Session 5084: Great spring. More Take Off Practice.

The great spring surfing condition continues in Half Moon Bay. My taking off practice continues. Given the same condition, there still are better surfers than me who can take the waves, and a majority of other surfers who don't or cannot take waves. My gut feeling on how I progressed is that for every 5 waves the good surfers can take waves, I can take 1 of them. So I would be happy if get to the stage that I can take every other one.

Something that I just realized today more clearly is this.

If I am riding the wave already and cut back to the wave face again, and if the wave jack up at the spot to similar situation where I would say "it is closing out" and "cannot take off". If I was already riding the board, and arrived there, I have a good confidence often in controlling it, and I can cut back again and keep the ride. In fact, if that happens, it is really a lot of fun because the wave just gives so much power in the second cut back. And as I am cutting back, I am already closer to the top of the wave then (or will get there shortly). So that basically means that if this were to be my initial take-off wave, if I take off and get on the board sooner I can actually take off.

Now back to being already on the board, what do I do then?

This would be a top portion of the turn and that means that I cannot easily turn through the rail of the board as I will be stalling out shortly. The option is to execute as smooth of a top turn and when the top turn is complete, I need to get back into the descent line to gain back the speed, and as I go down the line, the wave may continue to jack up for a while and if that happens I must weight on the tail hopefully it spits me out forward, if I screw this up, the nose would bury that that's the end of the ride. So it boils down to (1) do the correct top turn more like "pivoting" through the tail of the board, (2) Be prepared to do a balance shift to go back to heavy tail weighting mode.

So the next challenge is to connect the take off to above scenario, and that means to me that I should get the initial take off speed and doing so go up on the board as soon as possible so that I can exert the better weight control of the board, then also be prepared to do a top turn, and now I am a bit clear on what I should be working on.