...an Orangeman in a grass skirt? No, you get George Freeth, often billed as the "first surfer in the United States". Apparently, Georgie's old man hailed from Ulster and fell for a Wahine after he emigrated to Hawaii. The offspring of their loins turned out to be a rather interesting dude. As inscribed on a memorial statue at Redondo beach in California...

According to British Airway's (BA) own webshite "At London Heathrow Terminal 5 we’ve created a natural, logical journey that’s so calm, you’ll flow through. It shouldn’t take long to get from Check-in to Departures. Transferring and arriving are just as simple and calm. Spend the time you save enjoying the excellent range of shops, cafes and restaurants. Or simply relax and be wowed by the world class architecture..."

No, it's not the wing of an outsized model aircraft - it's a Grain Surfboard in assembly. Produced in Maine from a company with a background in boat-building, you can now buy these wooden boards in kit form from Magicseaweed - their new (and exclusive?) European distributor. Using white & red Cedar from sustainable suppliers you buy a kit that includes board frame, cedar planks and rail strips, fin box, leash plug, glue, epoxy, fiberglass (sic), rubber gloves and more. Every step of this process has been thought through and is detailed in our 40 page instruction manual. Each board takes approximately 60 hours to build, but will be around for a lifetime of waves.

Whilst "eco-friendly" surfboards (I'm referring to the variants that use alternative foam and resin formulations) have been on the radar here for many moons, they haven't really gotten close to being mainstream - yet. Perceived price, cheap pop-outs from Chinatown and performance issues may have stalled acceptance but actually finding board shops that will sell you something greener is rather hit and miss.

It was the video below that did it for me. It had me wondering if Kevin Flanagan, the VP of marketing for REEF would want his daughter's thong-strapped ass up there promoting all their tacky products. Now I've no idea if Kev has a daughter, wife or girlfriend - presumably he's had a mother unless he's been hatched from sort of weird corporate cloning factory (less unlikely as the years roll by) - but you get my drift.

The saga of the seven plagues of Egypt - the curse where rivers and streams turn to blood - kept trickling through my head as I stared at this shocking image from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's site. This isn't Egypt but the coastline off Taiji, one of a number of villages that make up part of the fishing community in this region of Southern Japan. The ocean has turned a gory red, awash with blood from scores of dolphins, porpoises and small whales that are herded into shallow water for slow death slaughter by spear, knife and hook.

There must be scores of surfers, bodyboarders, swimmers and other ocean users who owe their life to the Cornwall Air Ambulance Trust. Be it longboard meeting head, cramp out the back in heavy surf, asthma attack, rip currents - there's as many opportunities for a day's surf to go badly wrong as right.

Assuming you do get back to shore and urgent medical treatment is required, anyone fading fast might as well bow out early if they were to struggle in a conventional ambulance to the nearest A&E unit along the fatty arteries that are the minor roads in Kernow. And that's assuming you're near a road to start with - the beaches, clifftops and moorlands of this county are often inaccessible by road. Clearly the service that the Air Ambulance provides is both invaluable and essential.

If the young Dylan had journeyed out of California instead of the minelands of the bleak Midwest, with a surfboard under his arm instead of a harmonica in his back pocket, I fancied he might have looked something like the fellow I bumped into in Newquay the other night.

Here's an artist to watch out for with as many nicknames as he has hats. Underneath the splendiferous forest of face fuzz, you'll find the fine painter that is Harry Daily, a.k.a "Harry The Hat" or "Sketch Holiday".

As I watched this tractor tow a Barber Surf Rake up and down the beach the other day, I was reminded of some scenes from that flawed but minor classic film - Westworld. Set in a futuristic Disney-like amusement park, guests can check into themed regions and live out fantasies as Medieval knights, Roman noblemen or gunslingers - interacting with sophisticated robots that are virtually human. The guests literally tear up the town each night and while they sleep off their hangovers and recover from their brawls, there's a huge clean up operation taking place.

Sounding like the progeny from a sci-fi flick where a surfboard has mated with a Triffid, I'm not referring to anything quite so alien here, just an example of a property developer jumping on the woody and using surfdom's marketing potential to sell flats.

Tagged as "funky micro homes for the urban surfer", you have the opportunity to pay between £141,000 - £200,000 for a one bedroom apartment - sorry, surf pod. I can't quite fathom from the blurb exactly what design features have been incorporated that differentiates these flats from any other squeezebox - apart from a reference to a locker where, presumably, you can rack your board and wetsuit.