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Sipping Jetstreams Film & Book |
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Several years ago, fed up with traveling to the same old places to document surfing, photographer Dustin Humphrey and filmmaker Taylor Steele had an epiphany. Though they'd spent much of their lives in airplanes, hotels, rental cars, and aboard boats, had they really seen the world? Hawaii, Australia, and Tahiti had already been thoroughly covered, but what about Italy? Egypt? Yemen? Kenya? Sri Lanka? India? Canada? Russia? Cuba? They realized that while surfing has proliferated since the days of Bruce Brown's Endless Summer, traveling surfers had grown comfortable and complacent. It became obvious to the pair that it was time to follow Robert Frost's advice and literally take the road less traveled.
Through their shared realization a true connection occurred, and they formed a pact to explore those parts of our planet steeped in culture as well as waves. They decided to scrap the old surf-travel strategy of fly in, surf, fly out in favor of true exploration of a culture - physical, spiritual, musical, and emotional. Ten-day trips were replaced with two-month sabbaticals. They gave up the "sure to score" mentality that had dominated surf travel for decades in favor of a more rhythmic journey into the heart of a place.
They recruited their friends, many of whom happen to be the biggest names in surfing, to join them on their odyssey into the unknown. They agreed with Mark Twain's philosophy that travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and they set out to discover the places few surfers ever considered. They were "sipping jetstreams."
Their first series of trips took them to Morocco, Hong Kong, Italy, Indonesia, Egypt, Japan, Cuba, & Barbados, and the sheer stoke the images and footage they returned w/ inspired a renaissance of exotic exploration within the surf community. Along with dozs of articles from their travels being published in surf mags around the world, Sipping Jetstreams the oversize hard-back coffee-table book and DVD were released in October '06, documenting their experiences.
The pair is at it yet again, traveling to destinations like Iceland and Vietnam for another film/coffee table book combo. Look out for Castles In The Sky late 2009 or early 2010.
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