Chop Suey, Venice Style

Mixed bag at Venice this morning.  We got there early and it was windy and choppy.  Things cleared up a bit as the morning progressed.  It was at times disorganized and bumpy, plus there were plenty of close outs.  Every once in awhile a workable wave would show up.  Waves were mostly 2s and 3s with occasional bigger sets.  The current was also pretty strong today so we were constantly battling that. When its all added up, it was sort of fun and sort of like hard work.  I also took out a board mounted camera today, the GoPro Surf cam.  Its a fun camera to mess around with. It shoots stills and video, and comes with a tough housing that can take a pretty severe beating.  The video quality is ok (good for youtube). The stills are really nice, crisp and clear, not blurry.  You can set the camera to take a picture every 2 or 5 seconds, and it will also take sequence shots.  Right now its only available as a board mounted camera, but soon they are coming out with a wrist mount which will be cool to shoot action shots of other dudes getting rides.  There are several drawbacks to it, the biggest one is that in my experience it is Wave Kryptonite.  More often than not, when I decide to get it out for some pics the conditions end up sucking.  When I have it on my board its a little harder to concentrate on surfing, but after a few minutes you forget its there. For that reason I usually don’t take it out on the really good days because I’d rather have fun surfing and not worry about taking pictures.  Besides those drawbacks it is a lot of fun to take pictures with, and sometimes you can get pretty cool results.

Heres a few pictures of the mornings proceedings