Great to be home and our first chickens

Back in blighty and what a beautiful spring to welcome us back! The sun is shining and the first buds are appearing on the trees . Done my order with real seeds for our first veggies to get into the seed trays,loving the real seeds company  for their ethics, a small company in wales selling old reliable strains and heritage seeds,fingers crossed that their seeds are as good as they boast,put in peppers,gardeners delight toms,aubergine and cucumber so far as want them to get a good start and the weather is nice and warm.
Had a nice suprise yesterday morning as we lay in bed looking out at the stunning woodland view,two roe deer crossing right outside our caravan! love it! really cute, as they sauntered off we cracked on with a hard days work getting the polytunnel tidied up ,and finishing the chicken coups and fencing.
Still a bit exhausted from the 36 hour journey home but just cant stop working on the land once we get started,the surf is looking good at the moment and bloody cold as march is about as cold  as it gets as far as water temp goes in the atlantic,but with these nice sunny days i think im gonna brave it tomorrow...

Phoned around the county looking for some point of lay chickens,suprisingly difficult to get hold of,went to a place in redruth in the end, got three hybrids to start with ,very cute,they were very quiet on the journey home in their cardboard box,when we released them i was suprised how mellow they were! i had visions of them going crazy and not coming near us but they were immediately friendly and managed to pick them up without difficulty,lets hope that we fenced well enough to keep mr fox away.....

Peru,the longest waves of our lives...

As i sit here in sri lanka looking at the A frame reef in front of me with 24 surfers fighting and hustling for the few weak and insignificant waves that i didnt even bother to paddle out for this morning, my thoughts wandered to my  longest ride on a single wave. It was last winter and the place.. 'Chicama' in northern Peru.
I had been surfing at a left point called 'Huanchaco' for a couple of weeks or so and had been told that the legendary  chicama will only start to get good when huanchaco is far too big. One misty early morning i paddled out onto the point into the thick murky mists, (a common occurence in peru) and lo and behold, as i paddled over endless waves each getting bigger i soon realised today felt more powerful than previously. I could not see the sets as they stacked up on the horizon, it was a case of trust your instincts, (visibility was around 50 feet) , as i turned and took a thick heavy wave i looked over the top of the breaking wave as i bailed out and saw that actually the oncoming set was  huge, far beyond my comfort zone, alone , in the mists at dawn.
 I rode in  and back to the guest house to start packing for the two hour bus journey north, is it going to be big enough for it to work? its got to be worth a look..
Id heard of chicama, probably the longest left in the world over the years and seen photos in various articles claiming it was a very desolate place, nothing but desert ,mists and ridiculously long waves.
As we approached the small dusty town i was bristling with excitement to get my first glimpse of the famous wave and to see if the journey wasnt wasted, i was not dissapointed, the swell was stacking up out to the horizon! i couldnt tell how big it was but it was very definately on!
We booked into 'el hombre' guesthouse, one of the very first places there to cater to surfers needs and is also the name of the barrelling section of the wave that breaks out the front of the place, the accomodation was spartan and a bit damp and basic but the lady running the place made you feel part of the family and the photos and news articles on the walls were great to look at.

After unpacking the boards and having some lunch,we put on our suits and raced down the point to have our first taste of chicama. As we walked along a sandy/rocky track that skirts the sand dunes the smell of decay and death was in the air , as we turned a corner a huge and i mean huge sea lion was rotting in the sun! ,holding our breaths , we got to a  small rocky  beach which is the best entry point into the first peak, paddling hard to get out in time before the strong current drags you towards some nasty looking rocks, (it wasnt difficult but you couldnt hang around), its then that i took off into my first of many long rides down the point, i couldnt believe how mellow the wave is to ride as it makes its way reeling off down the point, at times you need to straighten out and wait for the wave to reform properly until suddenly you are racing off down the line again. It took me 2 waves to surf the entire length of the point which incidently is about 2kms! and the size was around 3-4ft with the occasional bigger set. At the end of the point you simply get out and walk the 20 minute walk back along the track and do it all again. It was after an hour or so that i decided i was going to time these rides on my stopwatch, i had a couple of nice rides of around 45 seconds and 1minute rides when a bigger set swung around the corner and with no one around me and a strong offshore blowing i took off on what became the longest ride of my life!. I put the stopwatch on as i came out of my bottom turn and raced along until the wave gave me the opportunity to cutback , then another and another , perhaps 15-20 or so then race another section then more cutbacks, this wave was way more lined up than the previous waves and with my thighs burning with exhaustion the wave finally closed out on me and i stopped my watch at....1 minute and 43secs!!Now a surfer averagely gets a wave that would last 10-20 secs long at most  places in the world and this was ridiculous, plus, i was only half way down the point! i waited in the same spot until another set came through and took another beauty all the way through to the end, i didnt time it but it was easily another minute ride! i couldnt wait to tell my wife (who,the next day got a ride of 1 minute 30 secs!! , this place is amazing, i spent another hour or so riding the second section near el 'hombre' and getting a couple of sweet little barrels just to put the icing on the cake, as i returned up the hill feeling like a hero and stoked to have had one of the best sessions of my life, the sun was just starting to set  and we sat with a cold beer and watched the endless sets of waves rolling mechanically along the point reflecting on how its a joy to have experienced something only a tiny preportion of people on the planet will ever witness, this evening was the most surreal and awe inspiring surfing moments ive experienced... 

First day,moving the caravan..





We will be updating this blog every week or so as of end of march as we will be back in the uk ready to commence our new life.. At the end of october last year we had our caravan moved up to our  plot. It was a nervous time the day of the move as the caravan hasn't really moved for at least 4 or 5 years and is getting pretty old now. Some friends of ours turned up on a lovely crisp sunny autumn morning with their landrover and hooked it up with minimal fuss and we were off, it was only ten miles to the land from the holiday park weve been living on for the last 3 years and couldn't have gone any smoother really.Our first major hurdle was the narrow access lane that we had to negotiate the caravan around, the first turn was done with little fuss but the length of the land rover and the caravan combined was around 30 feet,so after a few failed attempts the van finally snuck through the wooden farmgate with a squeak and a scrape.

Once on the open field that greets you as you enter our land we needed to get the caravan into a tight clearing that we had planned to use as our new home.  Another expert piece of driving and that was it! job done, we were looking at our new home and our first day living in the woods, no electricity,no running water (except the small stream that borders our property) and no idea how it was going to turn out.

Immediately we gave our competent friends a tour of the woodland with pride.We were quite shocked at how much the level of the stream had risen during the last bout of heavy rainfall, a little bit concerning as it had pretty much doubled since the previous week! our friends dog thought it a great idea to jump into the stream come rapids and the strong current dragged the dog off downstream at quite a pace! combined with the freezing cold water the dog looked a little suprised and we all gave chase downstream, luckily just around the corner was a section where the dog scrambled up the bank and after a good shake was no worse for wear, just a bit embarassed i should imagine haha.The rest of the day was spent doing the usual sort out in the caravan and by nightfall and the lighting of the oil lamps with good food we were able to have a lovely sleep in the woods with just the sound of a local owl. Next step is getting the vegetable plots dug over and the huge polytunnel cleaned out ready for our first season of growing on the land,also very excited about the chickens too,lots of fresh eggs and manure,wish us luck......