Month: September 2008

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Tides and Practicing My Turns

After surfing, with watch

Conditions: 3-4 ft. + – waist to shoulder high and poor+ conditions.
Gear: 8 ft Sunset Soft top, 9’4″ Sunset soft top from NorCal Surf Shop
and Freestyle Tide 3.0 watch. I now know what time it is AND what the tide is doing. Awesome.

I got off to a wobbly start on a board that was too short for me. After trading it in I caught a lot more waves, got in a few nice clean pop ups, plus a few really messy pop ups.

The best part of the day for me was completing my first bottom turn!
It’s supposed to look something like this www.surfline.com/video/video_player/video_player.cfm

What I did was zip down the wave face, dip the righthand rail in the water, and slingshot back up the wave going WAAAAAHHOOOOOOO before falling off. You’re supposed to use the momentum to turn back down and continue along the wave. I was so stoked to just turn that I didn’t even think about following through. It was awesome, I can’t wait to try it again.

Injury report: Somehow on one wave I managed to go flying in the air and to board flipped over on it’s deck. I came crashing down, my knee landing on the center fin, skidding into another forward fin. My hip and elbow hit the bottom of the board. I’m gonna have some wicked bruises when everything stops being swollen. Plus side is everything moves around just fine and doesn’t hurt unless I poke it.

In gear news, the new watch was a success.  The buttons are easy to press with cold wet hands and it says put pretty well. I’m trying to figure out a good way to fit it on my wrist above my wetsuit without bumping around when I paddle. All and all, it’s great. I can now see what time it is and what the surf is doing. 🙂

Why is the tide important to surfing? Depending on the beach, some beaches have the best waves at high tide, some at low, and some in the middle.  It also effects where the waves break at some beaches and what kind of wave you’ll have. For someone like me who’s just learning to surf a wave that’s spilling, rather than breaking will be an easy wave to ride for a long time. For someone who’s really got things down, a plunging wave is best. For more information, check out this great write up from Surfline.

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Getting a Class Together

Riding a wave all the way in

More from the day on my Flickr

Conditions: 3-4 ft. + – waist to shoulder high and fair-good conditions. Clean, peaky lines with workable shoulders and fair-good shape.
Gear: 9 ft foam board

AWESOME day.

I got together a group of friends who were looking to learn and headed to the beach for another Adventure Out class. My friends all got the basic class while I talked to one of the instructors about where I wanted to improve. Basically I wanted to work on my timing, on reading a wave, and generally working on my confidence.

I spent the day working with Melissa on catching waves, trying to learn when I should paddle slow (if it’s a steep wave) and when I should paddle faster to catch the wave. Mike helped me learn to balance my upper body and to use my front shoulder to steer. I learned to set up top turns and how to start to think about bottom turns. I didn’t get a whole lot of turning in, but I got up lots of times and had a blast.

Everyone else was getting the hang of things pretty quickly too, hopefully I’ll have a few more friends in the water!