Friday, December 21, 2007
Santa Barbara Surfing will be mostly without updates until the New Years. Happy Holidays to all. A few last bits of info:
Nick is selling a 7'2" Yater in the classifieds for a buddy.
Doug is selling a 6'3" Bill Johnson for his son.
Edhat links to this great montage of Sandspit Wipeouts from December 5th.
Thanks to all who submitted photos of the Dec 4-5 swell.
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Friday, December 14, 2007
Contests #4 and #5 of the NSSA Northwest Open were held this past weekend in Santa Cruz. Saturday was contest #4 at Pleasure Point and Sunday was contest #5 at Steamer Lane. The NSSA has a full writeup on the event and below we'll try to highlight the locals. If we missed any local placings let us know as we are not up on all the names.
Demi Boelsterli
Demi appeared to have an amazing weekend, placing first 
in Saturday's and Sunday's Open Womens division to continue her 1st place standing. From Janice Aragon of NSSA (Photo: NSSA):
Women’s competition saw Demi Boelsterli maintain her relentless run nailing her fourth victory of the season. The reigning West Coast Champion set the pace with a strong frontside attack at both Pleasure Point and the Lane. She positioned herself on the meatier waves and was annihilating the lip at both venues. At the Lane, she posted the division’s high wave score of 9.0 in her semifinal.
TJ Pingle
TJ placed 4th on Saturday in the Open Women's, which appears to be her first NW Open event of the season.
Cousteau Christopher
Cousteau surfed in the Mini Grom division and placed 5th in Saturday's contest and 3rd in Sunday's contest to be in 3rd overall in the NW Open Mini Grom.
Samson Anderson Magazino
Samson surfed in the Open Longboard division and placed 3rd on Saturday and 3rd on Sunday to be in 2nd place overall, just a few points shy of 1st. Samson also surfed in NW Open Mens.
Congratulations to all the local competitors. The next contest for NW Open is in April, but a Gold Coast Explorer contest is scheduled for December 22nd and 23rd in Ventura which we'll report on around December 28th.
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Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Some photos are starting to trickle in from this swell (note: this post will update a few times with new links in reverse order). Feel free to compliment the photographers if you like the shots, and if you see yourself or someone you know let them know, you might get a copy.
Updates December 13 
Anthony of Liquid Pix Photography shot a mere 140 photos at Sandspit on Wednesday also. One of his photos to the right. Between all of the photographers we've gotten photos of from Sandspit on Wednesday, we may have every wave covered.
Correction Confusion: A reliable reader thinks Photo #2 of 'Slater' below is actually Santa Barbara's Chris Brown. If that is the case, then Photo #1 is also. Then we started to think maybe Photo #3 isn't Slater either. Pro Surfer Hounds are advised to comment.
Slater mania continues, with Steve tipping off of two videos with Slater in them surfing here last week on Surfline, Video 1 and Video 2.
Bo Criss redesigned his main page for this swell, and added a ton of photos to his Dec 4 photos when we were out with him. He also has photos from Rincon on Dec 5.
Updates December 11, Noon 
Jon Shafer took the photo to the right of Kelly Slater on the beach at Sandspit. Also, as a correction, there are some photos of Slater riding some waves, taken by Jen at the Spit: Photo 1, Photo 2 , and Photo 3.
Ron was also out shooting at Sandspit on Wednesday in some photos on his SmugMug site (our favorite here.) He also has some shots from Rincon on Wednesday as well as other breaks nearby (our favorite here).
Tom from Spectral Photography has some photos up from last Wednesday in the Goleta area on the bottom of his surfing page, or start here and keeping hitting next. Nice drop here.
Updates December 10, Noon 
Jon Shafer of Rincon Surf Blog has some more photos online, these ones are from Sandspit on Wednesday. He has the 3rd photo we've seen of Slater in Santa Barbara, and we've still yet to see a photo of him on a wave.
We've linked to David's Powdrell's photos earlier, but he has two more pages of photos up at SmugMug, now Page 2 and Page 3. We really like David's photos for showing how consitently big Rincon was, and that people were pulling off some big waves. David is happy to send photos to people who see themselves in his shots.
Our first link to some water shots from this swell, this courtesy of Morgan, who contributes photos and videos to the site quite often and has his Big Wednesday Flickr Set. Morgan posted up in the channel at Sandspit, took a few on the head, got sucked into the Harbor, but ended up shooting Tom Curren among others.
Jen has some great photos of 'Wednesdays Pro Party' including this sick tunnel. Jen as also added some from Rincon and sunset at the 'spit.
Updates December 7, Noon
Tom Mondugno from Goleta Surfing has some photos from Tuesday Campus Point which we've added to the online gallery. He also has a lot more on his site and some a storyin in the Valley Voice today. In addition he adds some story to the day at Campus:
Tuesday at Campus was a circus. Broken boards littered the beach, bodies littered the lineup, the parking was a joke and a crowd was on the cliff at the point. And then the great one, Kelly, descended upon us, only to get smashed by a good old Goleta closeout. Great entertainment all around.
Andre has put up a great webpage with his photos on it, titled First Big Winter Swell, which covers Goleta and IV Surf spots in a well documented exploration of December 4 and 5, 2007. Our award for most well displayed photoessay of the swell.
Fallout from the big swell: a reader has a softop for sale.
Updates December 6, 5:00pm:
Jon Shafer has some photos from Wednesday at Rincon.
Paul has some photos up on his site of Leadbetter and the harbor area.
Cody Duncan has some more photos, this time of Sandspit with names such as Yadin Nicol and Kelly Slater.
Theo has some shots up from Rincon on Wednesday also.
Also, this from Travis:
Lost board at Devereux: 6ft Randy Cone, double wing swallow with rainbow spears on the deck. Travis Bower 687-6583
Updates December 5, 5:00pm:
Tim 
Halberg is a wedding photographer who got talked into shooting the waves at Rincon this morning. The results are outstanding, although Tim was a rookie at surf photography he captured some nice Rincon essence. A few photos are on his blog, and you can view them all in his gallery.
That brings us over to Tim's buddy Cody Duncan, who is also a photographer out at Rincon and his photos on his blog. Beside these dawn patrol photos, he has some from the evening before.
Photos Pope took of Poles around 9:45 this morning in a 3 minute photo shoot. That is Callie Bowdish of calliebowdish.com on that long wave.
Speaking of Callie Bowdish, here are some photos she took of Sandspit yesterday. There are some sick shots in there. She also has a few shots up from Deveraux yesterday.
We've 
started a Web Album from the readers submissions. So far we've got two from Kathy of Campus Point and Goleta Beach.
Also note here are some links to some more photos that Edhat has. Leadbetter broken board, David Powdrell's photos are some of the best at showing the sheer size, Rincon Photos has some photos of a few sleepy places that were not sleepy during the swell, some sunset shots further East, and more Dec 4 photos here and here. Ian Miley at Campus Point, and Edhat's Leadbetter shots. Some great stuff.
San Diego friend of the site Mario Covic, has some shots up from Swamis today.
Yesterday's photos from Bo Criss further to the West.
It seems around this time every year you see some cliche photo caption of "Joe Schmoo unwraps his Christmas present at Rincon." We're going beyond that. We want a caption that says "Joe Schmoo unwraps his Hanukkah present at Rincon." Make it happen.
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The cat has been out of the bag for a long time now, so we see no harm in circumventing the usual policy of keeping mum during swell time. There are plenty of readers looking for photos from all of those lens's out on those beaches. On that note, send your photos/videos, your links to photos/videos, or any reports of unusual places breaking. So far we only have this set of photos from Bo from Dec 4th afternoon. Use discretion as the the policy of not exposing sensitive spots still applies.
Photo: Bo Crisis
This is how it's broken down for us:
Tuesday, December 4th, Dawn Patrol
Campus Point with Greggory, Kyle and 50 other acquaintances as the swell was filling in. Overhead out at the point and Poles was looking good. Nothing was out of control yet, just a good solid Campus Point day. Surf Country Doug and Stewart, usual fixtures in that lineup, were making good use of it.
Tuesday, December 4th, Dusk Patrol
A Gaviota Coast pointbreak with Kyle. Bo took photos which are available on his Circling Hawk website (he took about 400 shots so if you were out between 4-5pm on this stretch of coast email him). 1.5X overhead with some cleanups in the DOH range. Out for just over an hour with one good wave to show for it.
Wednesday, December 5th, Dawn Patrol
First Hour: Infrequently breaking point south of town. 40 guys out, which was 32 too many. Sets were a bit overhead, tide was too high making this spot feel pretty blah.
Second Hour: Very infrequently breaking spot near the Sea Center. Overhead and mushy on the outside, head high or so and railing on the inside. Lots of detritus out there, even ran over a 2x4 in the lineup. Around 8am the groms that ditched school attacked the place in force as if it was 1st period.
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Santa Barbara Surfing. Created by Tim Maddux. Continued by Pope.
Photo: Bo Crisis