Banter In Amsterdam

Every trip you take as a wakeboarder tends to get a theme, often a catchphrase and always ends with everyone battling against a headache while trying to recover memories of what happened just a few hours earlier. As you can imagine, three days near Amsterdam with James Young, CK, Crowhurst, Dec Clifford and Freddie Carter was like the perfect storm for creating all of the above.

Last week we got an invite from Teva to the opening of their new System 2.0 rail park based at Down Under in Nieuwegein, Holland. It’s a sweet setup at the park, they have a full cable with a nice rooftop rail and a UNIT funbox, then the System 2.0 park with an incline, flatbar and double sided kicker. But if you get bored of hitting rails and dangleboarding, they have a Flowrider in the cable building! Our host, Barry from Teva, really hooked us up with as much riding, food, drink and surfing as we wanted, all we had to do was enjoy ourselves and get some photos in the park.

There was some ‘work’ involved for the boys, with a short head-to-head contest on the Saturday with 14 guys battling it out to win some cash by doing 4-passes each in the rail park. On top of the British contingent some of the local guys rode, like Sjors van de Kerkhof, Ricky Lukassen, and Geert Nielen. It was a really fun little contest for all the guys, and the crowd were amped on it too and loads of people signed up to ride on the cable later that day. Under hot sunshine with a bit of a breeze, it was Dirk Gideosen who took the win and some cash from Teva, with Ricky Lukassen and CK rounding out the top three respectively.

After that the park was opened up to the public and the crew from Down Under pulled beginners and pro’s all day. There was a great relaxed atmosphere down there, just like hanging out at the cable and on the beach rather than being overly organized and scheduled like most contests. Teva shouted everyone a ‘cook your own barbeque’ and then it was onto the shenanigans part of the trip.

That night we hit the town of Utrecht hard, except it was only the british guys, those dutch pussies didn’t even try to keep up with what we had planned! Unfortunately we didn’t really have a plan, we had no idea where to go, what was good or where any bars are, so we wandered between a few places for a while before CK spotted some searchlights in the sky, and we walked towards them hoping to find a good bar. Ten minutes later Matty was ordering drinks from a very friendly barman and we realized this was a gay bar. By this point everyone was too drunk and the bar was full of hot girls, or ‘fag-hags’ if you will, so we stuck around and made the most of it. It was an epic night that was cut short when Dec got offended by a guy hitting on him, and not because of any homophobic hatred, but because the guy’s pick up line was “Oh my god, you look just like Justin Beiber!”

We some how made it back to the hotel and had a good breakfast while trying to piece together the night, then headed back to the cable for some more riding and shooting. In just three days we had blast, plenty of riding, plenty of banter and plenty of abuse for poor Declan, sorry mate! Thanks to Barry Schmits and his crew for looking after us all so well, I can’t wait for the next trip.