(A version of this story was first published in Boards, 2014 Autumn Issue.) I’m sitting in a friend’s Hamburg apartment off the Alster, eating her marzipan and licorice even though I should be writing about a trip I did almost a year ago to Madagascar. The deadline for this essay is over a week past, […]
Here are some pictures of Kevin Pritchard that capture what I love about windsurfing. If you don’t like reading or are short on time, look at the pictures and then think about windsurfing indoors. Or, read my story below. On the trading floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange, I was told “why” is for […]
I’m in California for the first stop of the AWT tour. Unfortunately, today was stormy and lacking in waves– and I happen to be under the weather as well with a really annoying head cold. The forecast on Friday calls for gale force winds and a new swell. It might be the only day of […]
Are you comfy and curled up in the cozy glow of your computer? Perfect, just the time to revisit cold cold Ireland. Goodbye warm, windy Maui. Hello to the chilly, rolling green hills of NE Ireland for the final installment of my Irish Saga. Ireland skunked me. Well, kind of. I did not […]
I’m back on Maui and the conditions are super fun, but here is a flashback to last month’s Irish adventure. 4. It makes sense to go in wintertime from warm Hawaii, home of the best waves in the world, to cold Ireland in search of waves. Right?…wait… Am I insane? “Never leave wind […]
A short Irish interlude for today: The amazing people at google have fleshed out the streets of rural northwest Ireland. So I’d like to post a few photos here snagged from google maps in order to illustrate a bit more of my Irish trip. The Irish, of course, speak English. But while […]
Ireland is full of black things—Guinness, clouds, black pudding, stormy seas—and they define the culture there. The most perplexing of these dark things is peat. What is peat?, I hear all the non-Irish say. To put it simply, peat is mud that burns. Mud that is made in bogs. Bogs are acidic and […]
Ahhhhh. The adventure begins to begin. Seated beside Mikey in his van, I set out for County Sligo to catch my first Irish waves and wind. The drive from Dublin to the west coast takes about 3 hours, possibly 2.5. We arrived at the spot around noon and the car’s outside temperature gauge told […]
A catalog of this adventure is required. So here it is in 5 parts. And this first bit is the boring but necessary introduction. The middle three parts will capture the main action of the trip (or the lack there of). And the final installment will reflect on the whole, or something. 1: I landed […]
Okay, so I’m still in washington airport because despite running down corridors and sprinting up stair steps (an activity I take an unusual liking to in airports– even when I’m not late), I missed my flight to Newark. So, I used the 4 hour setback to spend some time in the United Red Carpet […]