Masedog

Characters from Surf Tour II - Sam Mason. The man who let me know Warwick Surf was a thing a year ago, when I decided I wanted to learn how to surf, I owe him a lot. This guy receives outrageous amounts of respect from the surf crew. The man achieves on every level (so many levels!).

As outrageous as his skills are, today was possibly even more outrageous. While sleeping and waking up on the floor in our tents isn't in any way comfortable, it definitely helps to have had some drinks beforehand. 50 something of us on tour and most of us made it down to the surfing beach in town at our own pace. The beach is rocky to say the least, but a short walk gets you to a beautiful secluded stretch of sand where the waves are intense between two sets of rocks. Along the steep cliffs battered by the Atlantic, its beautiful. The sleepy town of Sagres is scenic as well, spread out over an arid landscape, with beautiful southern-style minimalist white houses dotted around. The centre of town has a couple of bars, restaurants, surf shops and supermarkets. Nothing much, but makes for a chilled out place to stay. In fact, our trip overall was both relaxed and intense, if that makes sense. Here's how an average day went:

Wake up easily in the late morning, make your way down to the beach via the supermarket, potentially grabbing a lift with the van. Lay out on the sand, go surfing for a couple of hours, on and off while the tide is low. Then when the tide is too high, head to the other side of the beach where the bistro is, for some sangria, before having a couple drinks at the bars. Supermarket, back to the campsite, maybe maybe shower (no showers on tour!)? Then get ready for a BIG NIGHT.

Managed to surf quite a bit today. In fact, the first wave I attempted and caught was a green one outback! Couldn't have been happier. Moving from a shortboard (which I was using in Brazil) to a longboard makes life so much easier. After, a couple of us including Jade, Ben and Kate went to a pizzeria to try and watch the football, but just ended up talking the whole time since the screen was so far.

In the evening, we all got together at the campsite for flunkyball. Pokemon-themed night, I managed to throw together some towels for a zubat outfit. Which promptly got ditched for the game. As expected, I got overly competitive and sent a bunch of cups of sangria flying all over Dolly, in what was probably the most tense drinking game I've played in ages. On top of that, the massive audience, dramatic lighting from the van headlights and the the throne of beer made for an intense atmosphere. The game went on for ages due to so many penalties, but we bagged it in the end! Too bad we never got to finish the tournament, flunkyball's like a larger version of drunk ball, which is pretty much my favorite game ever!

Then of course we circled, before getting kicked out of the campsite due to curfew, and headed into town. Centaur rode a donkey, we danced a lot again... why can't I remember anything else?

Song of the day - I Got U

peace


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Photo editing geek stuff: while editing this one, I struggled with a lot of posterization over the sky, due to the gradienting of the luminosity. Couldn't find any way of achieving the same effect without the posterization, as I was editing from jpeg. So instead I tried to counter the posterization via a subtle combo of monochrome gaussian noise (Add Noise filter) with a Gaussian Blur filter on top of it, just for the sky. Think it worked out alright.