I lost my underwater camera. I went out last weekend to the bars and left it somewhere. To give you an idea of what I’m feeling, I’ve related the price of the camera to similarly valued things:
- 50 burritos
- 2 1/2 round trips on Southwest from San Diego to the Bay Area
- 5 Disneyland tickets
- over 425 Tacos at taco bell (assuming they are 70 cents each)
- $300 in cash.
I sold all my old electronics on Craigslist to fund this really cool Olympus camera. The Stylus 790 SW is a shockproof, waterproof digital camera with a 3x optical zoom that can store photos up to 7.1 megapixels in resolution. After seeing the photos by Neal Miyake here, I was sold.
My main concern at first was how to hold the thing while paddling around on a surfboard. I’ve used other bulky, semi-disposable underwater cameras and they typically have a velcro strap that wraps around your wrist. I never really liked this for obvious reasons, and luckily Brian pointed me in a different direction to surfcamera.com. Their camera pouch attaches just below the collarbone on any wetsuit.
I tried the camera out yesterday and it was a blast. Both the pouch and the camera are incredible. It’s roughly $325 for both (camera + pouch) and you can’t beat the quality and convenience.
Unfortunately, the camera can only store ten seconds of high quality footage, but that’s usually enough to get some good surfing footage. Lower quality settings let you record up to thirty seconds.
Here’s the footage from Yesterday.
I’ve surfed 8 days in a row, ending Wednesday. The winter consistency finally arrived. Not a day went by without head high waves and I’m exhausted. My whole body feels like I’ve been through a car accident. My arms and legs hurt, I get constant headaches and my digestive system is off. It’s really a good thing the last two days were flat because I needed the break. The surf comes in “waves” though… the next week straight is not supposed to pick up much. “Bummer”
I met Brian at work in the AM yesterday and went surfing a D-Street. It started out OK, then it just got really closed out with the large swell and the rapidly falling tide. On our way back, we checked Pipes which looked 10x better than it did on the way to D-Street an hour before. We really screwed up on our spot check- we didn’t check Torrey Pines or Del Mar, drove through a consistently awesome Seaside and Cardiff, and passed up on Pipes due to the tide (which was falling).
Here’s Del Mar from yesterday, compliments of SurfShot:
Now I have to wait another week before the water is clean again.
In the last four months I’ve traveled to South Africa, purchased a Tuflite Santa Cruz board, skied in Tahoe, broken-in my new job, been engaged to Hayley, and played a ridiculous amount of Xbox 360.
The surf this morning was much bigger than surfshot.com said. They said knee high for mission beach, but it was really over head and heavy. Weird, maybe they were trying to scare everyone off? It worked, and I had a blast.