This is final installment of the Flatland Magazine mini series about the DB Skimboards European Tour featuring the team’s time spent in Germany. We stayed in Germany longer than the previous stops in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, so this story has more photos and a much longer video.
Photos, video and words by Matt McDonald | EqualMotion.com
You can see the first four parts of this series here:
– Poland
– Netherlands
– Denmark
– Sweden
We drove from the Netherlands to Germany and finally arrived at Friedich’s house in Scharbeutz, Germany. We were greeted by Annette and Michael Friedrich’s parents for a great home made meal. A home cooked meal after being on the road is truly priceless.
We explored the surrounding area a bit and some of the guys worked on ideas for setups for the Suprememsurf skim demo.
After dinner we partook in some recreational beer drinking featuring flip cup and flunky ball and Freddy showed off his beer opening skills (watch the end of the video for that).
The next morning neighbors were talking about the english words that echoed throughout the small village of Scharbeutz until 3am. We may have reinforced the stereotype of loud Americans even though three of us were from Europe.
The next morning we woke up and headed to the unbelievably crowded beaches of Scharbeutz on the Baltic Sea. Unfortunately the wind/tides were not in our favor, so we were only able to sesh a small rail, but we made the best of it. Even if conditions are damn-near horrible you can still have a good time on the beach with a skimboard and that’s one of the things that makes skimboarding so much fun. While some of the team skimmed some of the guys disappeared for a champagne boat ride, which made for interesting stories and proved that dbaggery is an international sensation. They ended up swimming back to shore from the boat.
While hanging out on the beach and doing a little bit of filming a middle-aged, overweight man in a speedo asked me to not shoot video due to “privacy”. I fully understood his complaint that he didn’t want to be in a video. I then explained to him I would not put him in the video because no one wants to see a middle-aged, overweight man in a speedo. Our friendship ended pretty much right there and any concept of saving face with him ended. After reviewing the video later that evening I realized I lied because it was impossible not to have a middle-aged, overweight man in a speedo because they were everywhere on the beach that day.
We stayed another night in Germany and then headed north to Sweden to meetup with Jonathan Strömberg and the swedish skimboarders for a demo at the Hallifornia festival. Before we got on the ferry we seshed in Fehmarn for a little while.
At this point we traveled to Sweden (Read about it here and watch the video below) and made a stop in Denmark (Read about it here and watch the video below).
Video from our stay in Sweden…
While we were on our way back to Germany from Denmark someone broke into our van. That created a fair amount of chaos due to stolen passports and driving a van with a broken window and the only skimboarding we did in Denmark your can see below.
And then we took a ferry back to Germany…
We made it back to Germany, where we stayed at Daniel Priel’s parent’s house, so we had time to swap out the van and for some of the guys to get new passports.
After that we headed to Hamburg, Germany where Daniel goes to school and we crashed at his place for a few days. While we were there we ate a ton of kebab (oh, how I miss the kebab), checked out the red light district (except for Logan who conquered peer pressure) and we checked out the Beatles Square/Plaza since Hamburg is where the Beatles regularly performed during the early 60s.
While we were there Daniel took us to one of the local beaches that was one of the muddiest skim spots I have ever been to. The spot featured two shipwrecks and was right on a deep water channel where large cargo ships would come in and out. It was a pretty fun spot to skim and a great place to capture photos and video at.
We got a new van and everyone had their passports once again, so it was time to head to Warnemünde, which is part of Rostock, Germany for the Suprememsurf skim demo.
Supremesurf built some epic rails that we created the specs for, but due to the skim spots we couldn’t ride everything. People had discussed building a giant skim pit, but unfortunatly when we got to the beach there was no skim pit and the conditions were very similar to Scharbeutz. It was barely skimable. We dug out a skim pit of our own that could handle some of the smaller features. Crowds gathered around us to watch all the action. The local news even showed up and filmed some of the demo and interviewed Friedrich and Blake. At the end of the day we had spread skim to more than a thousand people on the beach and even more through the German television station. It was a good day.
After the demo we traveled to Poland for the Polish Skimboarding Open (read about it here) for one of the best skimboarding contests I have ever experienced.
The day after the contest we said our goodbyes and flew to Germany where we had to sleep in the airport.
Upon boarding that plane our trip was officially over. Overall the trip through Europe was amazing. We met a ton of skimboarders and had the opportunity to witness the different skim scenes in person. Never in my wildest dreams when I started skimboarding in 1996 did I think I would go on a skim tour through Europe in 2013. Thanks to DB Skimboards and Daniel Priel, Friedrich Fluh, Adiren Raza, Richard Doctor, Adam Balaam, Dallas Kingsburry, Logan Davidson and Blake Zimmerman for letting me document their travels through Europe.
And thank you for reading and watching. Until next time skimboarders.
