Surfing online. No, really.

I have been a big fan of the blog, Tenpiggiesover for some time now. The posts by Alex Swanson about the surfing lives of him and his friends are fun and interesting and they make my rainy Brisbane days when I have been too long from the sea.

Now one of his surfing compadres, Erica, has begun her own tumblr called Semesters by the sea, so I can find even more images to keep me stoked online. Like these, for example;

The images I find on this site (and Tenpiggiesover) are far from glamourising surfing or wave-riding, but rather celebrate it along with all the things that surround it like boards, friends, surf checking, cars, joking around and trips away. These are things about surfing that I love too, and which are the things I miss when I think of my friends down south. I miss the post-surf coffee, the time spent deciding where to go, the hours spent talking shit and those spent making plans for trips to breaks up and down the coast.

And I guess this is the particularly cool thing about blogs and tumblrs, right. That they are written as personalised accounts of our lives. That they can present things without filtering it all through advertising obligations. That even though the authors can be scattered across the globe, I can find my own surfing world reflected in them, so that even when I am away I feel connected to the things I love about catching waves. Not the industry stuff, not the pro circuit, but the experiences, relationships and spaces. And sure, there are those which reflect also the more heinous, hideous, violent, exclusionary aspects of surfing too, but I can make choices to block them out, to find another site, to avoid adding to their readership. But the ones that I love, the ones that are thoughtful and optimistic and un-self-conscious, well, they keep me pretty stoked.

And for that, I thank them.