A very enjoyable session with the turf dog over on Gwithian beach today, managed to get a couple of three hours of practice in on the sand. Leon was in crèche today so I had a bit of free time on my hands. I was going to do a little more on my dissertation, but I thought that could wait. It was quite nice on the beach, the tide was out so there was plenty of sand, and a nice little 8 – 10 mph side shore breeze blowing, just enough to get planning up and down the sand. There were quite a few people out today, most walking their little shit machines; it’s strange that a lot of these folks don’t feel the need to remove the mess their animals make.
It’s been a while since I’ve been on the turf dog so it took me a few runs to get the feel of it, and before long I was powering into some nice carve gybes, and even the odd duck gybe, the latter of the two was a little scrappy I must admit, but still good fun. I spent the last 45 minutes practicing the heli tack, which I started to get dialled into. For the heli to work on the turf dog you really have to carve the board hard into the wind to get the wheels to catch and push the nose of the board onto the new tack. The tricky part is the foot change, on such a small deck it’s very easy to get stuck in the straps or trip on them. I tried a few times to pull the helicopter tack off while keeping the feet in the straps, one of these attempts lead to a completely unexpected upwind 360, yep I have a new trick in my arsenal the upwind 360, and I will be working on owning this move over the next few days. In case you are not sure what the move looks like, here is an example I found on YouTube. Next sesion I’ll take along the film recorder and tripod and I’ll try to catch some footage of the action, and not too many wipeouts hopefully.
The Turf Dog Freestyle
Life after Jodyne 