Jesse Tighe tells us about his Bristol session

It was still pitch black outside , but I hauled myself outta bed at 7am, threw on some clothes and checked the weather. As I was pouring my coffee I checked the time on the cooker. 7:38, I chugged the coffee and grabbed some toast and my boards, I had 8 minutes to get to the station.

After getting to the train just on time, I settled down and put some tune’s on my Ipod and prepared for the gruelling hour and a half train journey.

The train pulled into Bristol at 9:35. I just took my phone out of my pocket when a long haired kid with a skateboard tapped me on the shoulder, Rob Borek long term skate buddy. We missioned it back to his grabbed some bacon butties for breakfast, slapped on some fresh grip then skated over to Ashton Court, a local speed run.

We skated there for half an hour. Then hooked up with Laurie and drove back to his place. One word to describe his living room, Awesome, Never Summer boards everywhere. We then grabbed some more food, played about on the boards then headed off to a local park with all the boards in the boot.

I took the descent out, and it was the perfect board for the job, it being topmount helped it grip through tight turns and respond to every movement, the 33” wheelbase kept the board lively but still stable as I was bombing the steeps, the snappy flex made it easy to pump on the straight and the 78a wheels held grip even on the wet surface.

After playing around on the new line-up for an hour we headed off to some multi-story car parks, to see what the soldier was capable of.

At the garage Laurie took the soldier out for its virgin ride, while I rode the ransom. After an hour of riding Laurie had a big smile on his face and I wanted to see what all the fuss was.

Just standing on the board I could see why it was special, the concave was deep and the sharp rails held my feet in through aggressive corners, the rocker/spoon on it gave ht board a low centre of gravity making it stable even at high speeds, and the 77mm Inferno wheels had a fast roll speed.

We shot some photos and videos ( The garage video), then jumped back into the car and went back to robs.

We got up early the next morning, 11am , and tweaked some bushings and bearings then headed out to Ashton Court and mucked about on the Ransom after a couple hours of riding the path got too busy with angry mothers and pushchairs and the odd horse, so we moved on to stoked bishop a notoriously dangerous speed run in the posh suburbs of Bristol, with blind corners and Sunday driver, and to make it worse the ground was wet and we were losing daylight fast, I managed to get in 3 or 4 runs on the Ransom before it was too dark skate.

From Stoke Bishop Rob and I lugged all five boards and three bags up the road where we were met by Laurie. We quickly crammed our boards into his car and were driven off to Horfield skate park, a floodlit concrete park with a nice bank and a good half pipe. We took some shots there but had limited time as I had to catch my train back. Once again we pile into the car this time to the train station.

It was a mad dash across the platform with Rob and Laurie carrying my boards but I just made the train in time and sat down and tuned into my Ipod once again.

I took home with me the soldier to test it out and take it to some real speeds.

All in all it was great weekend of riding and I’d just like to give a massive thanks to Rob for providing food and shelter, to Laurie for awesome riding, and to Jess Laurie’s girlfriend for being the chauffer for the weekend.