Bret little photographed by Ian Reid from the 2012 Photo Annual.

   

     ” Ian got this shot of me while while we had the O’Neill wakeskate team in Texas for some whitewater adventuring this summer. Unfortunately Mother Nature had other plans for us and our canoe journey was cut short. Thankfully we have a few staple spots around the area, and we were able to catch a glimpse of sun in between the downpours. 

This particular spot is Five Mile dam right outside of San Marcos, TX. I’ve probably winched that dam more than any other spot in the world, but we wanted to get something different that day. We opted to carry the winch across the shallow riverbed and hit the larger end of the dam. I’ve scouted this side before but never messed with attempting it, mainly because its 6-7 ft tall and about 2 ft deep with a solid rock riverbed. But we were running out of options. 

I went first. I decided to keep things kinda simple to make sure the board stayed under my feet with the landing being what it was. After a couple attempts I got this solid switch backside 180, and then two hits after that I got my favorite frontside shuv I’ve done down a drop. I passed it off to Nick Taylor at that point, but I don’t think he was feeling the landing, after two tries at kickflipping it he called it quits.

 Huge shout out to Ian Reid, who is an amazing photographer and pretty much an all around awesome individual. He really crushed it on that trip. “

-Bret Little

 

” Well first of all this trip was so much damn fun and so much damn stuff went wrong at the same time. Those are the best kinds of trips to me because even though things go wrong that makes for a better story and helps people become well aquatinted and find ways to stay positive. Weather and disease were main factors on our journey down the Guadeloupe.  

This shot of Brett comes from the bigger side of “5 mile” gap. The smaller side is on the same damn dam but the water level on the landing is higher.  The photo of nick kick flipping down the gap is that slightly smaller side I’m talking about.   Landing on both sides was sketchy but the bigger side obviously had extra consequence. Very shallow jagged pieces of rock bottom sticking up in very random places. No way to safely avoid it really, except for stomping your trick.  Shooting both sides of the gap was kinda nice. There was a peninsula like shelf that divided the two sides. So you could stand/shoot from either side of the gap if you don’t mind lugging lights and cameras out on the extremely slippery jagged rock. On this shot I had a profoto flash behind me and Scott holding a little Nikon flash on the other side for a little kick from that side.  I was down in the water about waist deep with my Fuji x100. Brett hit this and a front shuv down the gap. The photo of this back one came out a little nicer because I got lucky with some good ol natural sun backlight. I had an amazing trip with these guys and look forward to another! “

-Ian Reid