This morning the set were about chest to shoulder maximum. I almost took out the long board, but now I am in a short-board transition mode so I decided to risk it and took the 7'6. Though 7'6 is not really a short board, this is still a good training board for the style of riding.
Like many times in the past, when the sets get smaller, they tend to break faster, so it is actually more fun to surf with shorter boards than on a long board, which, in of itself is kind of recent discovery. Although it is also a lot of fun when a waves are mashing out but big like on the other day in M%a%!
So I caught a fairly large number of the waves this morning. And that brings me to the discussion of confidence. I started to commit and be able to commit to the waves much more recently, and being able to catch a much wider variety of breaking condition gave me much more confidence, and that in turn has given me a more confidence to challenge for even faster breaking conditions. I must describe these kind of take offs though as it is a bit different from when taking off on a long board with early paddle in. The closest description that I can come up with is like this. Imagine that I am in one of a huge diameter storm drain pipe that is above ground, and I am standing inside of it, and a suddenly someone opens a flood gate and lots of water start to come down the pipe. Suddenly the water hits my back and I get spewed out of the pipe at the same time I am now taking a fast drop down!
What I need to work on next:
My bottom turns are still very weak, the initial turn sucks, and so I am not climbing back up the wave with a finesse speed and power.
Next problem that I am likely going to run into is that I still don't change the upper body position much and this is going to become more important in executing more radical and faster top side turns. But I am not there yet because I still cannot climb up all the way back to the lip.
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