Jon is a freelance Creative Director and Art Director who, before moving to Cornwall two years ago for a sea change and to get stuck into a serious house renovation project in St Agnes, had spent almost two decades in London helping to build sports, outdoor, fashion and lifestyle brands. He and his partner Lucinda had only just made the move when, late in the spring of 2017, Jon joined us for a week to make his own wooden surfboard – a 6’4” Woodburner fish. Their major focus over the two years since has been the incredible renovation of a former mine-captain’s gardener’s cottage in St Agnes, but because DIY building projects can be long and lonesome affairs, Jon also picked up a few shifts at OPEN, the experimental surfboard factory-cum-coffee-shop hangout up the hill from his house at Wheal Kitty. Here, he met Andrew, who would come in for a coffee and a chat after or in-between surfs.
As they got to know each other, Jon realised that there was much more to Andrew than the obvious point of him being one of surfing’s more mature practitioners; he is a former photojournalist so the pair bonded over shared experiences in the media and their love of surf photography and history, and then Andrew told Jon about his surfing life and how he’d been documenting it. Having discovered surfing at 44 years old and now aged 70, Andrew’s energy and devotion would and still will put many surfers less than half of his age to shame. Over the last three decades he’s surfed quite literally whenever there are waves, sometimes chalking up three sessions in a single day and managing 190 surfs in his best year (impressive, for Cornwall), at an age when most of his peers are winding down and starting to think about putting their feet up a bit more. Not only that, but he has documented all of those surfs in annual journals, giving each session a star rating (out of ten) and recording the beach location, surfboard(s) ridden, fin set-up and, whenever possible, a photo for posterity.
