Technical Update

Technical Update

I am writing technical updates when I discover something interesting in my learn to surf experience. You can help me by writing your comments and they can remain anonymous.

On this post, I want to discuss about the critical moment of a take-off, and specifically for short boarding. This has been quite a bit of struggle for me and I continue to need to refine the technique. As with any of what I write, my goal is to share what I am experiencing and not necessarily to teach other people to do likewise. I am not a very good surfer, and due to my lower-than-average athletic aptitude and the age, it would be a long way, but having said that I am having really a lot of fun with this.

So what have I learned lately?

I have became somewhat more successful at short board take offs, and there was one key thing happened surrounding this in the past several sessions, and this is something quite different from long boarding, and I've even figured that out by riding long boards some of the times (and this is one of the reason why I advocate all recreational surfers to have a long board in their quivers.)

So what is the discovery?

The discovery is that importance of holding the front of board down during take offs especially on steeper stuff and for short boarding, waves have to be kind of steep to have a successful take off anyways.

As I find the correct spot and when the wave starts to break right at where I am sitting, then it is time to get ready to paddle in really (and really) hard to get into the wave. It is at this point that I am usually left behind the wave not taking off, or worse yet, I just get creamed by the wave. This happens a lot and it will happen for some more times. I originally was on the thinking that the reason I get left behind is because of the paddling power only, but then I think that I am finding out that is not just so.

One time, on successful take off, I almost took off and I thought I was going to left behind, but as I was getting up I was pressing the front of the board rather hard to make the board point down into the wave. That actually worked quite well, then it finally downed on me that I have read somewhere else "Using your chin, hold the board down." And now I've realized pointing the board down is actually quite important in getting the board into the wave.

I think I will be experimenting with this for some time.