Oh Johanna

Last weekend we went camping at Johanna beach. It's been a while since we were there last, but not much has changed. It's a really lovely, wild place.



The ocean is a bit rough to swim in properly but if you get to the beach at low tide there are lots of little rockpools to bathe in. This one is shaped like a sarcophagus.



We didn't do that much swimming, though. We mainly read our books and went for walks. Tess was loving it.



Post walk rubdown



Rosie and Tess



Highly recommended.

Demo

After actually skating for a few hours yesterday, we made our way to St Kilda to watch a demo by the Four Star team.



Lots of people were there including Ed, who was sporting a 3d shirt in honour of our fave BA.



Pre-demo entertainment was provided by a throng of loudly dressed, pre-pubescent skate rats (and Will Stoyles).



Joey



Skids



Young drop-in.



Note to self: tan shorts with no top makes you look like you're not wearing any clothes.



Moist



Then they appeared! TNT has long hair again and skates amazingly. I love how he smacks down his tail on the end of every ollie.



Corey Kennedy appears to have gone quite mad.



There's the guy who made me want to make clothes so I could look more like him. He also made me want to listen to De La Soul, Beastie Boys and dedicate the rest of my life to skating. I was too shy to talk to him.



Another favourite - Brian Anderson. To my amazement, he remembered me when Tim and I approached him! 'Still skating, taking photographs and making art?' he asked. Remember when I drove him around six (!) years ago?



These demos make me think about how skateboarding is an industry like any other, but also a sort of cult.



Sammy was loving it.



This was straight after Koston did an air off an esky.



The mandatory product toss closed things off. A second or two after I took this photo, the wheels Ishod had thrown slid up the bowl transition and hit me in the crotch. It took me by surprise.



Ishod was amazing. It was like he was charmed on his board. Even when his board rolled away from him, it would roll back somehow. He floated around like a spirit.



Although demos are always kind of strange, I love them. Seeing these guys skate in the flesh reminds me of how awesome skateboarding is, and how if you're really confident, things work better than if you are timid.

Sammy briefly back on board

As you might know, Sam broke his leg about four years ago and hasn't been able to skate properly since. It's fine because, you know, there's more to life than skateboarding and Sam has used the past few years becoming one of the finest web developers in Melbourne, but I know he misses skating sometimes. He comes out with us a fair bit and coaches from the sidelines, talking me into doing tricks because they're 'easy' and because he presumed I could do them already. Sam even got a board and wheels a while ago, but they've been sitting in his apartment gathering dust for over a year, awaiting accoutrements he's always too busy to acquire. Anyway, a few weeks ago we went to Reservoir and Sam was in rare form, taking turns on my board and sneaking around everywhere doing interesting, funny things. It was quite a thing to see, as if he never broke his leg. I asked him if I could take a photo of this wallie feeble and he did about ten in a row, each better than the last.



I filmed a nose wheelie Sam did up a wedge ramp, and he landed it while we were both laughing quite hard at a joke. His session came to an abrupt halt when he tried to slide up the curved rail and shot out backwards, landing awkwardly on the old leg. It looked weird. That was a few weeks ago and he hasn't been able to skate since. Fingers crossed it gets better soon, and he gets some trucks for his board so he can stop showing me up.

Boards up a tree

We spent Australia Day visiting some skateparks down towards the Mornington Peninsula. We ended up at Frankston skatepark, and on our way out, Joey asked me if I thought he should throw his board in a tree. He often does this kind of thing when he wants to spice things up a bit. He just likes to do something crazy to see what happens next, like a plot twist in a movie. My answer is usually no, but the reaction is invariably the same: he does it anyway.



Under the cover of trying to knock his board out of the tree, Joey proceeded to throw the rest of our boards up there too. It's a big tree!



Then he proclaimed to the skatepark that the person to return our skateboards would receive his deck as a reward, and two kids scurried up the tree in a flash.



There goes mine, I think. You can see the other kid if you search for him in the lower levels of the tree. He was doing some branch shaking.





Dion's board got caught on a lower branch on its way down.



So he knocked it down himself.



And it landed on his head.



Mission accomplished.



Poor Dion got cleaned up at the 'kiosk' while we fell about in guilty hysterics.



This kid got a new board. Joey drove home because Dion had concussion.