Saturday, December 12, 2009

Winds: W 20 - 30, gusts to 40.

This picture of my rowboat sitting on the bottom of the bay is relevant to surfing because this blow-out tide is caused by the extremely hard offshore winds we've had the since Thursday. The wind blows all the water in the Barnegat Bay out of the Barnegat Inlet and the Little Egg Inlet (I'm guessing probably more out of the Barnegat Inlet because of the wind direction), and then it creates these extremely low tides. This same wind is the reason that the really great waves we had on Wednesday (which I missed) got a lot smaller for Thursday (which I also missed) and then were non-existent by Friday (nothing left to miss). Oh well, there will be more.
 
On Thursday I pretty much finished shaping the blank, fine-tuned it and everything. I noticed in this blank (and the last one I did, both U.S. Blanks) that there are small pits in the blank which must've been little air bubbles inside the foam. It didn't matter so much on the last one, which I had planned on glassing clear from the beginning, but it might matter on this board, because I'm going to airbrush the blank and those spots will show up darker. I think what I'm going to try tomorrow is a tip from Swaylock's: fill the spots with a mix of granulated sugar with a little bit of resin. Supposedly this mixture will show the least out of all the remedies. I did get the 9" Greg Liddle flex fin in the mail today, which is a Christmas fin (but I'm allowed to use it before). I can't wait to try it out on a couple boards, but I especially can't wait to finish this board and try it, which hopefully will be before Christmas. The rest of the glassing stuff should come this week, so I'm figuring a little more airbrush practice tomorrow, fill those air bubbles, maybe try to paint the blank during the week, and hopefully glass next weekend, wave pending. Speaking of waves, looks like we'll have something Monday, which hopefully I'll be able to catch before and after work. We'll see....

After looking at these pictures, I can't help but feel really grateful to get to see and be surrounded by this stuff every single day. The people who evacuate the Island after Labor Day don't know what they're missing. Let's keep it that way.

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