JC: “This summer I have been constantly tinkering away with ideas of locations around the coast that would be awesome to photograph. Some have been new and some old that I have snapped before but in my books, could have been captured a hell of a lot better. One of my targets has been the Old Harry rocks, a pair of chalk stacks situated close to Handfast Point, a couple of miles north east of Swanage. I had shot there four or five years ago with Timo Mullen in light winds, but we had only been able to score about thirty minutes or so of sailing before our RIB had to return to base. I knew someday, it needed to be done again! After the Austria PWA World cup I had just arrived home and that perfect sea breezy forecast was on the cards for the next few days. I knew this was a decent window of opportunity and action needed to be taken! There was no problem finding volunteers to come out and windsurf around Old Harry but finding a boat and a driver was a slightly bigger issue. Cue Andy ‘Bubble’ Chambers and his contacts with the Watersports academy in Poole and a shiny six metre RIB was at our disposal, even if it did mean I would have to go without beer for a few weeks to pay for it. One thing I have learned during my years of photographing windsurfing and waiting for weather is that there is no point beating around the bush. If you really want to do something, don’t keep putting it off and finding excuses not to do it; push the green light and go! Yep, the forecast was solid, boat rider in place, ‘no ifs, buts or maybes’; we were on! We were looking at a pleasant enough spring afternoon; nice ‘n’ sunny and a decent sea breeze, probably 20 knots with no significant swell around. It certainly wasn’t that massive wave forecast that would have you quivering in your boots but nonetheless I was actually tingling with excitement when I left home headed for this adventure out to Old Harry. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, it is not that often that we make the effort to go check out amazing landscapes, even when they are close to home, so this was a chance to see an amazing physical feature with historical significance, with windsurfing action thrown in for good measure.
