Welcome back. So on Friday evening the PUATB crew arrived. We had a bit of of a nit nat and a rest before hitting the slopes again. Mainly the three freestyle jumps as we don’t get to hit perfect terrain such as that. Andy was doing some nice switch starts while I got myself toe cramp – the lamest of all cramps.
Local boy James Wanklyn was showing of some amazing skills. Able to to do tricks on demand…a monthly paid service worth subscribing to. Example; What do you want to see? 540? Okay. Frontside or backside? Yuhu. Switch start or regular? Gotcha. Any grabs?
Very stylish and very consistant.
So sun down, BBQ tea all round and a bit of alchomohol. Host Raph of IRONSIDES put on a nice fire – always a winner – along with a projector showing of films in the main area. I’d have watched the films but I got talking to the guys from Remolition, Dan and Smilie who are brilliant dudes, easy going and a fun chat – “ran out of talent” particularly tickled me but if you weren’t there you won’t understand! Side note – guys, I’m still planning on getting you that article, read the end of this post as to why I’ve been a bit lax the last couple of nights even though I’ve had time for once.
Wake up, shake your head. Feeling fine and looking great – the weather was nice too. After a bit of prep the PUATB guys had setup for the riding. First up the assault course – this consisted of part of the small… HOLD UP, rewind. Assault Course? Yeah assault course, keep up! It starts with a large toeside berm on the smaller boardercross track followed by a tow on the bungee cord. Once your tired and out of breath you have to bob for an apple in some rank looking creamy water, then you hit one of a variety of obstacles. The piece de-la-resistance? Stop within an area, like a finish line but you need more control. If you go to far you get creamed; again. This is the sort of stuff I love in mountainboarding. Competitive but totally fun and really unique. More of this please! My run went well, besides the apple dunking where I forgot to breath and almost passed out. Ma boy Andy got top time here 
Then it came round to the freestyle jam using all the jumps of IRONSIDES. At this point I had no ride left in me, my legs were killing with cramp so I bailed out and camera’d. I’ve never watched a freestyle jam up so close with a camera but it was real fun. James doing his flips and 540′s on everything; Andy pulling out some new spins and transfers; Simon’s huge grabs and noSno backflip (with a bad looking fall); Raph and the local crew riding as a brilliant unit; and everyone hitting the whoopdie whoop (to hard to describe! – see the video). We also had Paul on the water gun giving people “healing spray” whenever they went down – very useful for Alex Boswell who tried a lot but went down a lot too.
Once again we hit barbie for tea and settled down to a few drinks. The end of the day came with a prize giving event in typical mountainboarder friendly atmosphere. The difference was that most of the categories where based on photo’s taken, a nice twist which was handled well by the fact that there were loads of cameramen for the jam. After that the days pictures and videos were put up on the projector – a very neat touch not too disimilar to when getting home from riding with your mates to watching the days footage; but on a larger more social scale (more of this please organisers). The rest of that evening is mostly a dizzy blur of me having less balance then when on the board, although I do remember fire and sweets.
Sunday was a slow start as seems the norm for mountainboarders and not something I’m too used to; the early bird I am. Had a walk around the park for a bit and I was still too tired to ride. Watching Lisa and Simon go down the main boardercross was really impressive, it was so dry and really fast. I’m not ready for that, yet.
A bit of meta. My new GoPro arrived from USA yesterday after ordering it on Tuesday, damn that’s slick service. I’ll be hitting up better quality soon. I’d have another video up on YouTube if it weren’t for Windows Live Movie Maker making a misery of things. I edited a decent looking video of all the winter/spring’s freeriding but when exporting it hangs at 79%. I’ve got a good PC and the last video I put together was longer. I may have to split it into jumps and riding but the edit I had was really good and worked well with the music. Aaaargh! We’ll see.
– the writing had loads of flow too. I’ll redo better than ever and get it up here ASAP.