News:

2020
Attempting to do something

Main Menu

As of tonight...

Started by P3nT4gR4m, October 08, 2011, 02:00:08 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Doktor Howl

Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on July 23, 2013, 08:44:12 PM
I got old. Sue me  :argh!:

Yes, but you didn't get feeble.  You're supposed to be feeble, Goddammit.  YOU'RE MAKING THE REST OF US LOOK BAD.

:crankey:
Molon Lube

P3nT4gR4m

It's in the post. Sooner or later I'm bound to break my neck. Then I get my wheelchair or, as I like to call it, "My retirement plan"  :lulz:

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

P3nT4gR4m

Fucking stoked! Finally managed to get a surf on the main wavetrain at Connel. Only been trying since about march

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt5CoVPPlvc

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

P3nT4gR4m

So a funny thing happened a couple of Wednesdays ago. Rockhopping - it'll be the death of me. Literally almost was. I still can't believe I made it out of there alive  :eek:

"Rockhopping" in kayak terms, is fucking about with the interaction of ocean swell and (you guessed it) rocks. There's essentially three features you can play with: Pours, Climbs and Slots.

A Pour happens when a swell runs up and over the top of a rock feature. Time it right and you can scoot over a boulder that was sticking up out of the water a couple of seconds previously. Time it wrong and you're left, high and dry on top of it or, even worse, dragged back into the hole that usually forms when the wave sloshes back off.

A Climb happens when the rock or (more often) cliff face is too high for the water to get over. The surge basically climbs up the cliff then sloshes back down, again often creating a hole of turbulence on it's way back out. A bit riskier than a pour if you fuck up your timing here and get stuck in the hole when the next swell swoops down from above and grinds your shit into the rockface but you generally have lots of room to manoeuvre or pull a sacrificial capsize to get you out of trouble.

Then there's slots. A slot happens when a swell piles through a gap between two rocks. If you fuck up one of these, you're essentially pinned there, waiting for the next swell to land on you. Timing wise you always want to be on top of a surge, riding it. Get in front of one and it's riding you. Get in front of one in a slot and it's going to hurt. The longer and narrower the slot, the more dangerous it's going to be.

It goes without saying that, when dealing with Sharp rocks and hundreds of tons of water, only an idiot would be there without a helmet...

In my defence, we weren't planning a rockhopping trip. We'd set out for a 30k jaunt round Eye peninsula on Lewis. My mate, Neil, his wife Lynn and myself. 30k is nothing. Neil and I? We piss 30k but his wife aint a strong paddler. This trip was going to take all day. A couple of hours in and I'd started to get a bit bored. Instead of going point to point across the bays, like the other two were doing, I followed the coast, to add a bit of distance to my trip and help slow me down to the speed the other two were going.

Then the swell started picking up. I was hugging the shore, messing about in the boomers and features the swell was making on the cliffs and rocks. I wasn't "rockhopping" per se. There is a level of water that carries absolutely no risk to someone with my experience and this was well within the safety zone. Problem was the swell kept getting bigger, the features more fun, the margins neater, consequences more serious...

Before I know it, I'm climbing 7 or 8 foot surges and grinding over rocks and bouncing through slots, on he ragged edge of my abilities. No helmet. Getting lucky and upping the ante on pretty much every feature I came across. Next thing I know I'm eyeing up a 50 meter channel between two islands, with a boomer at the back, sending a reflected wave back out to meet the next swell coming in. We call these "clapotis" looks like a depth charge going off. Unpredictable too. You're essentially dealing with the interaction of potentially three waves at a time, exploding up, sucking holes and recirculating vertical whirlpools all forming in a complicated and hard to predict order.

So I fucked up the timing. Rode a surge in clean but got stopped dead in the middle by the reflection coming back and then kicked off to the side and pinned longways in a crag. Then the water dropped 6 feet, leaving me stranded up there. I was just about keeping my balance, no mean feat when your only point of contact is either end of the boat but I made the mistake of glancing over the side to see how far down it was. This small movement of my head was enough to tip me off balance.

So now I'm hanging upside down, six feet above some seriously gnarly teeth of rock. Lucky as fuck moment no.1 - the boat stayed pinned. If it'd dropped out the crag when I spun over I was landing headfirst on the rocks. My skull would have caved in like an egg, milliseconds before my neck shattered. I breathed out. So far so good but I wasn't out the woods yet. The next thing that was going to happen was a couple of hundred tons of foaming salt water were going to come battering through the slot and drag me upside down along the channel.

I tucked my body in and popped my spraydeck. No point trying to roll, the gap wasn't wide enough to swing my paddle out and every second my head was down there the risk of cracking it open on a boulder increased. The surge came in and I shimmied out the cockpit and made for the surface. Lucky as fuck moment no.2 - Somehow, in all the turbulence, I missed the brickwork! Getting out the slot, swimming, with my boat in one hand and the paddle in the other took forever. Just when I thought I was clear, a reflection would drag me back into the middle again. The boat was bouncing about like fuck in the turbulence. Lucky as fuck moment no.3 - at one point I went under the boat and felt a rock on one side of my head and the boat on the other. Somehow it didn't impact, just glanced.

Eventually I managed to get out and climbed back in my swamped cockpit. I looked down at my knuckles. I was leaking red stuff from a 1cm surface graze. Aside from a couple of bruises on my arms and legs that was the sum total of my injuries. Shaking my head in disbelief I paddled out to let Neil and Lynn know I was still in one piece, grinning like a lunatic.

I was fucking pissed off when I watched the headcam footage back that night. Fucking battery had run out about half an hour before the slot incident. That would have been the mother of all youtube clips :argh!:

Brilliant holiday - here's a couple of vids I did get. Music by our very own Synaptyx

Example of a slot but very tame, due to small swell

Wall climb from the day in question. This is the last thing the camera recorded

Playing in my new surf boat

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Q. G. Pennyworth

Glad you're not crushed in a million pieces!

P3nT4gR4m

Yeah me too. It did cross my mind that maybe I'm immortal but I've instituted a new policy of tying a brain bucket on my back deck if I'm going anywhere in any kind of swell. Just in case.

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.

That was a close one. Or three. If you were a cat you'd be down a few lives. Damn, man.
Weevil-Infested Badfun Wrongsex Referee From The 9th Earth
Slick and Deranged Wombat of Manhood Questioning
Hulking Dormouse of Lust and DESPAIRâ„¢
Gatling Geyser of Rainbow AIDS

"The only way we can ever change anything is to look in the mirror and find no enemy." - Akala  'Find No Enemy'.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Hey, don't die, Pent. You would be surprised by who has turned out to not be immortal.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Telarus

Wow. Well described brush with naked strife. Glad you made it through to tell the story, man.
Telarus, KSC,
.__.  Keeper of the Contradictory Cephalopod, Zenarchist Swordsman,
(0o)  Tender to the Edible Zen Garden, Ratcheting Metallic Sex Doll of The End Times,
/||\   Episkopos of the Amorphous Dreams Cabal

Join the Doll Underground! Experience the Phantasmagorical Safari!

P3nT4gR4m

If there is an Eris, like a really real Eris, I'm pretty sure she's made of water

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Anna Mae Bollocks

Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on November 02, 2013, 09:33:12 AM
If there is an Eris, like a really real Eris, I'm pretty sure she's made of water

She's NUTS.
"Imma kill you.....PSYCH!"
"Imma kill you.....PSYCH!"
"Imma kill you.....PSYCH!"

Holy crap.
Scantily-Clad Inspector of Gigantic and Unnecessary Cashews, Texas Division

P3nT4gR4m

Haha! Sounds pretty much what growing up with the sea is like. Haven't had a "near death" for a few years, tho. I used to chase them for adrenaline, trying to push what I could get away with and still be alive and bug-eyed and panting and not looking forward to the comedown but, fuck it, that's why drugs were invented, innit.

In my old age, I've kinda mellowed. Coupled with the fact that the stuff that almost killed me all those times before, would be nothing to me now. The more you do things, the more you get better at them. It's a universal rule. It's more about just being there, now, carving my way through roiling, dancing ocean. Where I usually am, it's big and it's difficult but I'm really in no physical danger unless me and my group fuck up in a phenomenal fashion.

Also, I don't paddle completely shitfaced anymore. So that probably makes it a bit more safe too 8)

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

P3nT4gR4m

I FUCKING HATE THIS VIDEO

So Sunday, there I'm planning a surf mission. There was promise of 8 footers at Machrihanish (a 350 mile round trip) but, midweek I got a tip off that there was some really long, clean swell due in at my local break. P3nTGF has wanted to go surfing for a while now but 8 foot is a bit heavy for beginners. The local swell wouldn't be anywhere near that big but really long and glassy. Perfect beginner waves. It was a no-brainer. I checked with the guy who'd texted me the tip - "Is this info good? MSW is showing nothing" MSW - is magicseaweed.com They compile half a dozen or so swell prediction models, running on various servers, to come up with a best guess at what your local break is going to look like for the next couple of weeks. It's been wrong before but usually it's pretty close to true, with the accuracy improving as the day you're looking at draws closer.

"Should be good. Source is reliable." answers my mate. Fine. Bells it is.

So Sunday arrives and I get a text from Kev - "Bells is flat" :argh!:

If I was going to Machrihanish, I'd have had to drive up on the saturday night and camped over. Fuck it my weekend was a bust. So I cracked open a beer, blazed up a joint, loaded up Adobe Premier and made a new vid. Which I fucking hate for obvious reasons.  :cry:

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

P3nT4gR4m

Last weekend was awesome in one way and a complete bust in most of the rest. Finally got P3nTGF out in surf. She lasted about 20mins and came off the water with a mild dose of shock and a kidney injury that left her peeing a tiny amount of blood for a couple of days. Apparently "the videos don't get across the actual force of getting hit with an exploding bus made out of water". She was totally blown away. like actually blown away - from the boat. Or vice versa. First clip is hilarious!.

So I was out in the surf "slipper" but the waves were shit for it. It needs clean lines to have fun in so I switched to the boat that had evacuated my "IT WANTED TO KILL ME!" protege and went out for a kickabout. Messy is fun, a good workout and a great skills polisher in a longboat.

So I caught a little section on camera with lots of splashing about and an almost-pirouette (waves were too small to get it right around) and I've had this idea for ages about trying to apply time fuckery to recreate that action movie style that happened somewhere between Matrix and 300 where it speeds up and slows down in rhythm. Dunno if there's a name for it but I'm sure you know the effect I'm talking about, right?

So here's an almost-pirouette done in WTF-time and some other bollixing around with mixed up pacing changes http://youtu.be/Uwx5xnA0_yk

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

P3nT4gR4m


I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark