First off, from Canyon Lake, CA, 13-year-old Jacob Valdez has been on a tear recently. A couple weeks ago Jacob started landing some toe 9's off the wake. Even more recently, with the encouragement of his Quiksilver team manager Ben Greenwood, the young wakeboarding wonder learned backside 5's, as well as how to grab his toe 7's and crow rodeo's. But, it gets better, just a couple of days ago Jacob stuck a heelside backside 7 off the double up. Test results aren't in at the time of this blog, but we're pretty sure the kid is a freak. Congrats on getting shredical, Jacob.

On a completely different note, if you go back a couple issues of Alliance Wakeboard and check out the article on Oakley's trip to South Africa, you will notice a nice littler picture of Aaron Rathy hitting a double up that was taken through some tree branches. I took the photo and I'm quite happy with the results, but I was supposed to give creative credit to Andrew Adkison because, well, I basically stole the idea from him after I saw him doing it with his camera. So thanks to Andrew for helping me do my job better. Andrew is also one hell of a player at South African Quarters… "Talk to me, Goose…"