good windy windy cold friday evening. gosh, it was freezing today!!! waves on the north shore was super shitty. bowls was the spot. i got out around 8:45am and it was pretty clean and sunny. then the clouds came and it got windy and cold. then the sun came back out and everything got warm again. the waves were 1 1/2 feet and super fun. i surfed for 3 1/2 hours. i’m so burnt out…. oh, seen a huge whale jump outside the green buoy. first time i seen something like that and couldn’t believe it because it’s so shallow out there. it was a great day to be in the water. thank goodness i have a wetsuit….
i headed down to fiberglass hawaii to pick up some 2oz. fiberglass cloth. yeah, wade tokoro showed it to me the other day and i couldn’t believe they even made it. all this time, i’ve been using 4oz. cloth to fix my boards and ended up sanding half of it off anyway. so now, i got the right cloth to fix my dings. and it’s much easier to work with the resin….
i’ll use this cloth to fix the small dings in my boards. one yard costed me almost $10. not too bad, but not too good. actually it’s pretty expensive stuff….
it was 2004 in the philippines when i was on board a boat with 8 international pro surfers and 8 filipino crew members. the second captain was this super nice guy named manny. being the curious guy i was, i was always next to manny on the top bridge because he use to drive the boat. he taught me how to navigate and to run the big 120′ yacht. manny was really experienced and knew the sea like the back of his hand. then it was in 2007 when i was in the phillipines for the cloud 9 contest. i stopped by in cebu on the way back to say hi to the crew member on the boat. i boarded the boat and was glad to see everybody there, but somebody was missing. it was manny. i asked the chef luma where manny was and she looked at me with a blank face. she told me that manny was chartering another boat from thailand back to the philippines the week before, when they lost all contact in severe storm conditions. the coast guard was in the process of locating the missing boat and crew. luma and i were trying to comfort each other by saying, “manny will come back”. unfortunately, i got word a month later saying that manny or the boat was never found…. this is the only photo i have of manny and i thank john callahan for taking it. we were pulling up to this remote island off eastern luzon and scored a perfect 3-5′ left that has never been surfed before. i still remember looking at manny right after this photo was taking with a big smile and telling him that “this is what we came for.” manny looked back with even a bigger smile and said, “this is nothing”…. manny will surely be missed and i will never forget the kindness he reached out to me on my 2 wonderful boat adventures with him….
