Slater Trout – Official Website

It has been a busy couple of days but fun!  Friday was the LA County Jr Lifeguard regional tryouts.  I only did one event, the rescue board paddle race.  I qualified to move on to regionals next week at Pacific Beach in San Diego but I get to do an individual event as well as one of the legs of the relay team.  The team relay is always exciting so I am looking forward to that.  After that we jumped in the car and loaded a bunch of boards (a huge thanks to Joe Bark for loading us up with race boards and rescue boards to use and as always to Blane Chambers from Paddle Surf Hawaii for the two 9′ 2″ all arounder wave boards that we took down) and headed down to San Clemente for the 34th annual San Clemente Ocean Festival.  We met our good friend Talia Gangini from Maui there.  She came to spend the weekend with us a do several of the events (that’s why we had extra boards along).  We had a couple of really fun sunset surf sessions at the pier and she did great all weekend taking home two seconds and a third.  It is one of the funnest events of the summer because it includes surfing, stand up paddle surfing and racing, relay events, swimming, running, surf ski and rescue board races, body surfing and dorey boat races.  The dorey races are in and out through the surf line with two man teams rowing out and back.  They wear helmets and its a good thing.  The boats for big and heavy and there are always collisions and boats flipping over in the surf.  It is a crowd favorite.  I did 5 events and won three races on my 14 foot Bark race board (thanks again Joe!).  The conditions were calm so no wind and not much swell until you got closer to shore so if you were lucky you could get a little help coming in.  Lots of great racers there and in one race several of them wore hazmat suits in support of the clean up effort going on in the gulf.  It must have been a little warm paddling 3.5 miles in them but they all did great and it was for a good cause.  In the 10k race some of the same group decided to cruise along with a fellow paddler who was just returning after a botched surgery put him out of commission for a while.  Paddlers are great about supporting each other and it was a cool thing to do.  I also did a swim and paddle rescue board event.  I am a strong swimmer but not the fastest by far.  It was brutal out there at the start, I got kicked, tackled, my goggles ripped off, its like being tumbled around in big surf!  It was all fun.  The last event of the weekend was the SUP surf contest.  I made it to the finals but there were some guys ripping it up out there!  The level of surfing was amazing and the crowd loved it.  All in all a great weekend, came home and fell into bed.  Had a bit of a rest day today.  Back at it tomorrow. Aloha, ST

Ocean Fest here we come...