15 minute read
JUST THE TIP
Old Bike Day With Brett Tippie
With almost 50 years of riding bicycles under my belt (and 40 years of mountain biking) I can safely say when I just hop on and start givin’r it feels much like an 'autopilot' or 'cruise control' of stoke. But…I recently had a moment that hit my turbo fun button and kicked my stoke into another gear.
It happened unexpectedly, when I was cast as a PVS delivery driver in a Pit Viper/IFHT Films rock video called New Bike Day. After getting into costume and weaving through the tripods, lights, reflectors, audio equipment, cameras, and fellow actors I suddenly saw it...the source and primal object of my bike lust from way back in formulative years…
A red and black motocross-inspired, full-suspension bicycle complete with fake plastic gas tank, fender, hi-rise handlebars, moto grips, and knobby tires. Oh, how I coveted this bike as a seven-year-old, back in the 70's and here it was, just randomly sitting there with the other props!
My vision immediately tunneled, the audio in my ears turned into crashing waves, the hair stood up on my arms, my palms got sweaty, and my heart started racing. It felt like an out of body experience as my hands curled around the grips and I sat down on the bike’s extended, padded seat. I had yearned for this bike so badly as a kid that it hurt. I never got one, but I did get the model below the full suspension that had everything but the shocks. In hindsight, it was probably a good move because the full shocker was actually a heavy tank. To see one now in great shape though, made me flashback to those days of extreme bike love, jumping garbage cans, doing skids, exploring new areas block by block and expanding my knowledge of the world—those bikes we had as kids offered our first taste of freedom and mobility.
Back on the video set, I pulled myself together and laughed at the idea of what it would be like if little, garbagecan jumping me back in “the good old days” of 1976 had somehow seen the high-tech, full-suspension YT carbon mountain bikes filling my bike room right now in 2022. (This is where I was going to slip in a time-travel joke...but you didn't like it.) Would my back-then mind be blown by a bike with today’s space-age tech? Or would I be disappointed that there’s no plastic replica gas tank?
After returning home from the New Bike Day shoot I checked out my current bikes with a newfound appreciation. I grabbed the closest sweet bike and hit the trails into the forest at the end of the block. Magically, the fog parted, and God-beams of sunshine began poking through the mist. My stoke definitely kicked into overdrive at that moment, and as I let the good times roll down the trail I said to myself, "These...ARE the good ol' days!"
So let the good times roll… New Bike Day can be found on YouTube.
The Flybrary
Need one? Take one? Got one? Leave one
ABOVE Jundai Nakashio, tossing a fly into the Squamish River. TEMPEI TAKEUCHI INSET Sharing is caring. Squamish's original flybrary. FEET BANKS
Fly fishing is a fairly hermitic pursuit, best enjoyed alone or with a select group of trusted companions. It’s a culture of secret spots mentioned primarily in hushed tones and purposely exaggerated facts designed to keep everyone guessing. Fish are a limited resource, and so is peace and quiet. As such, fly fishing is not a generally known for sharing, especially with strangers.
So, when Adam Raymakers installed a “flybrary” at the trailhead to a popular fishing spot on the Squamish River, he didn’t know what to expect. “I wasn’t sure how the community would feel. I expected negative feedback,” he says. “But I was pleasantly surprised. I wanted to put it somewhere everyone goes. This is not a secret spot, you can almost see it from the road.”
Modelled on the “little free library,” a movement to make books freely accessible that saw more than 125,000 tiny, free-to-anyone bookshelves pop up in neighbourhoods around the globe, the idea behind the flybrary is to provide fly fishers—locals or guests—with season, location, and species-appropriate fishing flies available to anyone who visits and fishes a spot.
“The idea started in Florida by Larry Littrell,” explains Raymakers. “There was a strip of foam attached to a gas pump that fishermen always put stickers on. He left some flies, and a few days later, his were gone and someone else had added some more and the flybrary project was born. You can order an official Flybrary Project foam strip but it’s like 60 bucks for shipping. I sent Larry a message and he said ‘Just make your own,’ so I grabbed some scrap wood, bought a wood burning tool and stuck it up.”
Raymakers populated Squamish’s first flybrary in the fall of 2021 with “a bunch of extra pink flies I had because we’d just gotten a puppy and I wasn’t fishing as much. I put up a couple of Coho flies too. I came back a few days later, and people had obviously understood the concept.”
Raymakers, who grew up fishing in Nova Scotia but has been in the Sea to Sky off and on since 2004, recently threw up a second flybrary on the Cheakamus River. Currently working with BC Cancer, he says tying flies is a nice break from the computer. “Same with fishing, it’s a great way to unplug and relax by the river. I don’t really care if I catch a fish, I just like it.”
Raymakers says that while the whole idea of the flybrary is to help novice or visiting anglers feel more accepted and in tune with an area, he hopes that the community vibe will extend to protecting and preserving local rivers as well.
“The rivers are getting busier. My girlfriend and I walk to the river every night and we’re seeing more garbage, lots of fire sites. There’s a lot of pressure on the riverbanks locally and maybe a flybrary will help people realize that we are all in this together and it’s on us to take care of these places. That would be the best outcome really.”
Seems those lessons we learned in primary school still apply, even to a culture as insular as fly fishing—sharing really is about caring.
Check the squamish flybrary on Instagram @squamish_flybrary or check the larger movement @flybraryproject – Feet Banks
If it Rolls…
First boards then bikes, Landyachtz is literally on a roll
The pen might be mighter than the sword but the steel is more fun to ride than the paper. LUCAS GREENHOUGH
“Bikes were always on the radar, it just took 19 years to pull it off.”
Blake Startup says this while pedalling to work at Landyatchz, a skateboard company founded in 1997 by Mike Perreten and Thomas Edstrand as a fun way to travel around campus at the University of Victoria. Then they started bombing hills, tinkering with their designs, and finding a community of skaters looking for durable boards that could handle high speeds. In the more than two decades since, Landyatchz has grown into one of Canada’s premier skate brands with a factory in the Kootenay region, a Vancouver warehouse shipping boards around the world, and storefronts in LA County and Union Street in East Vancouver.
To expand into the bike industry, the roots once again all come from the desire to have more fun travelling around, but instead of on campus—now it’s the entire city.
“I got into road biking for a bit,” Perreten explains. “Nothing too serious, but I started loving that morning commute. Being able to get that sense of speed every day to and from work…suddenly I’m really into biking.”
“The skate side of things was well established by then and we were looking at opening a new storefront,” says Startup, the general manager of Landyachtz bike division. “So, we found a space on the busiest bike route in Canada, which was also two blocks from our head office. At the same time, Mike took the
Paul Brodie bike building course and built the first Landyachtz—an aggressive, steel road bike. Then we called Brodie in to help us build up the shop.”
Brodie, a homegrown frame building legend and Mountain Bike Hall of Famer, mentored Landyachtz pro skateboarder and master tinkerer Kyle Wein on the art of building the kinds of bike frames Perreten and the crew were looking for—performance rides for commuting and recreation.
“Commuting to work is a really time-effective way to mix transport and fitness,” Startup says. “So, we leaned into that and let it naturally evolve. The tires got a bit bigger and the rides to work were not always just paved bike routes. We mixed in some trails, ripping through neighbourhoods—some adventure.”
The evolution and design tinkering continued for the next six years—cycle cross bikes built for obstacles and urban features, and gravel bikes—essentially road bikes that can fit a fat tire designed for exploring BC’s storied network of forest service roads. (Perreten also innovated a heat-molded bike saddle based on the customized boot shells of his ski racing background. Why shouldn’t your bike seat be molded exactly to fit your backside?)
“The heat-molded saddle is revolutionary,” Startup says, “but the frames just come from our love and passion for riding. Biking is part of our heritage—Mike grew up in Whistler in the late '80s and '90s, and I grew up in Deep Cove. Wade Simmons was my bike mechanic when I was 12 years old.”
Landyachtz has been hand building custom-order, made-to-measure steel or titanium frames in the Union Street shop since early 2017 and also offers a line of frames built overseas—steel or aluminum. Startup says custom orders take about six months from design to delivery, adding that pandemic supply chain issues that saw a shortage of bikes imported in recent years was beneficial to helping launch a locally-made alternative.
“People are excited about the bikes and so are we. We are a skateboard company but we also live in a rainforest. With the bikes, we can ride 12 months of the year. We do a shop gravel ride every week and we joke that the only thing that can stop us is black ice, public holidays, and (Provincial Health Officer/COVID rule maker) Dr. Bonnie Henry. Otherwise, if it rolls, and we can have fun on it, we’re in.” – Feet Banks
Check out the LY Bikes (and a local gravel route ride guide) at landyachtzbikes.com
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The Big Blue
Squalls, doldrums, dolphins, and a 16-day jaunt across the Pacific
Sixteen days at sea. JOEL JACQUES
The way normal people cross the Pacific Ocean in a 37-foot sailboat from Hawaii to San Francisco, explains my neighbour Joel Jacques, is to crew up the boat with six to seven sailors, set the autopilot at 90-degrees straight east, wave to your buddies on the dock, and head for North America.
That is not how Joel and the crew of the Spindrift V did it though. “We essentially had no autopilot. With even the slightest breeze you could hear the old girl strain, then she would get blown off course,” he says. “And there were only four of us—working in pairs, pulling four-hour shifts, swapping off hand steering and managing the sails for 2,600 miles without stopping. I was on the 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. shift. The nights were crazy beautiful at times, with stars filling the sky in every direction. Other times were intensely gripping with clouds blocking out all light as we barrelled through complete blackness with no point of reference—just staring at the compass and steering, trying to keep the boat straight. The first light of each new day was usually pretty emotional with a huge sense of relief that we’d made it through another night.”
The crew were tasked with returning the Spindrift V home after the 2021 Transpac race (one of the longest and oldest classic ocean races, running from San Pedro, California to Oahu, Hawaii). “The boat has to get back somehow,” Jacques explains. “And one of the crew that was supposed to do the crossing was unable, so I got the call super last minute.” Captained by skipper/owner Andy Schwenk, the Spindrift V already had a mechanic and a cook on board for the journey. As an engineer, Jacques’ job was to learn the navigation software on the fly and get everyone “home safely.”
“We had electronic instruments,” he explains, “telling us windspeed, direction, GPS…they failed on day three. We had a satellite phone for weather updates and the compass worked, but we couldn’t see any other ships or boats so we were completely blind from that perspective. At least our 12-volt cooler worked, so we had food for about ten days until we ran out. After that, we caught fish—two dorado and two bluefin tuna. Sashimi.”
“It seemed it was either blowing a gale, or dead calm,” Jacques recalls. When calm weather and flat seas (the dreaded “doldrums” of sailing lore) descended, the crew relied on a 40-gallon diesel tank with an extra pair of 50-gallon drums lashed off the back to motor them through calm waters. “The motor broke down twice but Mike, the mechanic, got us back up and going. On day 13 we ran out of fuel.”
If that sounds bad, on day 14 they ran out of water. “That was the crux, but we knew we weren’t that far out and could make it with what we had left in our water bottles.”
Eventually, after 16 days at sea, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge loomed through the mist and the adventure was over. For Joel, a lifelong Sea to Sky local with a number of multi-day ski trips under his belt, the tight crew camaraderie and the no-looking-back plunge into the unknown made for an incredible experience.
“Some sailors don’t want to sail in 30-knot winds, and it was blowing that when we left. But these guys weren’t scared, they were stoked. We battled some pretty serious squalls. You can see them coming during the day: a dark cloud going all the way to the horizon line, and you know you’re sailing right into it. At night it’s a bit different—you just get slammed with rain, wind, and steep, sharp waves. Without proper storm sails, it can get pretty exciting— you’re constantly managing the boat to keep it upright. Then, we’d finish our watch and go lie in the bunk. We’d wedge ourselves between the spare sails to avoid getting thrown across the cabin when the boat heeled during the next puff. We’re supposed to be sleeping, but we could hear the water rushing past the hull with a quarter inch of fiberglass separating our heads from the sea—all the while knowing we’re back on deck in less than four hours…”
Jacques says the excitement was tempered with moments of extreme peace, such as sailing at night with the stars of the Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon. He said it reminded him of an 11-day ski trip he once did in the Yukon’s Tombstone range with temperatures well below minus 20 degrees Celcius and northern lights filling the sky.
“That was comparable, but also completely different. We talk a lot about getting out into nature, and being out in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from anything, is as immersive as it gets. When you are in the mountains, you are usually at most only a day or so away from being able to get somewhere warm and safe. The ocean is constantly changing, nothing is predictable, there’s no air support, no rescue. It is true wilderness out there, with a really strong mental component to it—when you’re that far out at sea you’re completely alone, and you certainly can’t decide you’ve had enough and turn around and go home. That state of self-reliance is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. No matter what’s going on—you, the boat, and the crew need to work through it. That’s what I liked the most.” – Feet Banks
The next Transpac race is set for 2023. In the meantime, the Squamish Yacht Club hosts their annual open regatta July 20-24, 2022.
JOEL JACQUES
