After a morning spent getting sunburnt up at Boyley Park on the first properly spring-like day of the year, followed by a brief roll down at Bottle Alley for nostalgias sake and for J-Thaxx to ride straight through one of the many steaming, fresh dog eggs dotted about the floor, we headed underground to find the girl’s jam in full swing. With the likes of Rianne Evans, Stef Nurding, Amy Ram, Lucy Adams and Helena Long in attendance the bowl got handled – as did the street room by the looks of these photos, but I was holed up by the bowl and managed to miss that session go down. Helena and her recently functioning knees took a well-deserved first place, with a pre-injury Lucy Adams taking second and Rianne Evans third.

The judges had had enough time to whittle the competitors down and the finals stepped things up another notch – Sam Beckett, Rune Glifberg and Alex Hallford had all hit the rarely touched coping on the oversized vert wall, but Sam stepped it up and by the end had chucked frontside grinds, alley oop slashes, crailslides, back smiths and frontside airs up on top of about 8 foot of vert. This was enough to get him into third place, a marker of just how gnarly the level of skating was. Second place went to Alex Hallford’s trademark spontaneity, with a seemingly unplanned approach to where his board is going to take him, whilst Dannie Carlsen’s ability to knock out massive hip airs mixed with Cheese and Crackers level transition tech saw him coming out on top with a thick wad of Tuborg tokens to spend back in Denmark.

Sox, Sam Pulley and Jake Collins all put Newport solidly in the top ten whilst Matt Beer, Callum Waterton and Jordan Thackeray showed just how gnarly the next generation of UK skateboarding has become. Jordan’s final line, which consisted of about 20 tricks thrown down across various points of the bowl, saw him taking the best trick prize and a holiday to Greece, whilst George Poole bought the phrase ‘who the hell is that guy who can back noseblunt everything?!’ to more than one person’s lips throughout the day.

Check the photos and edit from the day and, if you missed it, get to the next one on the calendar! The vibes, the shredding, the finding yourself in a car park in Hastings at midnight with ten pissed skaters clapping along to what may or may not have been Hava Nagila (my beer-damaged grey matter isn’t quite sure)…all of this is why these kind of events shouldn’t be slept on…

Final results

Pro:

• 1: Dannie Carlsen – £1000
• 2: Alex Hallford – £500
• 3: Sam Beckett – £350
• 4: Matt Beer – £100
• 5: Sam Pulley – £50
• 6: Sox
• 7: Callum Waterton
• 8: Jake Collins
• 9: George Poole
• 10: Jordan Thackeray

Best Trick – Jordan Thackeray – awarded for best line of the day

Females:

• 1: Helena Long
• 2: Lucy Adams
• 3: Rianne Evans

Masters:

• 1: Stevie Thompson
• 2: Joe Sandland
• 3: Matt Davey

16 and under:

• 1: Elijah Nowak
• 2: Kieran Waterton
• 3: Finnian