This past Saturday, jammers from Monterey to Seattle converged upon the sands of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach for this years Wintershred. The weather was beautiful and the jams lasted all afternoon. This years participants included Dan Maggalanes, Doug Korns, Mark Regalbuti, Mike Esterbrook, Tam Wolfe, Mike Galloupe, Scott Weaver, Arthur Coddington, and Carl Dobson.
wintershred is mostly about the jamming, but we did take a break for a quick sort of competitive round of pairs freestyle. Each group got 4 minutes and were judged, as Dan termed it, on the old ‘Wham-O’ system, a 1-10 scale. Added to that were 3 bonus point moves that could add up to 2 points each to the teams score. The results are as follows;
4th Place: Doug and Tam – These two really played well. They had to deal with some of the stronger offshore winds of all of the groups and hit some really cool stuff along the way.
3rd Place: Mike E. and Dan – Good co-ops, Mike utilized his beach passing game, while Dan shredded out some big series ending in great seals. They were right up there, but didn’t get much in the bonus point category.
2nd Place: Mike G. and Scott – Played excellent and really could have played the best of all. These guys shredded. All day Mike was impressing with his shred or die style and big catches. This teams Gitis ratio was beyond all the other teams combined. Unfortunately for them this was the first year we didn’t have the Gitis as a bonus move. Scott showed off his rolling prowess and spin discterity while hitting some huge seals. They played very clean as well.
1st Place: Buti and Carl – Not perfect by any means, but we did hit some big multi-spin moves combos and garnered a few more bonus points which helped us get to the top spot.
Arthur decided to sit out the competitive round but he was a force all day in the jams. He took advantage of the constant breeze and hit an incredible variety of difficult turbo multi spinning moves. Mike Galloupe and Arthur had a little tumble rumble going. But I think Arthur’s triple spinning front dive to a prone bad attitude may have taken honors. Without equal, Galloupe’s thunderous crash and burn Gitis’s had us shaking our heads all afternoon. He had local beach goers on edge as each subsequent gitis threatened to unhinge the mighty San Andreas fault which runs underneath Ocean Beach. On Monday morning there was a 4.2 quake nearby that shook much of the Bay Area. Could Seattle be next?
The highlight of the day came late as we took a moment to honor an amazing freestyle feat of one of our fellow jammers, Doug Korns. Through this past year Doug has swept an amazing 16 consecutive Masters, Grandmasters, and Super Grandmaster world freestyle titles. A record that will be difficult to ever duplicate again. Mike and Tam came up with the idea to create an award to honor Doug ‘The Sweeper’s’achievement. Tam is a gifted artist and sculpture and she created a very impressive glass piece and presented it to Doug. All in all it was a great way to cap an incredible day of fun and jam on the San Francisco shore.
Hope you can join us at one of our next jams,
Carl Dobson