Still Stoked Longboard Skates For Surfers

The Landsurfer Story-Chapter2

This entry relates to: [ Skating ]

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

After the testing at Brighton and Gloucester I took the boards up to Leeds. I gave Tom a 4ft Performer for his birthday and Danny a 5ft Cruiser. Both these guys and their mates were at Leeds Uni, where we found the most superb slopes and underpasses to longboard skate.

Danny had come up with the name Still Stoked, because we were all mad for surf right then. More often than not it was too small for Danny or onshore mush or just flat! We even went in one memorable December evening at Scarborough, after a classic downhill session at Oliver's Mount, when it was minus 6 degrees wind chill and 7 degrees water temperature. We were mad! So danny said "call the boards Still Stoked, to remind us always of those rare, great and wonderful days we sometimes had in the surf.

Tom performing an "off the nose" spinner on a prototype Landsurfer at Oliver's Mount.

Leeds city was such a great place for smooth surfaces around the shopping arcades, and nobody seemed to mind me skating my 6ft Landsurfer around the place. I even got hoots from the scores of kids skating outside the Town Hall as i cruised and carved around on my 5ft Cruiser. Tom reckoned I got some respect there.

We did a lot of filming and coined the "Leeds Stokers", who in the late autumn of 1997, became the first longboard skaters in Leeds' history.

The Landsurfer was prominant in our filming and we got a good section of walking the plank from "Jesus Tom" and Donny, and all sorts of fun bits with Tom and Ed tandem, all of which ended up in the Still Stoked Story video.

Leeds was a great time and had a real pioneering spirit to it. The day at Oliver's Mount was pretty radical too. That would be one hell of a hill to put on a downhill event. If banking was built into the hairpin at the bottom of the impossible first drop, it might be just about makeable. It would be an awesome test of the downhill pros!****

I plan to do the next two chapters of this blog of the Landsurfer Story as picture galleries of the days with the Leeds Stokers.

Posted on Tuesday, May 18, 2004 at 16:21:20