Severely jetlagged, I was summoned to the town of Figueira da Foz to cover the art of surf cultural curation by a three-headed behemoth that consists of 66% Euricos (Junior, a.k.a. Kiko, and Eurico Senior) plus 33% Beatriz Fonseca.
But, Gliding Barnacles is not just them. This longboarding festival is also the love child of countless staff and volunteers, a daily headcount of an odd 5,000 visitors, plenty of surf culture contemporaries, and—more in the background, nevertheless very important—Kiko’s mom. From musicians to artists, shapers to surfers, chefs, photographers, videographers, and scriveners like myself—it’s one big synergetic heap, everyone pro bono.
I’ve kept an eye out for Gliding—as it’s lovingly abbreviated by most—for quite some time, but never managed to go myself. It usually transpires during months that I’m out and about and this year it wasn’t any different.
Nordic Surfers Mag mainman Mathieu Turries dropped a little hint back in May of this year when we were together for The Big Sea screening in Malmö, but I only heard a couple of days before leaving Japan that Gliding Barnacles could be on my menu this fall. Don’t mind if I do. As I was flying back home to visit my first baby niece, all the arrangements were made to finally experience this longboarding culture spectacle in the flesh.
Even though I was well aware of Gliding’s existence, I never knew what it truly was about. On Instagram, you may have seen countless pictures of a cacophony of couches, classic and leashless longboarding, good-looking people, parties, art, and a whole lot of food. And all of those are true.
I’m not going to lie, I was afraid it was going to be just that—good-looking stuff with barely any meat on the bone.
I knew Ben Waldron—senior editor at Surfer’s Journal—had a great experience last year, but I didn’t read any of his stuff just so I could have a virgin take myself someday. Regardless, Ben told me: “You’re going to have a killer time.”
Now, I usually operate on a ‘reality minus expectations equals happiness’ type of paradigm, but if Ben says so, you better believe it.
Sometimes, when events are being portrayed as culturally significant with great aesthetics, it lacks the depth it truly needs to be labeled as such—drowning in sauce. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, if an event is too core it can quickly become too in-crowd, esoteric, highbrow, and supercilious.
Safe to say, I’ve experienced Gliding Barnacles safely between those two ends without it feeling icky—on the contrary even. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Gliding Barnacles head of security Fernando hit the nail on the head, if you ask me. He told me, during a two-hour car ride back to Lisbon airport, that this shindig is all smiles you don’t understand. Everyone you talk to has a different experience of Gliding, but all are valid and solid.
The Aristotelian ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ gets 5 points on my Likert scale and applies to Gliding Barnacles better than cheap sunscreen on a burnt meaty back.
Is there a Sodom and Gomorrah aspect to Gliding Barnacles?
Yes—if you scope it out. It’s a longboarding festival after all. But, if you just want to get dusty and have the noise of air compressors drown out anything, it’s also possible.
This all means that you get from Gliding Barnacles what you want from it.
If all you want to do is smoke hash spliffs on a corduroy couch with a Superbock in hand, all while looking at some great leashless logging expression sessions, that’s totally possible and very much fun.
If you want to spend your owly hours of the night in a shaping bay or glassing room, that’s also definitely okay. Because that’s what I did. And it wasn’t just me. The place was crawling with like-minded nerds in faded t-shirts and sun-bleached anything.
I say: “Why not both?”
That being said, I sinned heavily at the 12th edition of this Portuguese saliferous jamboree. And probably not in the way that you might think. No. It was my first day after traveling through three time zones and I was completely out of it.
I accidentally stepped on a pup’s paw rendering it only 25% mobile as it was already wheelchair bound. In the altercation, I even tipped over its only means of transportation. Luckily, ‘love is everywhere’ here and I was quickly appeased by numerous licks after flipping him back on all twos and tires. No harm, no foul, but I definitely lost some karma points there.
In my current condition, chilling out on one of the couches overlooking Praia do Cabedelo was godsent.
Even though I was dispatched to Gliding Barnacles all by myself, my days were filled with encounters with people I’ve written about, had some vague connection with, or whose work I’ve been geeking out on for a while.
For example, just a couple months prior, I grilled both Clovis Donizetti and Robin Falxa on what it’s like to have Polyola boards underneath their feet. So, as you can imagine, being able to watch them surf in the same expression session was a lot of fun for me.
Some highlights for me were the lengthy and incredibly interesting car rides—from and to Lisbon airport—with Danilk and Fernando, spending an entire afternoon with Mr. Perfect Designs, philosophizing with scrivener peers, getting wine drunk in the evenings with the Wavegliders’ team and their spouses, surfing one of Nico’s 9’6 pig + pintail combos, finally watching TJ Thran’s Japan edit together with him, and being an overall fly on the wall of Kiko and Beatriz.
Seeing the ‘behind the scenes’ and watching the couple cosplay firemen, by putting out small figurative fires while chain smoking cigarettes, was equal parts stressful and inspiring. It’s clear that they are in it for the love of it as they are doing this fully on the side of already filled to the brim existences.
I didn’t get a chance to have a proper sit-down with—one of four still-standing Gliding Barnacles founding fathers—Eurico senior, but seeing his smiles and seeing him float all over the festival’s open grounds, leaving trails of shoes and whatever in his wake, brought a big smile to my face. It made me realize how much he embodies the spirit of what this is all about.
As this was my maiden voyage, I can’t personally speak on this, but from the dozen or so conversations I had with people, Gliding Barnacles still has that homey feel where magic happens—even after all those years and growth.
Bringing in Kiko and Beatriz eight years ago seemed like the right move as they offer the structure to let Gliding still be Gliding. I think the power of that comes from their curation. Though curation might also sound overly anal, Eurico/Kiko/Beatriz know how and when to let nature run its course. You can’t control all of it. And even if you could, should you even want it? Beautiful things can come from simply letting go.
It’s more that there’s thought being put into everything, even when it doesn’t seem like it.
By inviting chefs, vendors, artists, shapers, laminators, musicians, and press from all points of the compass, cool things are bound to happen.
Better yet, by putting some of the best currently in the game in a melting pot together, it’s actually pushing surf culture forward. You can witness—in realtime—what sprouts from their cross-pollination. From collabed boards to cinematic documentation. Sure, collabs happen all over the globe, but logistics and dough are always the challenge in the equation. Gliding Barnacles eradicates this hurdle. All while being a non-profit. Pretty cool, if you ask me.
One of the best things was watching an incredibly special shaping and glassing session in The Fish Tank—one of the shaping bays on the festival terrain right next to the press room.
This particular evening, Josh Peterson definitely got his daily ten thousand steps in while a select few of great folk caught a gander from the inside out. That same evening, Nico from Wavegliders glassed it all up. It all transpired in an eight-hour vacuum, ready for the next day.
Legends say this 9’2 speedy twin has more signatures on it than a kid’s Mexican wrestling poster.
I’ve witnessed many interactions of people who solely meet at Gliding Barnacles each year. It’s clear that this easily becomes a yearly tradition to many—one that feels very family-like.
It’s at times like these when I think to myself: ‘Are these our golden days?’
By Ronald de Leeuw
NORDIC SURFERS MAGAZINE
ALL PHOTOS BY SIMON FITZ
