ENGULF

What you didn’t see from the Fox team’s Gulf Coast road trip

Text by Bob Soven       Photography by Brian Soderlind

Hey friends, we’re back. Yep, it’s us, that ragtag bunch of nomadic wakeskaters (plus me, the wannabe wakeskater, and photo boner Bear the photographer). In case you didn’t know or already forgot (I highly doubt you would actually forget something like this — so epic, so legit, so insane…) last fall we took a little road trip from Florida to New Orleans and shredded the Gulf Coast. There was literally too much good stuff to fit into the pages of the magazine, which means we had to do an internet special with the leftovers. These are not normal leftovers like Tuesday night’s meatloaf though… These are Thanksgiving at Ritz Carlton leftovers. So thanks to modern technology we’re no longer confined to the parameters of a print magazine — here via the internet is the rest of our manly trip.

I can’t lie, this trip was actually pretty weird. Every stop had its own uniqueness and stories to be relived over and over. After our first stop at the Dead Lake I didn’t expect it to get much weirder.

I mean, you can’t really get much weirder than a lake full of dead cypress trees in the middle of a town you can’t pronounce, can you? But of course it totally did. From the locals we went partying with after our shoot on the dead lake, to finding a BP oil spill clean up crew looking for tar balls on the beach while we were riding, the trip just got weirder as we went along. The locals we ended up partying with at the corner store were a riot. It was definitely a case of culture shock. You had Dieter from South Africa, Grant from California and my flowing red locks of awkwardness. None of them had ever been to California, so it was like seeing an alien or something when they were talking to Grant and Dieter. They were making fun of me for having never killed anything, so they decided to pull out their weapons to show them off. It was awkward but funny as hell. All these guys and Reed had knives on them, some even had small guns. Grant, Dieter, Bear and I didn’t have any weapons. Kind of intimidating… at least Bear had his muscles and his nickname. I think Dieter had sunflower seeds for the first time there, too. Really this trip was about firsts. There were a lot of firsts. My first sandboarding experience, my first hard core urban winching experience, riding in a dead lake, riding next to battleships… and of course, riding in an abandoned amusement park.

Looking back now the visit to the rundown Six Flags has to be the most memorable. I’m still a kid at heart and for real I’m still a kid, so going to a theme park is never a bad time, especially when they get turned into a personal wake park via Reed Hansen (check photo in magazine….b#!%^’s). Walking around that place and seeing all the rides and booths just totally abandoned was both really cool and really creepy. Definitely something I will never forget. We got to climb wherever we wanted and Bear of course had the biggest photo boner of his life when he was there. He was taking more pictures of the Katrina-tattered stuffed animals than the riders it seemed, but we of course made sure to strike some good poses for him.

The trip was definitely one of the coolest I’ve ever been on and probably will ever go on. The story was great in the mag and hopefully these extras give you a little more insight into how cool it was. For those of you that didn’t read the article in the mag we will find you and forcefully read it to you, so go read it because we don’t actually want to do that. 11/11/10 is the day we decided that the trip was to become an annual event. Dear strange places we will be seeing you again this year.