home from NZ and off again

Back at home and getting ready for a surf road trip down to ventura, california for a friend's wedding.
here's a photo rundown of my last month in NZ, where i was mostly in raglan looking for waves.
enjoy
jl


kayaking on lake wanaka




damon haylor and myself at treble cone. enjoying my birthday powder day


the aussies crew at TC. Chumpy, nate johnstone and damon


scott gaffney at bridal veil falls, near raglan.


some random wave that you can't really get to..


hot springs!




rock that kinda looks like brain


the champagne pool. very hot! some guy decided to ignore the many warning signs, walk over the fence and dip his hand in. His yelp of pain was pretty funny.


care for a swim? it's the minerals in the springs that make the color


molten hot mud.


sweet hot creek


manu bay in raglan doing it's thing.


sometimes the surf sucks and you need to go exploring. however, we didn't think about this possibility!


stalagtites


scott and myself checking out the waitomo caves


random hole in the cave


cave ribbons.




giant fern tree

natural bridge


random cave


small dunes around Kawhia.


manu bay on a 30 foot swell and 40 knot onshores! the story of my last week in raglan. normally you just see the wave breaking in front of that car from this angle.


whale bay and indicators (further point) on that same 30 foot storm. look where the waves are in comparison to the last photo which is head and a half!


the coromandel is beautiful.






the reason i spent 3 weeks in raglan! indicators going off.

video reposts..

as i'm in the process of making a new video i thought i'd re-post a few of my favorites from this past winter. you can find all of my videos at www.youtube.com/justinlamoureux or hiding somewhere on this blog
enjoy!
jl

a good day split-boarding with dave B. and a bad day by myself! my last 2 adventures of 2009..


a day of noboarding. like learning how to snowboard all over again, just without your bindings. april 2010


the best opening week of my life, to kick off one of my best seasons ever.
whistler nov. 2009.


my 2nd run from the 2010 olympic pipe finals. pretty much the best night of my life.


birthday powder! does it get better? treble cone, NZ, aug 2010


burton canadian open. a few weeks before the olympics. this comp is when i really felt my runs coming together prior to the games. calgary


the world cup in calgary the week before the open was pretty fun too.. another podium


and this was just awesome to be asked to do. my grouse mtn olympic torch "run", on top of their tram.


mmmm powder! a lot of days like this last winter.

testing boards and off surfing..

My trip to the south island of new zealand wasn't quite what i was expecting. usually i just want nice weather and good pipes and parks to ride. this year, we got generally hell weather, only got to ride a good pipe for 4 days (out of 4 weeks!), and rode more powder in NZ then all my other years combined. which is obviously not a bad thing. So it definately made for a different style of trip down here then what i'm used to.

My last week in wanaka was spent hanging out with the guys from Bataleon snowboards. We had a whole stack of 2012 prototype boards to test out. The new line is looking pretty cool. We got some new shapes, a few new models of boards, and that's about all i'm allowed to say. We toured around the local hills, powder day at cardona, snowpark days and a day at remarkables, which was real fun. I'd only been to the remarkables one time before and thought the sidecountry terrain looked super fun. Snow coverage always seems to be an issue there, but not this time. As there was morning fog we cruised some park laps and tested the new boards. Then the sun started poking through to fun looking powder lines, which i was more than happy to hike to. Our web guy danny was keen to ride some lines so we spent the afternoon riding drops and skinny chutes. Danny almost drove himself into a rock wall at one point! I scoped a line with a little drop onto a snow patch, then you had to straight line out between 2 cliffs, dodge a rock then hook a good turn in front of a rock wall. I cruised the line, then turned around to watch danny. Seems the day's hiking and somewhat office legs were getting to him. He made the drop ok, stopped, then pointed it for the exit only to blow the turn. Luckily he had set enough edge before sliding out to just narrowly miss the wall. I had a good laugh, and so did the rest of our crew as they happened to see the line from the chairlift.

After 4 weeks in Wanaka, i made my way up to the north island where i picked up my good friend scott gaffney and headed out to raglan to get some waves for a few weeks. our first few days were really stormy with barely any surfing, but then the wind died out and the points started firing! couple feet overhead for 2 days straight and awesome times. Today the wind is still dead but the swell has dropped some, so we're surfing on the local beach breaks as the points are a tad too small. I'm here for a few more weeks (scott leaves a week early), so hopefully we get some more epic times out on the points.

I'll try and get some photos up from this part of the trip. but in the meantime, having more downtime at the moment my brain has been thinking of new things to build. So i thought i'd share a couple pieces i built earlier this summer. One is a key/sunglass box for the wall made from some scrap fir i had lying around. it has handcut dovetails, a carved front door, and a magnetic latch. The other is my new desk. I've been wanting to build one for a while and finally got to it. it's made from pine (stained black) and reclaimed fir flooring. the drawers and carcasses are held together with handcut dovetails again. the original idea for the top was supposed to be a slab of wood with live edges, but i found the flooring so i thought i'd try it out.