Ian Battrick has spent a decent chunk of winter hanging around surfing’s most famous farmyard. The clip above is the result.
Deep winter in Thurso is hard, what’s the hardest part?
The hardest part is the wait. You have to put your time into score. Even charts ‘set in gold’ don’t do what they say swell wise or weather wise.
How windy was that stormy day?
Extremely, it was difficult to stay on your feet.
What’s the key to good GoPro footage … apart from getting bazzed obvs?
Just knowing your angles of what you are trying to capture/portray. Plus you always need to be deeper than you think to score good clips. I shot with MyGo Mounts which worked well.
When it comes to tubes what’s your favoured board and fin set up these days?
I have been working on my own fin template for a while now, and it has just been released this week and produced by Futures fins. it is a tri-quad with a unique ‘Luna Knubster‘. I’ve been riding them from 6″ slop in Jersey on my fish to the high performance shortboard, all the way up to my semi-gun in draining barrels. We’ve got crew like the Ash brothers, Cain Kilcullen, Timmy Turner, Chris Noble, Amy Kotch and more riding them.
For the tubes in this video Lee Bartlett of Fourth Surfboards had just shaped me up a tweaked version of their Shiv model in 5’10” that went amazingly. I also had a a couple from Jeff ‘Doc’ Lausch at Surf Prescriptions. For the tube I’ve always loved speed and freedom of the quad and the lines it can take the thruster has difficulty with.
Getting soft in your old age actually being in a building?
Haha! I still lived in the van, which was the softer version, it was actually colder inside that building (especially the upstairs) than outside, you would walk out the front door and hot air would hit you. I was just going in there to stretch my legs, leave some boards out the way, cook, get the coffees on and hang out.
When are they going to renovate the farmhouse?!
I’m not sure… its in the process now.
