Ha Tarifa! To sum it up – Windsurfing, Surfing, SUPing, Windsurfing, Windsurfing, Hospital, CT Scan, X-rays, Windsurfing, Hospital, X-Rays, Horses, Pony Ride, double forward to face, damn f***ing ponch, driving, driving, party, fancy dress, beer, sunsets, sunrise, warm, cold, warm, 40 hours drive, Portugal, Sagres, windsurfing, windsurfing, not necessarily in that order.

So I’m back in Austria now for a few days before heading up to Hamburg to catch up about the new Sailloft sails and discuss the plans for next years range. After that it’s UK bound for some time and to hit the road around some of the UK’s finest freestyle, wave and freeride locations with all the Patrik/Sailloft demo gear. So if you want to try any of it then get in touch and I’ll try to swing by a spot near you.

As for Tarifa, it was a really cool place to go to, I’d had it on my list for years now and it certainly met all expectations, it’s kind of a Cape Town in miniature and yet at the same time it has a very English feel to the landscape/water at this time of the year. I’m currently writing a feature with a friend of mine BR (from BR Fins) who travelled with me about heading there and a whole lot more so won’t give too much away as it should be a pretty cool one with video, plenty of pics and some text to go along with it. Perhaps a 2 part feature, we shall see.

I imagine most people are interested in me doing the classic hospital trips, well I do certainly have video footage but am working on a personal video about that soon. However, Boards kindly posted a bit of news about it not so long ago, you can see that here (boards.mpora.com/news/another-man-down) and all I can say is that I’m still getting weird feelings from my head and it is over a week later, I was told (yesterday) that it can take up to 2 weeks to for any swelling to go down and sport should be taken easy in that time, good job I hit the water on day 3 then and no wonder I keep hearing random ringing in both my ears still! Any advice on head injuries/concussion welcome, either in the comments section below or message me. Anyway that’s not all of it… I also ended up in hospital a second time after crashing a ponch. I wanted to train the ponch as it is how I busted my left foot almost two years ago now. So for most of the trip it was going ok then I figured I should see what I can add on to the end of the move, came in full power, didn’t turn off the wind enough and halfway through the move my footstrap came out (completely forgot to tighten it, new board and a couple weeks in, stupid error!). This resulted in the board stopping the move and my body continuing through it. The pain was savage and I was convinced I had broken it, however it turns out that it’s not broken but instead I’ve either torn or very much over stretched all the ligaments that connect the joints in the middle of the foot. Kind of hard to explain but there are quite a few of them there (you have 103 in total in the foot) and they are responsible for any twisting motion across the middle of the foot. I’m walking on it but pretty slowly and now focus hard on physio, to make sure it’s ready as soon as possible.