July 2007. A wall spin competiton between Brett and Michael ends up at the Paddle Round The Pier 2007 beach festival doing spins and flips off the Southern FM van - with their permission. They suggested we speak to the event organiser, Dave Samuel himself, about doing a demo at the festival. It was too late to try and fit something in now, but he told us he would keep us in mind for next year. And he was true to his word.
We decided to use buy our own rig to display on - I mean Brett's folks bought one for us to use. All through May and June we would set it up at Stanmer Park on a Sunday and we would work on our routines. It was hard work, but a lot of fun.
Sadly soon after we started our practice sessions Tom injured his leg doing a jump down at the beach. He fractured his leg bone and was going to be out of action for at least 6 weeks. There was no way he could be in the demo. We didn't want to replace him so we amended the routine for the remaining 9 of us instead.
When the day came we found Dave had given us plenty of room to work in. To top it all our stand was perfectly placed by the food, drink and main stage which pleased us no end (the Thai noodles were delicious). So we awerre all set.
We did our routine every hour from noon onwards. The warm up and mucking around we did before our first demo got such a good response we did it every time. We had to do our 2pm routine early because we had such a large crowd waiting and they were getting restless. Then we had to do it again straight after as a load more people turned up and started waiting. All part of the learning curve.
We did our last demo at 5pm. We were tired, byut really pleased it had gone so well. It was good fun and we got a lot of satisfaction seeing positive reaction we got from everyone.
We were really looking forward to the next day, but Sunday 6th turned into a 'storm' and the day was cancelled - a real shame as everyone was having a great time.
All in all we had a great weekend - well Saturday - and we made a lot of new friends.
A special thanks to Scott at Plain Lazy for the T-Shirts. We went there to buy and they liked what we did, so they gave us some T-shirts - how great was that! You can see some of them in the photos we took the following week at the seafront.
And also thanks to the White Crane Fighting Arts for their support. Some of them said they might come along on one of our Saturday Jams. That would be great. And let's not forget the cornbread people at Arepa's & Co. Thanks for all the bananas. (You had to be there).
Hope to see you all again next year.
