First blog team rider!

Didn't make it at Hookipa before 3.30, but still plenty time to take 30 worthy photos.

Nico is the last one who needs tricks like these to end up on the blog, so I assume that his unsolicited and spontaneous idea is a pure act of love for the blog...
Immediately rewarded with the photo of day award! Maybe he started a new trend.


Rest of the photos in chronological order.
Unknown looper.


Browsinho is recovering from a foot injury and decided not to compete in the Austria's freestyle event. So he's still in Maui and throwing takas pretty much at every wave...


...when he's not relaxing like this.


Cisco Goya's perfect jumping stance.


Unknown looper is having a good sesh.


Mr. Sean Ordonez showed up again and, despite the gnarly shore break, took off fin first (Francisco did the same earlier).


Any girl out there ready to write "Maui Surf Report" on her bum?


One of the swiss kids.


Nico.


Sean. Sure that board looks good in photo.


Browsinho. Francky got a sick shot of backloop landing.


Nico.


Sean doing its thing. IMO, he and Robby Naish remain the ones that do that move best. Robby with a little more power and Sean with a little more elegance. I do it with a little more kookiness.


Browsinho.


Colin.


Little sequence that shows the unknown looper getting punished by the shore break on the way in. Many others did the same (Junko and Dave Ezzy for example).
Brah, that's more a bra than a harness!


Oh-oh...


He's in there.


Nico.


I guess Sean didn't have too much fun, since he soon preferred to body surf the shore break and play with his dog instead...
The conditions were honestly kind of shitty (for the Hookipa standards). Super gusty and choppy because of the very high tide. Good for jumping more than wave riding.


Plenty options there.


Browsinho.


Browsinho.


Browsinho. Is that the spray off the bottom turn still in the air in front of the wave? Wow.


Andres must have shaped himself a new board.


Unknown ripper.


Andres.


Browsinho.


Browsinho.


And now a few links.
Green light for il Capo del Capo contest at Capo Mannu this weekend. Capo Mannu is a beautiful place on the west coast of Sardinia. I had the luck to sail it with mast high waves and it was like Hookipa. As such, I ended up on the rocks over there too... and those rocks were actually way worse!

SUP club on lake Garda. If you pack your lunch, I guess the Garda makes a good place for a full day excursion. Leave early in the morning with the wind from the north (Peler), get where you get, stop, eat, rest, wait for the wind from the south (Ora) to pick up, paddle back... all downwind!
Better check the forecast though...

Talking about downwinders, this weekend it's the turn of the Olukai Maliko race. I'll be at Kanaha saturday afternoon for the free John Cruz concert!

Talking about concerts, if you're in Rome and have my same musical tastes (which means that you are an old fart like me), you should check out this concert organized by Radio Rock. Two cover bands of Pink Floyd and Genesis on stage at the same time... sounds like fun.

Talking about Radio Rock, I just heard a great live interview to the amazing jazz singer Roberta Gambarini by my favorite dj Prince Faster. What a voice! Plenty videos of her on youtube.

And talking about Radio Rock and Prince Faster, here's a positive side effect of moving to Maui that I failed to predict.
Prince's show airs at 6pm week days. That means that when I was in Rome, I almost never got to listen to it because, guess what I was doing most times at 6 pm? Still working...
So now, not only I live in this wonderful island, surf and sail great waves, work a lot less, enjoy my life a lot more and I could go on with another thousand more things, but I can ALSO listen to my favorite radio show through the internet when I wake up (it starts at 6 or 7am Maui time depending on the season)!

Is that a sign of the destiny or what?

best windsurfing music band ever

Just received this old photo.
Don't know the guy with the mustache, but the others are Mark Angulo on the bass (I'll call him colleague, next time I see him...), Kai Katchadourian on the drums and Mike Waltz on the guitar. They played somewhere on the Lake Garda a few decades ago. It seems that the original band included also Brett Lickle, but he wasn't there for the gig.
Now, that's a band with some windsurfing skill!


The photo came in a package of images to publicize a GPS race on lake Garda. I'm happy to publish also the next one...


And now, back to Maui. A windsurfer lady relaxes on the beach.


A surfer lady comes out of the water.


Three swiss sailors start a downwinder.


Colin all alone.


Super iper ultra cropped digital zoom... worth it!


Skyler Haywood did pretty good on the two feet waves.


Lil backie.


A not better identified cheese rolly thing.


Rail grab.


Dean Christener tried a high shove-it (didn't quite go as planned).


Laurent Guillermin warm up high jump.


Then Francky showed up and they were all chop looping around him. This is the gallery of the photos that he took.
1 and 2 are Dean's high shove-it. Later you can see Skyler's rail grab and his cheese rolly thing and plenty more that I haven't seen, because I had to leave at 1.30.
I always like to see different angles shots of the same move. Looks pretty good from the water, uh?



There's a mini bump out of the north. I'll take photos today too from 2.30 on. Be there and rip hard... you may make the blog!

first cuts movie + meditation workshop

Last November I experimented with a gopro mounted on a 3 feet stick attached to the end of the boom.
At the time, I quickly checked the result and wasn't particularly impressed by it, so I decided not to invest any time editing it, also because I was plenty busy sailing and surfing... best winter ever!

Lately I needed to free up some space on my hard disk and I ran into those files again. Before deleting them, I thought I'd give the world a sample of the result, in case someone would find inspiration from it (warning: the camera was often hitting the water in the turns...).

The ideal place where I would put a camera for wave riding is somewhere 6 feet behind the sailor's head. I even thought about building a waist belt (or integrating a plate in an harness) with a pole sticking out the back slightly angled up so that the camera would end up being in that magic spot, but no matter how stiff the connection would be, it would still be too wobbly I think...
Plus, being worked in the waves with a 6 feet pole sticking out of your back doesn't sound like the safest thing one can do...

Maybe a little RC helicopter might do the trick, but with a few problems:
- you need someone who controls the helicopter (and he better be reeeally good at that)
- not sure the other sailors would like to have such a thing flying around in the lineup...
Or maybe a little RC boat? Or even better an RC surfer!
Nah, I'll go instead for the idea I just had. I can't sail these days, so I can invest some time building it.

Some more information of introduction are necessary... sorry.

- When a mount is out of reach, the related clips are super long and editing them to find the worthy action is a tedious job. But I did go through all of them (we're talking two complete sessions) and cut only the pieces that I thought contained interesting stuff. When I do this first cut, I'm usually quite "generous", meaning that I include more than what I think it's strictly necessary, because I don't know yet what's coming next and how the whole video will look like.
When I finally got to the end of it, I said:"that's it, I don't want to put more time into this. I'll publish it as it is...".

- In the first session the camera was mounted upside down, so I tilted the video 180 degrees with the editing sw.
(The firmware patch for upside down filming for the HD camera will be available soon here).
The result is that Lower Kanaha now looks like a port tack spot...
Couple of pretty shots with the sun low on the horizon in this one.

- My editing sw/pc combo (Windows Movie Maker/Sony Vaio with 1 GB ram) is showing clear signs of distress when editing this large HD clips.

- Total lenght is almost 16 minutes and when I looked in my library of music to see if there was a song that matched that lenght, I was stoked to find a glorious piece of music (sorry, tastes are personal) that matched perfectly!

My favorite genre of music when I was a teenager was something called "progressive rock". Genesis and Pink Floyd are usually mentioned as two well known bands to describe the genre, but there were many other good ones.
In Italy we had a couple of bands that managed to have a bit of international success. One of them was called Premiata Forneria Marconi (the blog aficionados will remember that I saw a concert of them last year in Italy).
Back in 1974, they recorded an LP called "Live in USA" and I picked a song called Alta Loma Nine Till Five out of it. Once again, a glorious piece of music in my world.
If you don't like it, just turn the volume off... but you'll miss the best part!
The "poor" editing is actually a bit of a shame, because such a great soundtrack (so many mood swings and rhythm changes) would deserve a much better job...

Allright, enough words, here's the video. But before watching it, please follow CAREFULLY the instructions:
1) watch ONLY if you have enough time
2) watch ONLY if you are in a relaxed state of mind
3) watch ONLY if you are in a quite environment and you can connect decent speakers that can reproduce bass frequencies to your computer (or use good quality headphones). Unfortunately the original recording is quite poor, but that makes the requirement for a good sound system even more critical
4) make yourself comfortable, grab your favorite beverage and eventually assume your substances of choice to help you get even more relaxed.

Enjoy (click here to see it a bit larger).

First cuts from giampaolo cammarota on Vimeo.

Second topic of this post is a meditation workshop that my friend Cheyenne is about to start on May 14.
I was so lucky to be invited to one of his workshops and I found it EXTREMELY interesting!
Here's more info (click on the photo to read).


I also put a banner with a link to his website up. Why?

Lately, I've been contacted by a reader from Colorado.
G,
I love what you are doing and it makes little business sense for me to advertise since my business is here in Colorado. BUT, I do live on Maui about 1/4 of the time ... love the Ocean, love to Windsurf etc.
AND I want to support your gig. It's brilliant. Your articles, and your pics are something I look forward to daily.
More so when I am not on Maui, working hard, and counting the weeks till I return.
So my thought is this. Sign me up for a year, and let's promote someone worthy every month. That can be the Humame Society, a local event, a new place to eat, a Yoga studio or whatever.
Let's pick someone who CAN benefit from this great exposure. I could care less that they know it's being paid for by someone else too.
You come up with some ideas, I'll have a few ... and we'll pick some lucky winners.
It will be good Karma for both of us.
What do you think ?

This is what I replied:
That's a brilliant idea! I like it so much that I thought about donating a monthly banner myself too!
You pick yours and I pick mine, and every month two businesses/institutions/events will get a bit of exposure thanks to you and me... how's that?


He's gonna start in June, instead I'm gonna start now and donate a month of banner to Cheyenne and his Paia Meditation Studio. Check it out, he even has online classes.

By the way, just in case you haven't figured it out yet, a month of a banner on this blog is a great original idea for a gift! ;)

reef cleanup or try to educate people?

Third post update.

Patrick sent the link to the "Tapped" movie preview.

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Second post update.

Blog reader Philipp from Germany sent me an email pointing out that there's a movie called "Hawaii message in the waves" that you can watch on youtube in 5 parts.
I saw the movie already many years ago, check what point 7 of my 10 little things to try to help the environment is:

7. Whenever possible I pick up trash, especially from beaches. I've always done that while teaching at Kanaha, but since I saw the movie "Hawaii a message in the waves", I try to do it everywhere. I love nature and animals and I just can't stand the thought that all that trash will eventually kill a bird or a fish or a turtle.

What I didn't know is that the movie is now online. Posted on May 1st 2009, I can't believe Part 1 has only been seen 643 times... let's pump that number up guys! Post it on Facebook, forums, blogs, let's spread this thing as much as possible... it's an awesome movie!

Here's part 1. I may post the other parts too later on, but you don't have to wait for me to watch them...


PS. Michael Jackson's Pepsi commercial has been seen 11 million times instead... a bit depressing isn't it?

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First post update.
Blog reader Wim from Belgium read the post and sent me this photo of him drinking water from a reusable/refillable container. I'm super happy to post it. Keep sending them, I'll post them all!
My email is on the right where the banners are. Thanks!



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After I did that post about the broken gear I found on the reef, I thought about emailing marine biologist James Douglas about the subject, also because he happens to be a windsurfer who also has a blog .

Here's the questions I sent him:
1) what's the impact of broken gear laying on the bottom of the ocean (specifically on reefs)?

2) how would you compare it to other polluting things that windsurfers do?
My guess is that the process of manufacturing the gear pollutes way more than ditching a broken mast...
To me it also seems that having all those plastic bits floating around and getting eaten by birds and fish is way more harmful to the environment too.

In other words, buying and not recycling unnecessary plastic seems a lot worse then specific windsurfing pollution.

In other more clear words, I think that buying an unnecessary new plastic water bottle instead of refilling a proper water container is a more polluting act than ditching a piece of broken mast (in a life danger situation). Also because maybe a broken mast maybe happens once or twice a year, while I keep seeing windsurfers using and disposing plastic water/soda bottles daily...

3) do you think that organizing a reef cleanup would be an effective way of helping the reef?

Here's the email he kindly replied with (thanks a lot!):

Hi Giampaolo,

I liked that blog post. It’s cool how you’ve turned your camera eye to the underwater environment at Kanaha. From the pictures it looks like mostly rock and coral rubble covered with algae- not much live coral. I have no idea if the reef was always like that, or if there was more live coral in the past. The general trend on reefs all over the world is declining % cover of live coral and increasing % cover of algae. That is bad because without the growth of live coral there is no creation of new coral rock to replace the rock lost to erosion. Without live coral, the entire structure of the reef will eventually disappear, leaving no place for animals to live, and no protection of the shoreline from storm waves.

The main human disturbances that can turn live coral reefs into dead, algae-covered reefs are:

1) Excess nutrients and sediment coming from human activities on the land, because they interfere with the growth of coral, promote the growth of algae, and exacerbate coral diseases.

2) Overfishing, which can reduce numbers of the herbivorous fish and urchins that are needed control the algae. Even if the algae-eating animals are not directly reduced by fishing, they can be indirectly reduced by changes in the food chain that occur when predatory fishes like sharks and groupers are removed.

3) Changes in ocean temperature and acidity related to global warming. High temperatures cause coral bleaching, which is when the corals have to vomit out the microscopic algae they use to create food. If the corals stay bleached too long they starve to death. Increasing acidity is a product of excess carbon dioxide absorbing into the ocean and reacting to form carbonic acid. Carbonic acid lowers the pH of the water and makes it harder for corals and other animals to form shell and skeletal materials. It also increases the rate that coral rock erodes away.

4) Direct physical disturbances to the reef like anchoring, mining, walking on, net entanglement, etc. Windsurfing gear could potentially fall into this category, too. If a lot of it was banging around the reef it could kill the live corals. And a shredded sail tangled around a coral head could literally smother the coral.

The worldwide impact of lost windsurfing gear on coral reefs is probably very, very small compared to the other harmful impacts on reefs and compared to the broader impacts of windsurfing gear manufacturing and stuff like I described in my windsurfing magazine article. However, at a major windsurfing spot like Hookipa or Kanaha the harmful effect of lost gear could certainly be enough to justify a reef cleanup, so I encourage you to organize one if you are so inclined. Keep working on people to not drink out of disposable containers, too, since bottles and cans are a huge part of the plastic ocean trash problem, and even when you think you’re recycling something it can still find its way into the ocean.

Good luck!
James

Comparing the images included in an article he also attached, I'm now 99% sure that the reef at Kanaha is mostly dead already, since it's largely covered by algae. Not sure about Hookipa, will check it out next non windy day.
So, rather than investing my time trying to organize a reef cleanup that would probably be quite inefficient (meaning, we would still leave tons of stuff that we wouldn't see and it's highly possible that it would not be particularly beneficial for the reef since it's dead already), I'm going to invest it in keep trying to educate people to do things in an environment friendly way.

You guys remember this 10 little things I do to try to respect the environment post I did three years ago?

Well, I still do that.
(actually, to be precise, my stick shift car died and now I have an automatic transmission one, but still decent on gas!)

Here's a photo I posted a in another post a few months later.


And here's another one I used in another post in 2009.


Guess what? I still have and use both those metal bottles and that bag. How many plastic bottles and bags did I spare the environment of?
A hell lot, I guess. And that feels good. But it's nothing, since way too many people keeps buying plastic bottles and using plastic bags.

This is a well done animation. I especially like the sentence: "Carrying bottled water is on its way to being as cool as smoking while pregnant".


So, other than trying to remove broken masts from an already dead reef, I'm gonna try to do good for the environment giving you shit if I see you at the beach with a plastic bottle!

Everyone's warned.

new rule for launching windsurfers

The County of Maui has imposed a new rule: windsurfers will have to launch and get back in through a narrow path on the beach.











Allright, allright, don't freak out... I'm just just kidding! :)
Not sure what that is about, probably you can't leave your gear in there, so that the lifeguards can launch/land their jet ski.

Mildly shitty conditions yesterday at Hookipa, but those guys will always do something worthy. I have a few favorite pics. I think it's the first time that a girl gets the top honors.
Junko keeps ripping.


And now let's have a look at 15 minutes of Nico Drasimino's session.
3.46pm


3.48pm


3.49pm


4.01pm


Rest of the photos in chronological order.
Browsinho is still on the island.


He went out early and at the beginning it was all about him.


Lil too zoomed in goiter.


This guy was cruising upwind on that kayak propelled by leg movement. Quite a workout.


Junko.


Pascal.


Nori shows off a beautiful back/shoulders combo. I totally dig chicks with muscles.
Well, I dig them without too...


Junko.


Aurelian.


Looks like I missed a good day Tuesday, but luckily Francky was in the water (photo #30 is unreal) and a guy called Jimmie Hepp (that I haven't met yet... man, does he take awesome photos or what?) was on the cliff.

Pretty grim wave forecast. Pat Caldwell's table shows four days in a row (Friday through Monday) with only the easterly windswell in it... might be the first time I see something like that!
It's a great time to be injured!

PS. Blog reader Guido left his boom at Hookipa last Friday. It's an AL360 Wave 140-200 carbon boom, like this but grey instead of red. Email me if you found it.

surf boat carnage

Extremely dodgy!

epic swimming conditions + where does our broken gear go?

The lack of wind and an extreme morning low tide has made for some epic swimming conditions the last couple of days.

I swam to the reef at Lowers to check out how many broken masts/booms were laying on the bottom. I did find a few.




But really not that many actually. And it seemed that somehow they didn't do too much damage on a reef that looked kind of dead already. I'm sure some creatures found a new home in them.

The reef at lowers it's like the wave that breaks on it: soft, mellow, not sharp at all, pretty uniformly shaped. But please try not to stand on it if you fall there. Also because, although extremely rare and well hidden in holes, there's a few sea urchins here and there.


I was wondering where all the broken stuff goes and I found a partial answer when swimming along the beach... 10 yards from it! Unfortunately, the battery died before I could document it, this is the last photo I took. It shows three pieces of masts and there's five more just above them. Plenty more gear all along the shore.
The current must move the stuff a lot and I guess most of it is probably somewhere downwind.


I'd like to invite all sailors not to ditch gear in the water unless it's strictly necessary.
I'd also like to invite golfers not to practice their driving shots on the beach... I saw HUNDREDS of golf balls!

Looking good with a snorkeling mask has never been as easy task.


I'd like to thank all blog readers: April was a great month with 37,801 unique visitors.


I would also like to thank a new blog sponsor (timesharerelief.com) who bought a couple of text links. Not exactly sure how it works, but having a text link on a highly accessed blog helps the ranking of your website in the search engines.

Just a quick reminder of the prices.
Current prices for a banner: $50/month, or $45/month if you order 3 to 5 months upfront, or $40/month if you order 6 months or more upfront.
Current prices for a one line text link: $25/month or $20/month if you order 6 months or more upfront.