About

Surftide is an amalgamation of stories about surfing, travel, music and stoke written by Ben Ellis. Dig around and if you like something you’ve read then please leave a comment.

About the author

Ben grew up far away from the sea in a little landlocked village in rural Essex, England. As a child, he loved being in or near water, whether that was a swimming pool, stream, lake, river or the sea. Ben enjoyed many family holidays to the coast and loved splashing around the in the sea.

Ben waxing up at Watergate

Once a sponger

At the tender age of 9 he was bought his first body board which was debuted in the Canary Islands. Fortunately Ben has left his sponger days behind him and moved on to proper surfing about 7 years ago.

Here and there

Since then he has been around the world a few times, visiting and surfing as much as possible. Ben now has a quiver of 7 boards ranging from 6’0 (fish) to a 9’1 single fin longboard.

Ben surfing in Fuerteventura, 2007

Surf instruction and life guarding

Early in 2009 Ben qualified as a BSA Level 1 surf instructor and RLSS beach lifeguard and is hoping to put these skills into effect next season. Both courses were challenging and enabled Ben to open up doors to new horizons.

Certificates

About the site

Surf Tide was developed by Ben Ellis using the WordPress framework (and a lot of code re-writing). The site has been tested in Safari, Firefrox, Opera, Chrome (for Mac OS X), Safari, Firefox, Opera, IE9, IE8, IE7, IE6, Google Chrome and Opera (for Win7/WinXP) and on an iPhone 3GS. If you come across any display bugs then please do get in touch. Enjoy!

  • Archives

  • Flickr photos

    • Igloo build day 1
    • More Finsbury under snow!
    • Finsbury under snow!
    • Rose playing in the snow!
    • Igloo building
    • Après!
    • UFO
    • Frozen tree
    • Morzine sunset
    • Return to Morzine
    • Morning powder!
    • Avoriaz above the clouds!
    • On top of the world
    • The Don on top of the world
    • Blue skies over Avoriaz