Words by Ryan Clements
Photos and Captions by Michael Derewenko

Christian Hosoi - it was pretty cool getting to shoot photos of Hosoi after all I've heard and read about him. Here he transfers over and into the extension

Tom Remillard - the Best Trick Contest was on three different obstacles...the bell, the extension, and this cradle that Tom got 3rd place on with a fs 5-0 to fakie

Andrew Langi is taking advantage of another obstacle with a nose manual on the extension during Best Trick

Slamming a popular transfer route throughout the whole Contest, Nolan Johnson wall jams for a quick 100 bucks

Andrew Langi - I couldn't imagine being this high in the air with my board nowhere near my feet, much less have to think about grabbing it after it flips and putting it back under my feet to land into the extension

Curren Caples was of course killing it all weekend and constantly going big, but here he stays low and sticks to the lip with a fs flip tailslide

What exactly made this world famous? It's cold string cheese on cold tortilla chips with their special sauce that's basically just runny salsa

I didn't get to check the actual BMX Contest, but this was what the course looked like. You can ask Albright or Forrest whether or not they think it was any good

I did however see some of the surfing and it was pretty amazing to witness Kelly Slater and Rob Machado in action. I know, I didn't really know who they were either, but it was unavoidable at this event. One of the dudes went through those pilings in the pier right there. Look how giant those waves are compared to the pier!

Hey, I got an idea. I need attention so I'm going down to the beach with my snakes, okay?

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. We watched this girl bust her ass when she fell over this wall backwards and then got up and ran off like it never happened. The was just seconds before she had a great fall

The wall claims another one. You look a little too young and weak to handle sun and fun, blue top girl. She ended up in the VIP tent

There's so much wrong with this photo...longboard with sandals, Lakers Hater shirt, and well, the chicks are looking pretty good at least

I haven't talked to Al Bow in a while, but if ever there was a band he should be in, it was this one

I don't know how I know this, but this is Tito Ortiz leaving the beach. I was thinking, "Why does he need security if he's one of the baddest UFC dudes out?" Then I remembered where we were and how many "gibronies" would probably try and pick fights with him

Barak and I went to Pierre Andre's house for the "anti-Nike party," even though they didn't advertise it as such. Great times and good people. What up Candice and Jeff Taylor...thanks for the fun time

Maybe one day I can dedicate a space bigger than my apartment to all my homies' boards

If it was up to me, Carroll would be on the Skatepark of Tampa Party Team. Dude's always partying, so here's your coozie, Mike

What's an event with BMX, surfing, and skating without Brett Redenbacher doing a Weekly Update?

Sorry Rick Howard, but I spotted you...and there you are trying to maintain some "ambiguousness"

Sammy Baca got $100 for skating for five minutes in boardshorts and no shoes. Not bad on this miller flip over the spine

Always wear protection, even when watching dangerous acts

This is Mike Carroll telling Alex Olson to do a bean plant to backside boneless on the extension for 50 of Chris Casey's dollars, which he did second try and it was pretty sick

While the A-Team was overseas trying to avoid some bars and other ollie bars, the B-Team was enjoying the consistent views of Huntington Beach

Mike Peterson's fs flips were a little soggy on Saturday due to a late Friday night on the town, but this one taken on Friday, prior to his Huntington Beach bar tour, was proper

Ryan had his moment in the sun and sports the shades for this frontside smith grind up the escalator

Chad Bartie has a mean backside noseblunt as you can see in these photos. This one is on the extension during his 12-minute jam in the Finals

Trujillo showed up on Sunday straight off a plane and killed it from the morning into the afternoon

There was a small group of skaters that were put straight into the Finals. They were mostly coming from Boston's The Don't Tour. Dennis Busenitz utilized the entire bowl, including a noseblunt on the extension

Chad Bartie backside noseblunt on the bell during the Best Trick Contest, but I'm not sure if he ended up landing this

I shot this photo of Devon Lamb doing a fs grab on Friday before anybody was even skating the cradle

Nolan Johnson was not skeered of the terrifying cradle, as you can see from this lien to tail

This 50-50 grind grab in that Ben Rayburn was doing was so sketchy...he would land lower than the Converse logo every time

This hip Bartie is ollieing was another popular choice for a lot of skaters. Transfer into the cradle

Langi's got Madonna's...really high ones

Curren takes to the sky with a kickflip frontside grab

More Bartie - frontside 5-0 on the cradle. The guy is up there

My new best friend, Tom Remillard, fs air transfers into the cradle. Tom broke my fisheye lens at one point during the weekend and I told him he's got to call me to shoot at his local park, Washington Street in San Diego

We had to get Jimmy the Greek on the site and this bs nose pivot was his move. Here's his extension dance the day before he donned a Skatepark jersey to try and get extra points from the judges

Alex Olson was taking tips from Mike Carroll on the sidelines and took $50 from Chris Casey as well. Here he blasts the hip with the bell obstacle in the foreground

Sure beats a dust-filled skate park for the site of a contest. Ben Rayburn hits the cradle with a bs nosegrab tailslide and the surf in the background

Grant Taylor was skating really good as always, with great style and big air

I had never seen Sergie Ventura skate in person, so to have him and Hosoi in the same heat was pretty amazing. Montesi told me he went to a Madonna concert years ago and Sergie was skating a vert ramp behind the stage while Madonna performed

A "Where's Waldo?" photo with a couple bikes in it. Can you spot Wade Speyer and Rick Howard?

Jaws got 1st place in the Best Trick with a blunt kickflip out on the bell obstacle, so he came to collect his cash from Clements, Sinclair, and Fritsch (L to R)

Apparently Clements and Jake Duncombe have grown pretty close over the years, hugging out a 15th place finish with a suitable shirt for the occasion

L to R is Kowalski, Caples, Tershay, Clements, Sinclair, and Fritsch. Everybody in the cool guy area was making predictions on who would take the 10 large. Busenitz, Trujillo, Rune? Um, how about all three of the youngest ams in the Contest? If this was Vegas you would have come up on some serious loot considering the odds were stacked against these kids

After Berard and Peterson partied a bit too much the night before the Qualifiers, Berard and Lizard came to the conclusion that if they simply switched shirts it would all work out. Well it didn't, but it made for great entertainment as Kyle Liz-ard was created

Leave it to the skaters to blow it for the whole beach production. The cops were not psyched on our partying habits and started searching bags and dumping out every last beer throughout the whole weekend. I wonder if they have to shave their heads for this kind of work?

Wade Speyer was the victim of one of those really important reasons for getting a ticket on the beach...jay-walking

I was skating back to the car at the end of the day and there was someone skating the other way. I thought, "Huh, that looks like Rodney Mullen." I gave him the friendly nod and realized it WAS Rodney, so I turned around and chased him down for the photo

When you're a fan of motorcycles, this kind of stuff catches your eye. Only in HB...

As I type this, I’m sitting on a couch overlooking the bowl, with the waves breaking in the background. It’s 9:30am, there is a cool breeze, and it’s slightly overcast, but it will burn off by mid-day and there’s pretty much not a cloud in the sky after that point. So I guess I can’t really complain about the work environment, huh? At around noon lunch is served, the sound system is impeccable, and the vibe around the skate area is point on.

There is a HUGE surfing event going on here. The skate aspect of it is basically a small sideshow. I’m pretty ignorant to the surfing world, but the US Open of Surfing is apparently a big deal. It takes place on Huntington Beach and the annual crowds get into about 300,000. Traffic is horrendous and everywhere you walk you literally bump into people. But I’ve been told that the waves are unusually tall this weekend…and any wave is big to me since I’m used to the bathtub temperature of the Gulf of Mexico, which is generally as mellow as a lake.

The culture out here is so different from what I’m used to back home in Tampa. It seems as if everyone either skates, surfs, or partakes in the “lifestyle” to a certain extent. When I hear a skateboard rolling down a sidewalk in Ybor City, I turn my head to see who it is. But out here that sound is so common that I really don’t even notice anymore. It’s the morning of the Qualifiers and the session is going with a few surfer guys, a random girl, and even security rolling around the bowl. Like I said…everyone is into it, but they will soon be carted off the ramp to make way for the contestants.

The event is what we call “invite-only.” It’s not am or pro specifically…you simply have to be invited to be a part of it. SPoTlight got together with Cons, Red Bull, and The Skateboard Mag to collectively put together a list of skateboarders that we wanted to see compete. They ranged from pros like Johnny Layton, to ams on the come-up like Tom Remillard, to living legends like Hosoi. This is a happy-go-lucky format, but unfortunately that entails excluding certain skateboarders. To those that we had to decline, please don’t take it personally. That’s not how it was intended at all.

The skaters started strolling in around 11am and after a couple of hours of practice the first heat of eight got kicked off at 1pm. Each skater in the four-man heats got a one-minute intro run and then a full-on, no-rules, 10-minute jam. It got started a little slow, but everyone got the hang of what was going on pretty quickly and the crowd perked up at the same time. Actually…that’s an understatement because the crowd was GREAT and there was standing-room-only in the stands for the majority of the afternoon. There were a total of 34 skaters, but we only took 10 to the Finals on Sunday to compete for the $50,000 purse. Here are some of the highlights of those that ripped and were entertaining, but still didn’t make the cut:

• Sammy Baca – he showed up with only board shorts on and skated in the last heat. It took him a few tries, but he pulled a miller flip over the spine and then cruised it barefoot for a while
• Kyle Liz-ard – this was an odd mix of a drunken Kyle Berard and Lizard King. Kyle attempted to take his intro run, but slammed immediately since he was slightly intoxicated, but Lizard King saved the day by skating in the jam for Kyle
• Christian Hosoi – Holmes was ripping! He had great lines, smooth transfers, and damn nearly made the cut, coming in at 11th. It was a pleasure to watch him and Hosoi was a crowd favorite as usual
• Wade Speyer – What?!?! Yep, Wade Speyer himself was in attendance and destroyed the spine just like he always has
• Brent Atchley – you don’t see him in person much, but this light-footed ripper from Portland, Oregon handled his business by ollieing into and out of everything, with a serious mustache, too!

You can get a full copy of the results right here.

There was this other contest going on the same weekend in Boston, so that made recruiting exactly who we wanted in Coastal a bit more difficult. To make the Finals more interesting, we “seated” a rippers that flew straight from Boston on Saturday night/Sunday morning to our beautiful “working” environment on Huntington Beach, and straight into the Contest.

Due to the strict scheduling of the US Open, we had to start at exactly 3pm. We took the 15 contestants and broke them into three, five skater heats. Instead of one-minute intro runs, we gave them a more appropriate 45-seconds to get familiar with the crowd on their own. Then it was a 12-minute, all-out, no rules jam:

• 15th – $500 – Jake Duncombe (seated) – I saw Jake’s dad one time when I was in Australia and no one had to tell me that it was his pops because he literally looked exactly what Jake will look like when he’s in his mid-40’s
• 14th – $600 – Christian Hosoi – surprise! We squeezed Holmes into the Finals because the fifth seated skater didn’t show. It was rad because he ended the whole deal with a nice lien air transfer into the extension
• 13th – $700 – Pedro Barros – our name for him was the Brazilian Ryan Sheckler because he had the Red Bull hat and went shirtless about 50% of the time. But as you can see by getting 13th place, Pedro held his own
• 12th – $800 – Andrew Langi – I’m so glad that I talked him into attending because Andrew is easy on the eyes and skates the entire bowl with a mix of air and lip tricks
• 11th – $900 – Tom Remillard – if you’ve been hand-picked to ride for Anti Hero and your name is Tom the Grom, then you’d better produce…and Tom sure did with bs tailslides to revert in the cradle and much, much more
• 10th – $1,000 – Grant Taylor – check out Nike SB’s Debacle and watch Grant’s part for an example of how he skates at all times. Everything he does is 100mph…he knows how to keep it exciting and on edge
• 9th – $2,000 – Collin Provost – when you’re from Huntington the crowd would go even more nuts. Collin didn’t disappoint with his alley fs noseblunt onto the extension
• 8th – $2,500 – Dennis Busenitz (seated) – since we first saw him so many years ago at Tampa Am, I’ve been a fan of Dennis. It was cool to see him roll up, scope the bowl, and then proceed to shred it like no one else
• 7th – $3,000 – Ben Raybourn – just turning pro at the young age of 16, Ben is one of the coolest kids you’ll ever meet. His trick selection is a mix of the past 25 years of skateboarding and he does it all with his own exciting twist
• 6th – $3,500 – Chad Bartie – I got called out for saying it too many times over the mic, but Bartie really is getting better with age. For some guys, when they lose sponsors they sort of fall off, but not Bartie because he’s on top of his game as much as ever right now
• 5th – $4,000 – Rune Glifberg (seated) – the great Dane only needed a short period of time to get used to the unique bowl and get his lines down as one of Converse’s newest representatives
• 4th – $4,500 – Tony Trujillo (seated) – he was the first one there and was ripping all day with some of the most spontaneous skateboarding we’ve ever seen. TNT did tricks in his jam that you didn’t even see him do in practice
• 3rd – $5,000 – Kevin Kowalski – this soft spoken kid out of Newport, Oregon was so stoked on the five G’s that I don’t think he really even knew what to say. He didn’t have to talk because his array of transfers, lip tricks, and footplants did all of the conversing just fine
• 2nd – $6,000 – Curren Caples – definitely one of my favorite little guys out there, but he truly does skate like a grown-ass man. Kickflip to blunt fakie and fs flip disaster on the extension, fs flip tailslides, and much more earned Curren a top spot
• 1st – $10,000 – Raven Tershay – hailing out of Santa Cruz, Raven has the name and the Tershay legacy backing him up. I had never seen him skate before so I was hesitant on getting him in the event. Shame on me because if he’s got street skills to back up the tranny skills, then Raven is the future

Next up was a 15-minute Best Trick Contest on all three of the unique obstacles…”Sinclair’s taco”, the extension, and the cradle. Dyet squeezed in there with a fs 540 and a back flip in the cradle. Yes, you read that right, not a back lip, but a back flip…

• Honorable Mention – $100 – Andrew Langi – nose manual transfer from cradle onto extension and back into bowl
• 3rd – $1,000 – Tom Remillard – proper fs 5-0 to fakie in cradle
• 2nd – $1,100 – Ben Raybourn – boardslide transfer onto side of extension from out of the cradle
• 1st – $1,200 – Aaron "Jaws" Homoki – he got the blunt kickflip fakie on “Sinclair’s” taco to win it, but the crowd really wanted to see the 540 in the cradle

Apparently there were some issues on when the Contest had to end. Barak relayed the message to me that at 4:30pm the cops were going to shut us down if we were not 100% completed. I was sweating it for a minute, but once I realized that Huntington’s Finest were hanging out on the judges’ stand enjoying the shredding, I know we were all good. So it went a little bit over, but that was fine with all in attendance.

First and foremost, SPoTlight Productions would like to thanks Steve Luther and all of our friends at Converse for allowing us to be part of such a unique event. Thanks also to Red Bull and The Skateboard Mag for support. Speerco, great job on the bowl. Finally, thanks to the good people of Huntington for being such a lively, standing-room-only, crowd. Hopefully we can do this one again! Maybe at another beach? Stay tuned…

Ryan