North County
Surf Academy

"Everything rides," says Bird Huffman of Bird's Surf Shed. "You should expand your surfing horizons and capabilities." "Everything Rides" should maybe take over the "Ride Anything" moniker for our zeitgeist of board experimentation. Way cooler of a phrase. And hey, Bird gets it. One look at the smorgasbord of surfboards in the Shed tells you that. Speaking of which, for this episode of Shed Sessions, Bird picked about as random an assortments of boards as you could imagine, most of which are from North County, San Diego shapers. A bonzer from Leucadia wizard Gary Hanel. A progressive late '60s single fin log from Don Hansen. A squirty little 5'2" fish from Sunset Surf Shop's Ed Wright. Even tossed in a flex-tail thingie as a non-North County wildcard from Allan Gibbons, a legendary figure who ghost shaped for Al Merrick for a long time, just to throw an even odder board into the mix. We sent Joel Tudor, Derrick Disney, Jake Marshall, and Duran Barr out to put 'em through their paces. Bird was right. Everything does ride. Here's the quiver for this episode: Gary Hanel Bonzer 6'3" x 19 1/2" x 2 5/8" Don Hansen "Hustler" 9'6" x 22 3/4" x 3 1/8" Sunset Fish 5'2" x 21" x 2 3/4" Alan Gibbons "Reflex": 6'0" x 19 1/2" x 2 1/2" For other episodes of Shed Sessions, check out our playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyKz2WxlHm8&list=PLwz8kkMT-mEk4dVdK6X0VbrUn7UZKoWZc

Duran Barr and film maker Blake Michel document Winter 2018 surfing up and down the coast ofMexico and California

Eagar to get summer rolling Duran and I saw the first south swell on the charts and decided it would be a good idea to head to Puerto for the beginning of the season and get on it before everyone else did. The idea we had in our head was that we were going to be packing bombs at Zigatella, but unfortunately we showed up to bad winds and had to work with what we got. We decided to reset the vibe clock in some time at the local point, La Punta. Surfing that wave was almost a joke though, because of the amount of people in the water and surf schools going on, it really made it frustrating to put a clip together. After a few days of surfing in the chaos we knew we had to get out of there and we caught a ride in the back of a truck down to Salina Cruz. Four hours later we found the perfect rights we were looking. We got one day of absolutely firing waves and finally got into the mindset we had come down for, packing some tubes. We knew we needed to head back to Puerto after Duran’s neck started craping from going backside for so many days vstraight. By the time we got back to Puerto the winds were mellow and were able to squeeze in one session before we headed back home. -Blake.