Session 4063 (D33/31): Fun AM Surfing

Note: In order to respect all the local surfers and the community, I am no longer going to disclose where I have surfed other than a general location if that is necessary in the context of a report. I would like to avoid people from flocking at any specific breaks because I said something, and since it is on the World-Wide-Web, you know what I mean when I say flocking.

 

I had a late start this morning but I managed to surf for about 45 minutes this morning, but it almost never fails that on days like these, it is hard to get out of the water, as the "time-out" comes I usually "finally" find a spot or some nice breaks come in (this is actually a well known psychological phenomenon that you tend to discard "blah" situations and only remember good situations).

 

This morning the beach was fairly wide spread and giving rather soft breaks up to about shoulder size level. Since I have been using my Fish for sometime, and I had some reason to believe that the sets might get a bit bigger, I took out my old-reliable 7'6 out.

 

Today, I set out to understand the mechanism of balance shifts during the take-offs. One of the things that I started to notice this week was that the board slips under me forward while I fall backwards during take-offs, so I have been trying to analyze the reasons why this occurs. In most of these cases, the board does catch the wave and I am on the board momentarily. So last night I was reading my surfing text book and I have reviewed the balancing during the take off. Essentially what the text book said is that most beginners do not shift the weight forward immediately after the take off. This is right. This is exactly what is happening to me! Of course the difficult part is that we all have to put the back weight up as we take off, but immediately after the board is going, you need to weight shift to the front and that is the key to gain the speed in surfing (and not only that to get ready for the bottom turn.)

 

There were two times that the board slipped out, and so I started take a mental note of what has happened and to make more conscious corrective efforts on the forward weighting and I had some better take-offs. It really goes to say how difficult it is.

 

The swells were getting better as the tide started to recede from the max. Alas, the time was up already to head to work.

 

Hope the weather will hold up tomorrow and try more take off refinements!

 

Let's Surf Better Tomorrow!