SUP Surfing 101 Basic Track Chapter 1

This post is the first in a very long series (I hope) on surfing your SUP. A lot of people are buying SUP boards just for flatwater paddling. More power to them, but there may come a day when you decide you’d like to try a bit of surfing. The good news is that all the things you’ve learned in paddling flatwater–balancing on the board, paddling techniques, turning, moving around on the board–will all come into play. The bad news is that it’s not nearly enough.

This series will give you practical knowledge about surfing. It won’t teach you to do it–only time in the water can do that. But it will accelerate your learning by showing how to best spend that time.

I’m not qualified by long experience to teach you to SUP surf. I’m a writer who SUP surfs. The knowledge here comes largely from other, more experienced people and from the lessons I’m learning as I take the same path you will take. I’ve been doing SUP surfing for about two years, but I do it intensively. I live in Portland, Oregon and Haiku, Hawaii, and I SUP surf and paddle in both places. I have the luxury of time–I’m semi-retired. I try to get in the water every day and probably succeed about 300 days per year. When I’m in the water I don’t just play, I’m always trying to learn new things.

Chapter 1 Section 1
Etiquette, safety, and wave knowledge

Step one is to reassess your swimming ability. When you’re SUP surfing, as opposed to flatwater paddling, you’ll be in rougher water, and you’ll have a higher likelihood of losing your board, even if you have a leash. You need to be able to swim to the beach from wherever you are surfing. In some cases, like reef breaks, that could be a mile. You also may be swimming in currents, chop, whitewater and breaking waves. Beef up your swimming before you tackle surfing.

Step two is to practice your breath-holding. It’s easy to get held down by a wave, even in relatively small surf. You might be held down for just a few seconds, or it might be more like fifteen. In very rare cases you might have to hold your breath for thirty seconds. That may not sound like much when you’re sitting on a couch, but it can be difficult. It’s worthwhile to practice holding your breath while you’re doing inactive pursuits, like watching the TV, and especially worthwhile to practice swimming underwater. The key to surviving a long hold-down in a big wave is not to panic. The only way to train yourself not to do that is to experience it many times. Start small–trust me, a hold-down from a chest-high wave can scare the hell out of you.

Etiquette and Safety
Before you venture into the water you should know what the surf community expects of you. There aren’t any true rules other than to respect the people you are going to surf with. But there are some customs and expectations you should know about. The “rules” of the SUP community are contained in a site called SUPright (HTTP://WWW.SUPright.com). these rules will change over time as other people add refinements to them, but here is what this site says today:

First thing to understand is that there really aren’t rules–not yet anyway. Right now there are simply ways that the community of SUP surfers believe we should act. If you don’t follow these ways, someone might yell at you, and people might think you’re a jerk, but that’s it.

And that’s the best reason of all to follow these ways–because we don’t want that to change. Join the community and share the stoke because that is what makes surfing–all surfing–so very special. Don’t put yourself outside of that by being an idiot.

Beginners and experts have a different set of responsibilities. We’re going to take pains to explain everything as clearly as possible, which will make this a little tedious. If you find that too slow just jump to the summary at the end.

Beginners
What’s a beginner? Well obviously if it’s your first week on a SUP and you’re still falling in every few minutes you’re an absolute beginner. Once you get into waves you’d probably count yourself a beginner if you can’t turn easily without falling. But the definition needs to be a little more precise.

Beginner: You can paddle out past the breaking waves without falling when knee high whitewater hits you. You can pick the right place to be in a wave, paddle to the right spot and turn in front of the wave without falling, then catch the wave.

Intermediate: In waist high waves you can do a bottom turn, a cutback, and turn out of the wave without falling. When you do fall you can grab your board. Your leash is rarely needed.

Beginners have no business in a popular break. You’ll get in the way, you can get hurt if a closeout wave or set comes through, if you catch a wave and fall you’ll lose your board to the end of your leash. Almost everything you do will endanger yourself and endanger other surfers. Paddle away from the break, find some small waves and practice.

One very important thing to practice is controlling your board. If you watch experienced surfers you’ll almost never see their boards at the end of their leash. They either turn out of waves at the end of their ride, or in the rare cases that they fall they grab the board as they fall.

The leash DOES NOT prevent your board from hurting other people. When your body is outstretched, being dragged by your runaway board you have four feet of body, perhaps ten feet of leash and eleven feet of board. That’s at least a 25 foot radius you can hurt other people within. Your board will generally be in the wave, sticking out just waiting to nail another surfer.

One disciplined way to practice controlling your board is to surf BY YOURSELF without a leash. By yourself means NO ONE in the water who could be hit by your board–all the way to the beach, because that’s probably how far you’ll have to swim to regain your board. You can certainly simulate this with a leash if you don’t want to do all that swimming, but going leash-less is a useful training aid and a commitment. Just never do it around other people.

If you are a beginner, and you want to paddle out and watch the more advanced surfers, stay in the channel (which should be obvious–it’s the way most surfers will be returning to the lineup) and sit down. Don’t wobble around in the lineup and loom over all the prone surfers. It’s rude and intimidating.

Intermediate: If you can execute basic surf maneuvers without falling and can control your board, you should be welcome in an uncrowded lineup. If the crowd grows you should paddle off to the side or go looking for new spots. Your SUP board can catch waves that longboarders can’t. Don’t be a sheep, you don’t have to be in the pocket of a lineup with twenty other surfers. If you can’t thread your way through a half dozen people in the way, and contend with people dropping in or the need to pull out from the wave at ANY time without EVER losing control of your board, then you shouldn’t be there. Yes there will be be people there that can’t do that. Just because someone else is a kook doesn’t mean you need to be. Ride your own ride

All SUP Surfers

1. Don’t be a wavehog: It’s easy to grab every rideable wave with a SUP. You can always be first into the wave, closest to the shoulder. Everyone else is just dropping in. If you are spinning laps, paddling back out quickly and setting up for the next wave, you’re the worst kind of hog.

2, The second worst wavehog is the guy that maneuvers outside, coming in like a locomotive on every good set wave. Do it once and you’re getting all the wave can offer. Do it five times and hoot others off your wave and you genuinely, truly, absolutely suck.

3, When your turn comes, take your wave, surf it well, paddle back out and sit down. Talk to people. Watch for good waves. Let them pass and make it obvious that you’re sharing. Show some aloha, some kindness, some wisdom.

4. Don’t drop in. Dropping in means another surfer has caught the wave closer to the shoulder. If you find you accidentally have, turn out of the wave immediately. If you can’t do that without falling then sit down on the tail of your board (and if you can’t, what are you doing in a crowded break?). Never undertake a maneuver that might cause you to ditch your board in front of the overtaking surfer.

5. Using your high vantage point to call out waves might be a good thing, but ask your fellow surfers if they’d like you to do that. A lot of people surf to decompress and relax. Having some guy bellow “here’s a good one” five times in a row for mediocre waves may disturb their Wa.

6. Don’t paddle out through the middle of the break. Go off to the channel, or if there is no channel, well to the side out of the surfing zone. Killing someone’s ride by standing like a deer in the headlights will not gain you any points.

7. If you must paddle in the surfing zone, signal which way you are going to try to pass any surfer on a collision course with you. Generally you want to pass behind them so they don’t have to cut back, so if you fall you won’t take them out. Make your intention clear. It might not work but at least you tried.

Any time you think a rule doesn’t apply to you, you’re just BS-ing yourself. “I didn’t really drop in because I was so far down the wave”: BS–you wouldn’t come up with an excuse if you didn’t KNOW you were wrong.
“I tried to grab my board but I missed it” BS–go back and practice control.

Find new places. SUP boards are magic for that. You are missing out if you don’t explore, and you’re just adding to the congestion. Five miles is no big deal for a SUP board.

Don’t let nitwits control your standards. Just because someone doesn’t appreciate your efforts to share and to observe traditional etiquette doesn’t mean you should abandon it. Set your standards and live by them.

Summary

Beginners: Stay out of popular breaks. Find some small waves and practice controlling your board. Learn to turn out of waves and/or grab the board as you fall. Do not rely on your leash–in fact consider learning to surf BY YOURSELF without a leash with NO ONE in the water who could be hit by your board–all the way to the beach. Alternatively simulate this with a leash if you don’t want to do all that swimming, Going leash-less is a useful training aid and a commitment. Just never do it around other people.

Intermediate: If you can execute basic surf maneuvers without falling and can control your board, you should be welcome in an uncrowded lineup. If the crowd grows, paddle off to the side or go looking for new spots. If you can’t thread your way through a half dozen people in the way, and contend with people dropping in or the need to pull out from the wave at ANY time without EVER losing control of your board, then you shouldn’t be in a crowd.

All SUP Surfers

1. Don’t be a wavehog.

2, When your turn comes, take your wave, surf it well, paddle back out and sit down.

3. Don’t drop in. If you accidentally have, turn out of the wave immediately.

4. Don’t paddle out through the middle of the break.

5. If you must paddle in the surfing zone, signal which way you are going to try to pass any surfer on a collision course with you.

Any time you think a rule doesn’t apply to you, you’re lying to yourself.

Waves and breaks
Before long you’ll be sitting in a lineup with other surfers and they’ll start talking about the waves. That they are mushy, or blown out, closeouts, or sectioning or A frames. That there’s too much west in them (pick a direction), that the tide is going out or it’s all short period stuff. There’s a lot to know about waves, but you don’t need to know much to start with. Here’s the basics and we’ll talk a lot more about waves later.

Waves for Surfing

Surfers ride waves on the shoulder (or curl), which is the steepest part of the wave, right where the smooth face of the wave and the whitewater of the already broken part of the wave meet. Beginners can have fun playing in the whitewater, and a SUP board can use it’s speed and size to ride a wave almost anywhere on it’s face, but the shoulder is the sweet spot of the wave.

The broken part of the wave is called whitewater, foam, or soup. It’s turbulent and a lot of the power has been spent. You can ride it if you point your board mostly toward the beach, but it’s bumpy and hard to maneuver in.

The lip is the top of the wave, especially when it’s starting to curl over as it gets ready to drop. How the wave drops is an indication of the amount of energy in the wave and how the ocean bottom is shaped to form the wave. When the lip pitches way out and falls into the trough at the base of the wave or even well past it at some fabled breaks it can create a tube (called the shack, a pipe, the green room, breaking top to bottom, etc.). But most waves crumble or form just a partial tube as they pitch over and fall into the face of the wave

Beginner Waves

What you want as a beginner is a wave that has a shoulder that is gently spilling as it travels across the face of the wave. And you want mushy waves, which are waves that crumble down their face, rather than the ones that toss a lip far out and fall with a whump to the base of the wave. You also don’t want waves that are breaking right onto a steep shore or in very shallow water. In other words, you don’t want to paddle out at Pipeline, unless you have grown tired of life.

Waves create rip currents and often have channels in them, that are simply deeper water that doesn’t permit the swell to kick up into a wave at that point. The rip currents and channels are useful for moving back out through a wave, but they also can be a source of danger. A rip current can move a lot faster than you can paddle. If you get separated from your board you may be battling rip currents while you try to get back to the shore or to your board. Simply put, don’t fight rips. Go with the flow and look for a way to get back to shore when the rip dissipates. Generally you can make your way across the backside of the breaking waves and find a place where there either is no current or it’s going more in the direction you want to go. Often you can bodysurf your way closer to shore. In any case, you need to assume that you can be in for a tough swim, in conditions that cause most beach emergencies, injuries and deaths.

The channel might seem like a happy place, non-breaking waves, a favorable current, a fine seat to watch the real surfers from. And it often is, right up until it isn’t. Waves can come up quickly in size, and even if they don’t there is often a sneaker wave that will clean out the lineup as everyone scrambles for the horizon, and not everyone makes it. In those conditions the channel can sometimes be a lousy place to be, because the wave can be at its biggest and most poweful right where they weren’t breaking before. The sneaker waves usually break outside, and sweep up the slow movers in the whitewater. But in the channel they can break right on top of you, and that’s the worst possible situation. The full power of the wave is unleashed on you and your board, You can be pushed to the bottom, grabbed viciously and wrenched back to the top of the wave in a second. Going back over the falls and being pummeled repeatedly. Surfers call this the spin cycle, and that’s exactly what it’s like. You have to be ready for that and constantly vigilant for what’s happening in the outer waters.  We’ll talk about that more later in the sections titled “caught inside” and “big wave safety”.

The best places to get initial experience is beaches that have a sandy bottom or a relatively friendly reef–by that I mean not much coral or rocks sticking up close to the surface at low tide. You don’t want a heavy shorebreak or a steep beach. Not much rip, not much current, and not much wind. Look around for the kind of place that has other beginners, but don’t plan on surfing right in the middle of them, you need to be able to get away from the other beginners.

…to be continued