Sean O'Brien, Pro Windsurfer – seanobrien.com.au™

Just got back from another amazing trip to Singapore! The first time I was there to catch up with some buddies of mine but this time I was there to catch up with some buddies of mine AND compete at the 2012 Asian Windsurfing Championships. Singapore is just such an amazing city it’s a bit hard to describe; so I thought I’d make an attempt with the above photos. A bit less craziness this trip as I was competing each day and running lot’s of training clinics and coaching sessions for the local sailors and up and coming kids but we still did manage to make it to every nightspot imaginable, and some! Enjoy the pics. All by except the ones from Howie!

Wow. Miami. What a place. Took a quick flight in with my good mate Kurosh to compete at the 2011 IFCA North American Slalom Championships. Rented the most obscenely pimped Ford F150 truck I’ve ever driven. Windsurfed all day, cruised South Beach all night … great times! I finished 3rd at the event behind Wilhelm Schurmann and Kurosh but points were tight and we each had a few wins a piece in the 12 races we managed. Miami is such a fun place to visit and my friends there (shout out to Diego, Alex “the Legend” Morales and Rick “Maui Malones” Randall!!) really looked after us and made sure we had a legendary time. Enjoy some pics and soon a quick video I shot with Kurosh driving our truck around the streets of Miami!

So I hadn’t seen my bestie Timmy in about 3 years so figured it was time to swing down to Singapore to catch up with him and also another good mate of ours who’s just got hitched and on his way back to Australia. I haven’t been to Singapore proper (apart from Changi airport 15 times a year) in about 8 years and A LOT has changed in that time! Here’s a quick chronolog of our weekend madness in Singapore – the happiest Asian city on Earth!

Sentosa Tourist Park (can’t believe this guy ruined my shot!) – check out the 45m high stone MERLION statue in the background.

Collecting horrible Chinese masks in China Town.

Checking out the foyer in the $8 billion Marina Bay Sands Hotel/Casino (that place is awesome!).

View from Level 27 where our friends were staying in this amazing MBS hotel!

The Art/Science Museum at the front of the MBS where we went to see the Salvador Dali exhibition.

Caribbean Club apartments where we went to one of the wildest BBQ’s full of English twats and all-sorts on Saturday night before hitting the town.

The amazing INFINITY POOL on the roof level of the MBS which also doubles as a nightclub in the evenings called Ku De Ta (was $50 just to get in though – sheesh!)

Inside the MBS shopping centre there were small canals and fountains that you could take gondola boat rides in! WTF?!

Avalon Club. A 17,000sq foot ‘crystal inspired’ glass nightclub floating on the water in Marina Bay right in front of the Casino. One of the best nightclubs I’ve seen on the planet … simply amazing. Hello, another $40 to get in though and $20 drinks. Meh!

Hit the clubs with a few friends!

The city skyline viewed from the balcony at Avalon Club.

On Sunday we rocked the Tamjong Beach Club (they call it model beach apparently) for some sun soaked beers and sand. Great atmosphere.

Up the top of the MBS at Ku De Ta rocking the VIP section things get a bit wild. Our first adventures with the big man’s new fiance – think she took it all in stride!

About to check out the Louis Vuitton store which is another floating glass temple on the water in front of the MBS. There is actually a tunnel that goes between the LV store inside the MBS to this concept store where you walk under the water… Saw the most awesome pair of hightop sneakers there but they were $1,980.

On my last night before hitting the airport me & Timmy head to LITTLE INDIA and find the magic Ghandi restaurant where you are served endless rice/vege/meat curry assortments dumped on a massive banana leaf on your table and just eat with your hands. They refill the water glass pretty quick cause this stuff is SPICY!

Managed to actually make my plane this time and get back to Europe (and the cold). Singapore…WHAT A PLACE. Go visit! Do it!

About 6 months ago I got some emails from some sailors in Mauritius asking about formula sails and fins. With +10,000 islands surrounding Australia, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have to quickly throw Mauritius in to Google Maps and just check exactly where it was………. They had heard about me from my blog (www.CarbonSugar.com) where I’ve written a lot about training for Formula Windsurfing so it was good to see I am still generating hits on that site when I’ve had no time to write anything on there in the past year!

The dialogue continued for a few months and eventually the guys over there asked if I would be interested in coming to Mauritius to coach their elite Formula Windsurfing team. Coming up in August is the Indian Ocean Island Games; a mini-Olympics for the nearby islands of Mauritius, Seychelles, Reunion and Madagascar involving many sports – with the two sailing disciplines this time being Lasers and Formula Windsurfing.

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Just after the PWA Slalom World Cup event in Ulsan, Korea, myself and Kurosh Kiani took a little trip down to Okpo Island, which is just outside Busan, in the south of South Korea. Okpo is home to one of the biggest shipyards on planet earth, owned by Samsung (yeah, you know them, the electronics brand, yo!) and a cousin of mine happens to be working down there overseeing the build and fitout of some of the world’s biggest Drillships.

Don’t know what a Drillship is?? Understandable. It’s basically what would happen if the Titanic, a Space Shuttle, Terminator and the Mining Industry had a baby together that looked like a ship. We got the full tour of one of the new ships being commissioned and it is one of the most impressive and complex pieces of engineering design I have ever seen. Drillships are designed to head out in to the far reaches of the ocean then can drill +3km deep in to the ocean seabed; mostly being used for exploration of new gas and oil wells and scientific drilling. These beasts don’t use anchors, they position themselves to exact GPS coordinators by maintaining engine thrust from 6 different thrustors to stay in position whilst the drilling takes place; all with a floating drill pivot that allows the ship to tilt over massive waves in the ocean without actually moving the drill pieces in the ocean – which would surely break if not! If that doesn’t seem complicated enough; at the same time this is going on, there is mud being sucked up out of the drill which is then compacted and treated on-board in massive tanks and turbines before being hardened and pumped back down to the bottom of the ocean.

The drills are controlled by just 4 guys sitting in a pressurised cabin on the top of the ship. Each driver sits in a space-chair complete with all sorts of joysticks and custom-keyboards and flatscreen monitors to show all the information that the drill’s sensors spit out – as well as cameras on every angle to make sure everything is running smoothly. The drivers don’t really need to leave the control room; even in a hurricane.

Samsung is one of the biggest shipyards on the planet employing over 30,000 people every day with its own hotels, sports centres, running tracks, gyms, shops and basically its own economy to keep the workers happy and on the site 24 hrs a day to keep busting out these massive ships.

Was definitely a side trip from windsurfing I will remember for a long time. Including climbing the ladders to the top of the drill mount which are around 30 storeys high climbing up a sketchy metal ladder! Thanks to Tim and the guys at National Oilwell Varco for lending us the overalls and allowing us to check out the site.

I had to make a separate post for the windsurfing photos as there were just too many taken in Egypt! Dahab is an incredible place to sail and over 2 weeks we had conditions from super light to nuking +35 knots and sailed in many locations from the flatwater freestyle spots of Speedy Bay and Kamikaze (near the surf-clubs in the tourist areas) to driving north past the famous dive locations like Blue Hole, to find our own private reefs! I brought with me all my new Starboard iSonics to test and a bunch of sails from slalom to wave kit. Travelling with me was Markus Bouman and of course as always, the 400kg we managed to check-in for FREE with AlphaStar airlines also included all the camera gear I could muster.

Sadly, I lost one of my small cameras when I stupidly let a tiny piece of hair fall in to the waterproof housing which broke the seal whilst I was snorkelling (hello, waterlogged camera) and also took a full-wave over my Canon 7D which did actually manage to survive somehow! Good times. Enjoy the pics!

Looking for some places to do some slalom training before the PWA Pro Tour event in South Korea next month, I discovered my good Dutch buddy Markus Bouman’s family has a house in Dahab, Egypt. 12 hours drive from Italy later I was sitting with Markus in Warsaw airport with 400kg of windsurfing gear and ready to go stalking camels.

We got super lucky with this trip, as the wind was perfect nearly every day of our 2-week stay. The house is away from the tourist areas where the surf-clubs and hotels are located, in the Bedouin town of Assalah, so we really got an opportunity to explore this amazing culture, away from the cliche tourist perception of Dahab. We rented a very old-school and falling-apart jeep, and despite the fact we spent more time learning how to Macguiver broken engine parts back together, we got amazing opportunities to drive north through the desert and windsurf in places no tourists have likely windsurfed; our own private reefs with only desert Bedouins for miles and miles. Mix in some snorkelling, camel rides, parties with the plethora of English tourists who frequent this town and plenty of late night Vodka escapades with our Polish friends and this was a perfect way to spend two weeks. Stay tuned shortly for the windsurfing pics and some movies that we shot during our stay…