The Witchcraft lot recently took a trip down, under visiting founder French’s new home and shredding hard on all terrain left and right.
Author Jake repping Oz.
Taking no prisoners out in some of the gnarlier parks nor at the occasional street spot were Euros Julian Benoliel and Jake Collins and Australian team mates Erik Cole and Gus Thomas plus guest Nik Stipanovic.
Jake was kind enough to write a few words for us to give you a little insight on this witchcraft endeavour. Here we go! …and here’s an alternate Youtube link just in case.
Words: Jake Collins | Photos: Sam Coady
Cooking With Gus
The crew for this trip comprised of locals Erik Cole and Gus Thomas, Juju aka Julien Benoliel and myself (Jake Collins)we also brought Passport Skateboards representative Nic (Stipo) Stipanovic along for the laughs! Then there was the camera manz: Sam Coady shooting photos and George (zoolz) Kousoulis on video.
Jake Collins charging hard: top bar 50-50.
Erik Cole and “Juju” Benoliel, born ready.
I’d known Erik and Juju for a good few years before this trip to Australia but it was the first time I’d meet Gus, he’s really sound and has a real job, a good real job. In fact he’s an architect. Anyway, I’m glad his name is Gus and I’ll tell you why…. we were skating this one park up in the Blue Mountains and Gus was trying this savage trick. Well in Australia they love to say ‘punch it in the guts’ to encourage you, but Erik shouts: ‘Punch it in the Gus!’. After he stuck it he went back around and got the special bar up did a couple more stunts right after. Zoolz was like: ‘Yeahhhhh cooking with Gus!’ The classic ‘broken record’ soundbite of the trip was set for the next ten days!
»In Australia they love to say ‘punch it in the guts’ to encourage you«
Stoked to have finally got to skate with you Gus! Pretty much five minutes into the trip and everyone had settled in: Sam Coady was giving Stipo shit. Stipo was calling Sam a pathetic loser.
Sam took his place as random statement guy , like the retarded: ‘I always order my coffee extra hot’
Gnar and raw = Julien Benoliel sailing frontside into the deep.
And naively asking me if I ate semi-healthy when I was on trips, I was like: ‘Yeah man just salads and water, and bed by ten..’
»We only had one ‘arvo’ before the storms came…«
We started the trip started in Sydney, skating all around there for the first week skating a few parks and squeezing in a few street missions before renting a 7-seater and hitting on the road. From Sydney we headed west to the Blue Mountains skated 3 gnarly parks there then the next morning and headed straight back towards Sydney and took the coast roads towards Canberra hitting all these insane parks on the way, holding off on the street skating till we got to Canberra.
TCB!
Canberra is like Barca in the sense of how many spots both the city’s have! Shit thing was as we got there we only had one ‘arvo’ before the storms came, meaning we ended up just looking at the sky and whereever a bit of blue sky was we’d drive to that part of the city, only to get about 30 minutes before the rain would have us again. I’m pretty gutted that we didn’t get to skate all the spots there man but we still got some good ones in! So it’s not all bad!
Most of the park and spots were good and crusty, not too hard to skate but the kind of place that would rip your skin off if you so much as put a foot wrong.
Jake Collins opting out of his nosegrind early.
I still reckon brand-new parks are more scary !
Park recreation.
For the rest of the trip the heat was pretty gnarly it was only really skatable in the day if there was shade at the spot or over the park so we ended up just going swimming in the daytime, preferring to try and skate in the evening.
»In other news: Victoria Bitter can fuck off!«
I was really into the beers in Australia and Coopers IPA was the one! It always had the deals on and was always the in walk-in cool rooms! What got me laughing though is fact they have drive in beer shops called a ‘bottle-o’ (they seem to put an O on the end of most words…) But when I say drive-in it’s a bit crazy, you don’t even get out of the car. You just talk to the guy, tell him what you want and they do it all for you. Brilliant way to promote drink driving ha ha.
Don’t get me wrong though, they came in handy!
Erik was really into sessioning frozen margarita’s and eventually he got us all on them. When in Rome…
In other news: Victoria Bitter can fuck off!
Thanks to everyone’s help in getting me and Juju out there.
Going iconic here with one of his trademarks: Julien Benoliel backside nose picks like no other.
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