Jeff "the Original Longboarder" Tatum recently ripped the world infamous Banana Bay with the Silverfish crew and told us it was the first time he'd hit a parking garage since the 1980's.  He's been too busy tearing up ramps, pools and parks across SoCal with his longboards!  Recently, JT made an offer to the Silverfish community to win a free Pool Kings deck if you can come up with something good about "the first backside tail tap" (click here for that ).  Now, to show you what he's been doing wih the stoke, he sent in this series of his new move.

Jeff Tatum has a new longboard move, called the "Fire Hydrant"

Check out the full sequence in the forums.  Click the pic! 

The Silverfish ASR Tour, Part 1

The Action Sports Retailers trade show is a glitzy, flashy, sexy, exciting time – the stuff of legend and the object of lusting eyes outside the green door blocking the riff-raff and general public from viewing the Shangri-la within the hallowed halls of the San Diego Convention Center.  That’s one side of it.  Others might tell you that ASR is a withering claw, grasping and gripping at the fleshy assets of manufacturers and retailers alike, as “The Big Show” seeks to remain relevant to an industry in flux.   If you’ve been reading our reports from ASR over the past few years, you probably know that we find what may seem to be diametrically opposed viewpoints to be sides of the same coin.   Once again, we’ve sent our crew behind the curtain to check it all out and report back to you.  This is the first part of what we’ve come up with.

The September edition of ASR is generally the largest gathering of manufacturers and retailers of skate, surf and related fashions on the West Coast.  As we write this, ASR’s biggest “competition” (trade shows are, after all, a business in themselves) is taking place in Florida.   That one’s called “Surf EXPO” and it’s been growing in size over the past few years.  ASR, to the contrary, has been contracting along with the mainstream skateboard market’s apparent turn for the worse.  In San Diego, many smiles were strained and virtually every mainstream skateboard company displayed a renewed focus on fashion, image and soft goods…  On the other end of the skateboard spectrum, we found more longboard-related manufacturers than ever, and that’s not even including the desperate measures taken by well over half of the “popsicle stick” companies to nail a longboard or two on the wall of their booths, even if their staff had no idea what it was.  To get you acquainted with the scene, we’ll spend the rest of this report with much less obtuse commentary and a simple photo tour.