It was a bit of a challenge getting Sascha Daley on the horn since he’s been spending a lot of time away from home. I couldn’t help to feel a bit envious of the fact that his pocket was void of the nagging tractor beam-like draw a cell phone tends to have. After a little email juggling, Sascha managed to hustle some airtime off someone over at the Black Box Distribution [Zero, Mystery, Slave, Fallen] compound in Carlsbad. He filled me in on the globetrotting that directly resulted in a tree’s worth of print coverage during the month of May 2008.

Vitals
Age: 21
Residence: Vancouver, BC.
Sponsors: DC shoes, Mystery skateboards, RDS apparel, Independent trucks, Nixon watches, and Westbeach skateshop.
Stance: Regular
Switch mongo push, or regular switch push?: “Just regular, I don’t push mongo.”

Where have the travels taken you as of late?
I was in California for 5 months, and I spent 2 weeks of April ['08] in Taiwan with Ryan Oughton and photographer Andrew Norton. I was in China in November ['07] with the Strange Brew dudes—that was super fun.

I just read about the spa experience in Shenzhen [China].
Oh my God, dude. We’d go there every day after skating, like: “Get your trick and we’ll go to the spa right after.” There were assorted pools, back massages, steak, foot massages, champagne…I can’t even believe how good it was. It was insane, dude. 5-Star. You walk into the place and there’s 10 different pools to swim in—one with Epsom salts even. There was a steam room, sauna, and you’ve got silk pajamas on with a gold robe. You go up this elevator, and you’re chillin’. You could watch a new movie, and during the whole length of it you’re getting a foot massage while you’re drinking beers, eating fresh fruit and having ice cream.

What was Taiwan like?
It was real fun, man. This guy Jimmy Sun, a skate distributor out there, went above and beyond taking care of us and making sure we were good. He’d take us out for baller steak dinners every day. Taiwan didn’t have a ton to skate, but the spots they do have are ridiculous. I probably found my favourite spot to skate in the world there—a bank to a half-a-foot high ledge that just goes on forever with little gaps in between. You could just go up and slide it for so long, then just pop back into the bank.

I imagine there’s some pretty epic park sessions over at Black Box Dist.
There’s this dude from Norway that’s here right now, I heard him skating the other night when I was going to bed. I went in there and he was in boxers and a wife-beater skating in shoes with no socks and frontside flipping down the 11-stair. He switch frontside flipped it, then he went to the 7-stair rail: kickflip front lip, nollie flip front board, and switch backlip. Then, first try, he did a kickflip front tailslide to fakie down the hubba. It was crazy. And that’s just one session with one person…

Are you getting some good coverage down in the US?
Like five photos in May. I’m super psyched. A full page in Slap, a contents spread and a photo from the China trip in SBC Skateboard, a page in Concrete Skateboarding, a page in The Skateboard Mag, and I filled out a “Who’s Hot” for Skateboarder. I’m pretty stoked. Another cool thing when you come down here is all the photos you’ve had published in Canada don’t matter. You get to start new because no one’s ever seen anything from you before. So your fakie flip is hot again [laughs] because you haven’t done it anywhere. You get a second chance to bring out a few tricks again. I’ve been learning a bunch of new stuff down here, too.

Who’s taking care of Thomas? [Sascha’s Mississippi Map Turtle]
[Laughs] My brother is, he’s the man. He took over my room while I was gone so I could stack my loot. A little while ago, he told me he was looking for a really big tank for Thomas. I recently got an email from him mentioning that he has a surprise, so I’ll have to give him a Nixon watch or something for doing all that.