I hadn’t been on a ferry for a few years but seriously you forget how amazing they are in comparison to flying (well, amazing if you’re a photographer with loads of heavy bags). Okay so it was 10 hours travel time but seriously that is nothing in comparison to all the trauma and headache of getting to an airport, dragging bags about, weighing bags to make sure they get under the limit, hiding heavy stuff on your person at check-in to then put back in your bag after weighing and then flying with say, Ryanair…or worse still, Aeroflot.

I drove onto the Ferry in my car, the bikes and camera shit all loaded into the boot, and within half an hour I was sitting comfortably on the deck raising my glass, toasting to the high seas and at a disappearing Portsmouth that was shrinking in the distance. Because it’s a boat too no one really cares if you’re drinking…at say half 10 in the morning and if Alan has a full slab in his backpack; it kind of goes with the territory. As the day progressed it was, excuse the pun, plain sailing.

We docked at Guernsey for about an hour whilst people got on and off there. Peering across at this other funny little Channel Island it was obvious that we were going to have a good time and find some interesting stuff to shoot. This archipelago just seemed like a little microcosm of the mainland, but with a strange twist to everything. Although that kind of made me feel really ignorant, because the UK mainland is, in reality, a small island too…either way I just couldn’t wait to see Jersey now. This had been a good idea, I was feeling it.

The next three days became a whirlwind of spot hunting and shredding. Alex had already formed a rough plan of what he wanted to hit up (thanks largely in part to the local skate hero, Steve Harben, who knew the location of just about every handrail on the island). Luckily the weather was perfect for the whole time too whilst we were there. We met up with Patryk Kucza, Billy and a handful of other locals on occasion, but that’s the one thing about Jersey, there’s not many riders! There’s a handful of very limited skatepark facilities, no proper shop and a small skate scene. I don’t need to really harp on about this too much, but how it’s bred one of the UK’s best ramp riders just literally doesn’t make an ounce of sense…