Blue Edge Magazine

Blue Edge Magazine July 2007 Issue

BlueEdge 2007 Photographer's Issue

It's like riding a great wave. It's fleeting, yet memorable.

However, once it's over you want another and another. It's the same way for photographers.

An epic shot is never enough. It might be up on the wall or grace the pages of a surfing publication for all eyes to see, but the proverbial "what have you done for me lately" looms large for each photographer wanting to make a name for him or herself.

It's why surfers surf and lens men push the shutter.

The Blue Edge 2007 Photo Annual is a collection of images taken from the past year and that's all. It's a tight edit of photos from right out the back door and around the globe.

Flip through the pages and absorb the action, because before you know it, 2008 will be upon us.

Chuck Graham, Editor, BE

Blue Edge Magazine June 2007 Issue

Pavones

6 DEGREES North
I guess my daughter Sarah’s right (she usually is). She's been insisting for awhile now that I get some kind of living trust or Will or something, especially if I’m gonna be traveling as much as I have been. It sunk in last week, half way into a four hour bus ride from San Jose, Costa Rica, to a small town south named San Isidro General. Usually my wife Debi and I rent a car to cruise around Costa Rica, but this time our friends that live in San Isidro offered to drive, so we decided to bus it to their place.

Traveling for surf is an inherently dangerous business, and using public transport i.e, buses and ferries, usually increases that risk substantially. The bus driver was passing eight cars at once, going down very steep mountain roads, with cliffs on each side. No one really seemed to notice, especially the 62 year old Tico man who'd been talking my ear off since he figured out I understand Spanish. By the time we got to San Isidro, I knew his life story, and he knew mine.

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Haida Gwaii

Hours of Darkness
Trailing the Raven in Haida Gwaii
Words and Photos by Michael Kew

“Better put your jackets on,” the stewardess warned. “It’s a bit breezy out there.”
Tyler Smith, Raph Bruhwiler, Josh Mulcoy, Chris Burkard, and I stepped through the Dash 8’s door and were nearly blown off the airplane stairs. The wind was sharp, the air freezing. Black storm clouds loomed. Alaska lay within sight. Behind us were jagged, snow-covered mountains, and ahead lay shallow Hecate Strait, one of the world’s most feared waterfetches, just wicked today, smeared white by the southeasterly gale.

“At least it’s offshore somewhere!” someone yelled over the din.
Of course, this was expected. Daily, for months leading up to our departure, I’d monitored Haida Gwaii’s weather online, and the forecasts were repetitive, like the one posted the day of our arrival:

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Bali: On a Road Less Traveled

Bali: On a Road Less Traveled

By David Pu’u

It has been said many times by writers and travelers: “Bali is an amazing, magical experience.” I had heard that from Aussie traveler and surfer Jim Banks who had been there thirty years prior, exploring the surf potential: “Mate you HAVE to go there” was his principal direction. Being a little slow, it only took me those
thirty years.

I have found that the Gods of Bali dictate the tempo and timbre of the voice, heartbeat and siren song that drew a long history of transients into the island country from the ancient Chinese to present day Euro tourists, Japanese, a dwindling number of Aussies and now only occasional Americans. A world in turmoil has thrown Bali on the do not call list for international tourism. The US consulate had warnings up as we had left, about radical terrorism threats in Bali and Java. Asking around, I had decided to come anyway. It was a relief to see who and what actually controlled this part of the world. It definitely was not Al Quaida, as I was to learn in passing. It was a people who embraced me and taught me about the dance with the Gods of their land.

A case in point would be Petulu. The village we stayed in. In the sixties a clash with government troops had caused the entire village to be slaughtered. Genocide as our driver Gusti had described it. An even more horrible concept than a Western mind could accommodate when one experiences the closeness of the Balinese family unit. The silent homes of the vanquished lay dormant, waiting seemingly, he said. But for what? A couple seasons later something odd occurred. White herons descended into the trees above the village, a huge number of them. The Balinese believe. It was said to be the incarnation of their belief and proof by their Gods: the slaughtered innocent returned in the guise of those white herons. They are there to this day. I was dumbfounded when I saw that they would return at sunset each night to roost overhead. But that is “The Real Bali”: a land that urges one to believe.

Then there is the smile. Yes, a miraculous thing when one hails from the West where smiles are reserved for special occasions. In Bali people just look at you, and the first reaction is generally a smile. It is a reflection of what they have on the inside I found, and entirely infectious. I was a little confused when the first light of a Balinese smile fell on me, as it was in passing through Customs, a place where stories of touts and forced offerings to the government abound. The customs officer did it when he waved us through, opting NOT to search our huge pile of luggage, gear and boards.

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Wavelengths
Text and Photo by Michael Kew
A Wave Runs Through It

Owls hooted in darkness, frogs croaked in the marsh, wind swooshed loudly through the pines and gnarled cypress. At the campground it was a cold, heavy night—nights behind storms are always so, the sky impenetrable, moonless, starry, and with cold hands I held cold bottles of beer, drinking one after another, until finally the frogs and wind and roar of surf knocked me out.
At first light I smelled cow dung—the wind was offshore. I rose quickly and walked out to the beach, where large swell broke with mass confusion. There was no one around, no runners or dog walkers, no coffee drinkers, no fishermen, no surfers. It was six-thirty on a freezing Tuesday morning in late January, night mist still clinging to the beach, gulls huddling together at the mouth of Salmon Creek, flowing fast and fat with rain and brown farm silt.
East was a psychedelic sunrise, orange and pink swirls painting the sky above the ridges of Mount Roscoe and Irish Hill, the grassy slopes specked with silhouettes of sheep and black beef cattle. To the north was rocky coast easing eastward into these soft hills, unspoiled by homes or wineries, and to the south lay a thousand acres of sand dunes, rimming Bodega Harbor, leading into the low sheared mound of Mussel Point, piercing the Pacific at the south end of the two-mile-long beach.

Camping in winter eliminates creature comforts and outdoor cooking, instead replaced by hot smoky campfires, tipsy postprandial walks, rough slumber without good shelter. It is time best spent alone. And so driving along Highway 1 in winter too may harken of times preceding Sonoma’s chambers of commerce and expensive Sea Ranch homes, before the vintners and abalone pickers and gargantuan RVs, before elegant art galleries and bed-and-breakfast romance, before retirees and southerners en masse fled their suburban sprawl, which people actually needed to escape so they could revisit nature. But when the south was rural, why go north? It was much colder, much darker, vastly remote—decades ago, to Southern California surfers, Santa Barbara was a fringe, Santa Cruz was arctic, and nobody seemed to know what lay north of San Francisco.
That night I ate cold pizza and drank beer in fogbound darkness on the south bank of the Gualala River. The campground was flooded with rain beneath dripping redwoods, bordered by the fat river’s muffled rush. There was no noise from insects or animals—only water. I sat on a wet picnic table and watched the wide river when the fog broke, illuminated dimly despite the absence of moonlight.
Around three in the morning I woke thinking a jet airplane was landing nearby. It was heavy shorepound, the booming thundercrack funneled to my campsite along the river corridor. Since dusk the wind had died and the swell had hit—a giant westerly with a twenty-five-second period, strong and orderly, undoubtedly the winter’s best swell.
At dawn I parked in a pullout above the river, which was separated from the ocean by a narrow spit. The surf was huge, the sight impressive — because of the high tide and the beach’s severe drop-off, sets were slamming full-force onto the sand, immense wave energy accumulated over thousands of Pacific miles at last terminating in violent fashion.
Suddenly a rogue wave flooded the spit, scattering a flock of gulls and spilling into the river, the wake quickly forming a riverine version of what had created it. This chest-high river wave peeled flawlessly for dozens of yards in both directions before expiring into the riverbank, one of the most bizarre acts of nature that I had ever seen, in the middle of a Northern California river, an occurrence so rare it was an incredible stroke of luck to capture it on film.

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