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

This is a short interview I shot of an interview with Greta Benvenuti (ITA-38) from the PWA Slalom World Cup event in Ulsan, Korea. Greta talks about life on the PWA for the girls during her second time visiting Korea …

We’ve just finished up my first PWA World Cup Slalom event for the season in Ulsan, South Korea. I skipped the first event of the tour in Vietnam and thought I’d kick off in Korea as I really like this spot. As usual, it was a week filled with rice, language breakdowns, super strong winds, crazy hotels, more rice and bottles and bottles of Korean Soju. I finished 24th overall after the 7-day competition which is my best result on the PWA World Tour so far and kept me in the prizemoney.

On the first day we also had a “media race” with all the competitors starting together which I finished 6th in to add to the cash. Enjoy some of the photos from the event by PWA/Carter and as usual all the ones from the event party were shot by me.

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!

This is a video I shot on a recent trip to the Sinai Desert in Egypt. Travelling with some Dutch and Polish friends, we spent 2 weeks based in Dahab then with an old-school rented Jeep, we travelled as far as we could north in to Bedouin country to explore this amazing country and culture. Dahab really is an amazing place to windsurf with plenty of reefs and secret spots you can get to by car; windy everyday and still with the revolution fresh in everyone’s minds, there are barely any tourists around.

Most of the footage was shot by Markus Bouman (NED-6) and myself, completely handheld (tripod broke and we couldn’t get a slidetrack or dolly on the plane).

We used a combination of Canon 7D, Canon SX210 and a GoPro HD for the moving car and helmet-cam shots. No housings were used during shooting and as a result we nearly wrecked all 3 cameras!

The sequence of me throwing a hat and sunglasses on whilst standing on the roof of our villa is actually a series of 257 individual photographs I processed with Topaz Adjust 4 plugin in Photoshop and stitched together.

Go to Egypt one day and ride a camel. You won’t be disappointed.

Music used is “Complacency No Vacancy” by a favourite Australian band of mine called Children Collide.

Not much wind for the last few days of my trip to Tenerife so most of the time was spent with the Point-7 Pro Team running up the mountain next to El Medano where we were staying and a few sessions out on the big sizes of the new slalom gear. Here are a few snaps of the team out on the water and on the flight back to cold Italy.

Today we visited FoxSports in the north of Holland to pick up some new iSonic slalom boards! FoxSports are the Starboard importers in the Netherlands and there I picked up a brand new 90L and 107L to compliment my 127L for this season. It’s a good feeling picking up new gear; keen to get them on the water next week in Italy. A carton of beer for the boys at Fox for their troubles and we were on our way…

I’ve won my 5th Australian Formula Windsurfing Title!!! After a 4-day battle with some of the best windsurfers on the planet, competing at an event I helped organise, I have managed to put myself on the podium coming in 3rd at the 2011 Downunder Pro as well as being the first placed Australian and winning another National Title. Check out a few photos above from awesome photographers Rob Plim from New Zealand and Adam Craven.

On the weekend of New Years Day, amongst the festivals and other parties I managed to put together a photoshoot with a few of my friends including Jesper Vesterstrøm who is out in Australia training this summer. The man behind the lens was the legendary Adam Craven (who is also a fellow windsurfer!) who volunteered his time for the shoot. The location was a small bay in Sydney Harbour launching from Clontarf which allowed us to sail right up to the cliffs along the bushland forest areas of the Harbour; an amazing location. Here is a few of the pics from the shoot.

Right now, most of the area around my city of Brisbane is underwater. After 6 weeks of continuous torrential rain including a cyclone and some very big tropical low pressure systems, many towns around me are completely underwater and already some lives have been lost. I’m doing what I can to support some charities who are helping flood victims during this mess. Today, with some friends of mine we sailed at Golden Beach, Caloundra which is an estuary full of many shallow sand banks and is normally quite a nice place to sail. After the rain, the entire passage has flooded and nearly all the photos of me shown above I am actually crossing sections that normally you can WALK ON, but today they were under 2m of water – incredible!!! The channel which is normally only 50m wide at some sections is almost 450m wide in some parts!!! Hopefully the rain will soon stop…

My thoughts are with the families who are in the towns currently being evacuated.

From www.Point-7.com: Pro Team rider Sean O’Brien traveled to the northern seaside city of Fortaleza in Brasil this week to compete at the final FW Grand-Prix World Tour event. Here, Sean shares some of his thoughts on his first experience traveling and windsurfing in Brasil.

Footage from the FW Grand-Prix event was shot by Claudio @ Morlima Films.