glissers.com/blog

I met a guy in Morocco once who told me about a “Swedish surf brand”, and he claimed that the boards were awesome. I was sceptical, but such a thing actually exists - Nordsurf is a Swedish producer of surf boards, with boards adapted to Swedish conditions.

I’m embarresed to say that even though I did a lot of windsurfing when I grew up, I never even tried wavesurfing in Sweden, and I still haven’t. I’ll change that this coming Christmas, unless there is too much ice. Here’s a good movie about the Swedish way of wavehunting.

Nordsurf.com is also a community for the dedicated tribe of Swedish surfers. They arrange surf camps, parties, competitions, and have a lively web forum (only in Swedish). And Adam at Nordsurf wrote a nice article about glissers - thanks

The forecast for Saunton was simply too bad. I couldn’t justify driving 5 hours one-way for something that promised to be ruined by messy offshore winds. So I stayed home in London, and have spent the day learning about web development and SEO (and watching Federer crush Gasquet in Wimbledon). I’ve made some small changes on the design and the texts - if you spot them I’ll buy you a beer. I’m also trying to figure out how to end up higher in Google’s page rankings. To me most of this is new stuff is brand new, but I love learning about it. If I had to pick between “surfing” and “Internet”, it would be a very close call.

El Joy, a.k.a Fast Johnny, a.k.a Big Daddy J, is top of the charts at the moment. He’s added 6 different accommodations from the the US, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico and Australia. El Joy’s Glisser profile is here . It’s quite an achievement to be the number one glisser, but El Joy is modest:
“When I took my first trembling steps on a surfboard back in 1995, I could never dream or even imagine something like this would ever happen!”
On behalf of glissers around the world - congratulations, El Joy. Keep on glissing

If you’ve seen the Endless Summer you know Senegal is a great surf destination… Friendly people, good food, empty line-ups, interesting culture. It’s far from beer-drinking stag-parties in Newquay, or evil localism in Huntington Beach.

Now we’ve teamed up with Philippe at Ngor Surf Camp to offer our members the chance to win a week at his camp, paid for by Glissers. Bed, breakfast, dinner, transfer to the best surf spots, airport pickup / drop-off, and more are all included. Flights are not included, sorry. British Airways fly direct flights from London and it only takes 6 hours.

To participate you need add a review of an accommodations you’ve stayed at. You can review our current accommodation, or add a new one. The starting date is June 28th.

The competition is open until the end of October, and for each review you add, you get another chance to win. So go crazy - adding accommodations is good for your karma as well.

More about Ngor Surf Camp

I’ve got Thursday and Friday off this week. Should I leave the smog and go surfing…?

YES!

But more difficult is to figure out where to go… the forecast for Saunton is not looking great - too much wind - Saunton at MSW

Maybe this is the perfect opportunity to venture down to the south of Portugal, fly into Faro with Ryanair and spend a few days traveling around. Or maybe go to Wales for a few days. Or maybe hop over to Biarritz. Oh, these wonderful choices

I spent Thursday and Friday in Saunton, North Devon. I arrived with bus from London late on Wednesday evening, tired and hungry. Woke up early on Thursday to maximize my exposure to the waves, but almosted started to cry when I saw the weather - rainy, windy, no waves.

I went out anyway - 2 h in the morning, 2 h in the afternoon. Happy just to get wet and catch some small messy waves.

And then, when the evening came, the wind dropped, the tide came back in, and all of a sudden it was paradise. Saunton is amazing for longboarding, absolutely amazing, and I had the best time ever (well not ever, but it was GOOD). Friday morning was even better, so when I went back to London (7 hour in a bus…) I had a big fat smile on my face.

I wrote a review of the place I stayed: Saunton Sands Hotel.

Here’s a pic from the road just above the hotel:

Just sent this newsletter to our members, but if you missed it…

Hello,

Here’s an update from the world of glissers.

We now have over 200 accommodations in the directory, from all over the world - Sweden to Mozambique. The map is getting crowded - www.glissers.com - great stuff.

But we need your help to build the directory bigger and better! Why bother? Well, it’s good for your karma to help other surfers, and for every new review you add to glissers you’ll get a chance to win a week at a surf camp in Dakar, Senegal. Read more here.

One of my favorite new accommodations in June is “Birdmans van”. Birdman is traveling throughout the US and Central America with his van right now, looking for good surf. If you pay 50% of the fuel cost, you can travel with him. He’s got a good blog, too.

Big ups to our top rated destination this month Nexus Surf and our most active member: John Bauer

Have a good day!

//Nils at glissers

(if you don’t want to get this email, just reply to this email and say “I don’t want your news, you glissers-people”).

That’s the reaction I get when people ask me about the name… It’s not obvious, I’m aware of that And it’s probably pretty crap for search engine optimization. But the name comes from “glisse”, which is French for “glide”. “Sport de glisse” is for example surfing and snowboarding (at least I think it is). If you turn “glisse” into an English version, you have glissers. And as a bonus - “a glisser” mean “a nomadic surfer traveling the world looking for waves and ukulele music” in creole.

The idea behind www.glissers.com was born in Dakar, Senegal, while on a week-long surfing holiday at Ngor Surf Camp. Originally, we wanted to create a surf travel operator for Scandinavian surfers. But after spending a few hours googling, it was clear that there are already good alternatives for the Scandies, so we decided to try something else.

One of my favorite web sites is www.yelp.com, which lists user reviews of restaurants and bars etc in San Francisco. I love reading other peoples honest opinion about things they care about, and I’m pretty sure surfers would appreciate the same kind of information - reviews and tips on where to stay while on a surfing trip.

Let’s see if the idea was good or bad - we’ve just started a long journey