Adventures in Jacksonville, FL

  By Erika Langman

There is a house located on Lake Conway that is infamous for housing some of the top girl rippers when they stop in Orlando to get some training in for their up and coming season. It has housed the likes of Wakeskaters Jen Gilanfar, Steph Tor, Lacey Menkin, Cassie Scott,  Pro Tour riders Andrea Fountain, Kara Austin, Barrett Pearlman, Courtney Dustin, and more.  They call themselves the Conway Punks, and we were lucky enough to stumble upon this house as our new home for our stay in Florida.

Conway Punks’ Adventure in Jacksonville

            Coming from Ontario I can probably count the number of times on my hand that I have ever actually swam in the ocean. Sad, I know, but unfortunately that’s the way it goes when you’re from central Canada. So when we got the invite from up and comer wakeskater Britt Fletcher to check out her place on the Intercoastal in Jacksonville Florida, myself, and the rest of the current Conway Punks jumped at the opportunity.

            We made our way down Saturday around noon feeling a little shaky after our Fluroesant Adolesant rager party the night before. Britt met us at her place around 5 and we got out on her XStar for an evening ride. Her place is right on the Intercostal waterway and a 5 min drive to the beach. The Intercostal is a river system of brackish water which flows out of the Atlantic Ocean all the way from south Texas up to the northern states and into Canada. In other words, dark, muddy, half fresh, half salt water with who knows what kind of life forms that swim beneath you when you ride. Britt told us there was nothing to worry about, besides the odd manatee you never really run into anything crazy like sharks. Ha.

            Julez Hayley and I took a quick wakeboard set then we passed it over to Jen G, Britt, Cassie and Ally to rip it up on the skate. The river had one of the coolest back drops, there were a ton of dead logs and stumps, with cypress trees, big leaves and the occasional bald eagle nest. Very cool.

            The next morning we hit the alarm at 7am so we could get some solid light for chase boat filming. For once, Ally lead the charge (for anyone who knows Ally knows she is NOT a morning person) and rolled everyone out of bed. All the ladies killed it, Jen G doing w2w 180s and coming close to stoping her w2w shove. We were in the middle of filming Britt when out of nowhere, she screamed and started swimming like a crazy person to the jetski where we were filming. We looked ahead and saw a fin in the water about 5 feet away from her, Shark! HA, ironic that Britt would be riding after her well assuring statement the day before that there was never any sharks where she rode. Britt was fine and we took the jetski closer to get a good look. It turned out to a be a baby Hammerhead which are incredibly rare to that area. We followed it around for a bit and figured it was probably injured so we left it alone. Pretty cool though!

            After the morning sesh we got some lunch and met up with Joey from Yolk winches to hit some of the local gaps. After driving around for a while disappointed that the water had dropped significantly all over Jacksonville, we decided to hit up a winch drop close to home. It was in a gated community so we had to call ahead saying we were friends with some “Josh” guy so we could get in.  It was in the backyard of this little old lady’s house who was pretty overwhelmed to see seven girls and 4 guys taking over the public stream. We got about 6 hits in total before security kicked us out and we had to leave. Oh the joys of winching.

            After we gave up on finding new spots Britt suggested we head over to the beach to do some winching in the waves. As I had mentioned earlier, I can count the number of times on one hand that I have been to an ocean so I pretty much thought that this was the best idea of the day. When we got there I took one look at the waves, grabbed that handle and started running down the beach with my board. Winching in the ocean is a lot like snowboarding. You can look around and pick which ever natural ‘hit’ or wave that you want, and charge at it. Sooo much fun, I was instantly in love. We finished up with some Pina coladas at Brits’ beach club, diner at Chillies and called her a night.