cruised around filming for my flick. I spent about six months living…sort of based out of Bali. I ventured out to the outer islands from Sumba to Lombok to Java…spent a bit of time in Java. There are a ridiculous amount of waves there that you can find if you really want to find them.
You sort of did the unconventional surf trip, in that you veered off the beaten path. You hung out with the local people in, as you mentioned, rather remote regions. I see that you helped the local communities out over there too.
As the trip went on I sort of realized that to really get away you have to venture way out. My bike started breaking down, and I used public transport and got into some cool funky places and I did a lot of camping, and I removed myself from my normal routine and it was good.
Your movie is called, tentatively, THE DRIFTER. With whom are you working on this film project? Is this a Taylor Steele production?
Yeah, Taylor and I came up with it, and Hurley is backing it and gave me the opportunity to basically disappear in Indo for six months. I pretty much fell off the face of the earth and chased great waves around for six months.
Undoubtedly, you scored some great waves and some great tubes. Photos have already trickled into the pages of surf magazines and on websites. We’ve seen some insane barrels from your trip. The notion that time stands still in the tube, the old surfing cliché, do you think there is any truth to that?
Wow, that’s pretty deep right there. For me, it’s about not thinking. I like the idea of actually being on a wave…I think that’s the only time that I’m actually not thinking. That’s the magic of surfing for me. There aren’t too many things that you do in life where your brain shuts off and you acting on what you are feeling and you’re not consciously making decisions.
Seems like the free-surfing vibe fits you perfectly. But watching you surf in events, your level of performance surfing is higher than it’s ever been. Do you still enjoy competitive surfing?
Yeah. Occasionally. It’s still fun, and I like watching those guys. That’s where the best surfing in the world is happening. If you watch those guys: Mick and Joel and Kelly and Andy, and now Dane and Jordy, The stuff that’s going on is pretty radical, so it is fun to go in there and mix it up with those guys. It’s hard because those guys are on tour together all the time and constantly pushing each other. When you are not around that level of surfing all the time it is hard to maintain and stay at that level. I try and hang with those guys as much as I can; it is inspiring to see those guys in person that’s for sure.
So the guys at Cardiff Reef aren’t inspiring you too much then?
(Laughs) Oh, you know, not quite the same level. But those guys at Cardiff are cool.
You mentioned Kelly, and I’m wondering, earlier in the year, Slater played in the Pebble Beach Pro-Am and hit some great golf shots. Especially on number 17, the par 3, it’s 200-plus yards, he hit it into a strong 20-knot head wind. Kelly put his tee shot 8-feet from the hole and birdied. Being an avid golfer yourself and a friend of Kelly’s, did you see that shot?
No I didn’t see this year’s event. That’s cool. That’s heavy. Serious stuff.
The movie is THE DRIFTER. Where are you at with that?
We are elbow deep in the editing room right now, so we are looking at a summer time release, we hope.
Are you involved with the music on the movie?
Oh yeah, I’m involved, and it’s pretty exciting. We just had Warner Brothers music come on board so we’ll be adding some of their acts to the flick. I recorded some music. We recorded some music in Indo. We are throwing everything we can into the mixing bowl and see how it goes.
Rob, thanks for the time today. Can’t wait to see the movie.
Thanks for calling, and thanks for the inspiration at Cardiff (laughs).
The moments after a sports hall roof collapsed at karate practice in Padang
Almost 3,000 people are still trapped under rubble following Wednesday’s powerful earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, officials say.
Massive quake: A member of an Indonesian military rescue team walks through a collapsed building in Padang (Reuters: Singgalang-Muhammad Fitrah)
More than 1,000 people are known to have died and the chances of finding survivors are growing slimmer.
Rescue teams from several countries are heading to the Indonesian city of Padang in a last push to save lives.
Some were focused on a hotel where as many as eight people may still be alive, and where noises were heard.
As night fell, rescuers said they were close to a room where a seminar was being held when the quake struck.
Voices were heard from under the rubble earlier, and a newly-arrived Swiss rescue team said it had picked up frantic knocking sounds using sophisticated audio equipment.
AT THE SCENE
Rachel Harvey, BBC News, Padang Darkness has fallen for the third time since the earthquake struck and once again powerful floodlights are trained on what remains of a large hotel.Twisted wreckage of cars and rubble are still piled high here and the rescuers say they now may be close to a room where it’s known a seminar was taking place on Wednesday evening. Several people are thought to be trapped inside that room and the rumour here tonight is that miraculously even at this late stage some people may have survived and there is a long queue of ambulances here waiting just in case. Shattered Padang tries to cope but an AFP reporter also described a stench hanging over the hotel, as bodies there began to decompose in the equatorial heat.
At least one survivor, a young woman, was pulled from under a collapsed school earlier in the day.
The rescue of Ratna Kurnia Sari on Friday was a boost to emergency workers who were enduring tough conditions as they scrambled to reach survivors in Padang.
At least one other young woman was reported to be trapped close to where the first rescue took place.
Although rescue efforts focused on Padang, aid workers and reporters said that in rural areas thousands more buildings had been destroyed and whole villages flattened.
“From the aerial assessments carried out yesterday, the feedback is, yes Padang city and environs are bad, but once you go outside into the surrounding rural areas, the situation is very seriously grave,” said International Red Cross coordinator Christine South, quoted by AFP news agency.
There was still no information for some areas including Mentawai Island, 57km from the coast, she added.
An AP reporter said parts of Pariaman district, to the north of Padang, had virtually no buildings left standing and had received no outside help.
Need for machinery
US President Barack Obama, who spent part of his childhood in Jakarta, called his Indonesian counterpart to offer condolences and help with the relief effort, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.
Indonesian Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari has appealed for more foreign aid to help the rescue effort.
MAJOR INDONESIAN QUAKES
26 Dec 2004: Asian tsunami kills 170,000 in Indonesia alone
28 March 2005: About 1,300 killed after a magnitude 8.7 quake hits the coast of Sumatra
27 May 2006: Quake hits ancient city of Yogyakarta, killing 5,000
17 July 2006: A tsunami after a 7.7 magnitude quake in West Java province kills 550 people
30 Sept 2009: 7.6 magnitude quake near Sumatran city of Padang, thousands feared dead
1 Oct 2009: Second of two quakes near Padang, magnitude 6.8 – no damage or casualties reported
SurfAid has a Padang Earthquake Relief Appeal. People can donate through our website. We are in Emergency Response mode and currently assessing the coastal areas south of Padang. We are buying tents, tarpaulins, food, water, medical and sanitation su…pplies in Medan to ship down. We have five Indonesian staff still unaccounted for in Padang. Any support much appreciated. Cheers www.surfaidinternational.org
With last weekend’s Unsound Pro surf contest in Long Beach, Long Island; the second annual New York Surf Film Festival in TriBeCa, which ended last night; and the recent art opening of the female longboard pro Kassia Meador of California at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, the New York area has been crawling with the biggest names in surfing. A friend of Waves, the surf writer Tetsuhiko Endo, caught up with the film festival over the weekend.
Rob Machado, professional surfing’s ambassador of soul, was standing outside Tribeca Cinemas on Friday, waiting for the national premiere of his new movie, “The Drifter,’’ at the second annual New York Surf Film Festival.
The oddity of the location for his United States premiere — the theater is on the concrete corner of Varick and Laight Streets — was not lost on Mr. Machado, who can more regularly be found in Hawaii, Tahiti or Indonesia, where “The Drifter” takes place.
“There’s this crazy, underground surf scene here that no one seems to know about,” he said while waiting outside the theater for his film to begin. “And it makes it really cool to come to an event like this.”
In his narration of “The Drifter,’’ Mr. Machado says, “The surf world moves like a traveling circus.” Well, that circus came to town this weekend along with the festival, whose organizers were hoping to showcase the eclecticism of a spreading area surf scene that is increasingly drawing fascination from other parts.
A quick look around Tribeca Cinemas on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday underscored his point: The New York/New Jersey surfing scene showed up in force, from swaggering hipsters to suit-wearing bankers, to the Jersey boys in their flannel-shirt-and-baseball-hat uniforms. The rest of the crowd was a mélange of industry types from California, Aussie expats, a handful of Irish, the odd Basque, and even a couple of Ohio lake surfers. The filmmaker Andrew Kidman and local pros like Will Tant and Dean Randazzo blended in happily with local recreational surfers, including the fashion designer Cynthia Rowley .
“It doesn’t feel like a typical surf event,” the Australian filmmaker Stefan Hunt agreed. Mr. Hunt’s movie, “Surfing in 50 States,” was one of 18 featured over the weekend along with 13 shorts. “Usually, theses things are filled with the surfer dudes with bleached hair, the skinny girls in bikinis, and a bunch of surfing films that all look the same.”
Homogeneity is one of the things that the event’s founder, Tyler Breuer, who is also manager of the Sundown Surf Shop on Long Island, said he specifically tried to avoid. “I want the old guys I grew up surfing with in Long Beach, I want the grommets who are just interested in the shred flicks, I want the artists, and I want the people who don’t surf at all,” he said.
Sancho Rodriguez, the founder and organizer of the San Sebastián Surfilm Festibal, who was also in attendance, praised the mix of the crowd over the lip of his beer can. “New York is a strange place for a festival like this, but doing things that are slightly out of the ordinary is good for surfing,” he said. “We have to understand that our sport is growing and maturing, so the role of festivals like this is to convey the best parts of surfing to people that may not have been exposed to them.”
Ms. Rowley suggested that the surf world was ready for some distance from its traditional epicenter on the West Coast, and that New York seemed to be providing it.
“Californian surf culture has been a little mined,” she said, in that dismissive way that only fashion designers can fully evoke. “People are inherently interested in things that are alternative.”
When asked what she thought of the general surfing vibe in the room, she called it “aspiring to be non-aspirational,” and added: “New York surfers are a stylish bunch. In fashion, it’s got to be genuine to be cool, and this definitely feels genuine.”
Waves is an occasional City Room feature chronicling surfing in and around New York City, and the issues important to local surfers. Its author, Jim Rutenberg, is a Washington correspondent who grew up surfing in New Jersey and continues to surf regularly on Eastern Long Island. Ideas and comments are welcome at Wavesnyt@gmail.com.
