Session 7033: Technical Update

Now I am at a point that I can more confidently take off on a bit more wider variety of waves, and once I am on the wave, I can make various turns, also more confidently, I should be able to surf like some of the best people at a given session right?

Wrong?

What differentiates me from some of the technically best surfers is the lining up properly and that is the next key item that I need to consciously improve in the next many sessions.

The typical problems I have presently are the following,

• The lack of my confidence in paddling ability made me wanting to paddle less and tend to stay in one area. Good surfers seems to be moving around all the time.
  
• Given a session, there usually are one or two surfers who always are nailing the good take-off spot and so they are usually the one taking waves. If you tried to tag them, you know it is difficult to do because they are usually moving all the time, and they have tremendously more paddling power than I do, so even if the breaks are about to happen not exactly where they are sitting at, as a set starts to roll in, they start to paddle to the direction where the peak happens. In coming sessions, I am going to emulate this a bit more.
• When surfing with good surfers, they also are always using reference points so they know where they are and where breaks happen. They can usually describe where by pointing out objects on the ground, say a tree, phone poll etc.
  

While these things are easy to describe, it is actually very difficult to execute as ever changing current, tide, wind, and set sizes determine the lineups, and without a strong paddling ability, it is nearly impossible to keep yourself linedup at the optimum location every single time. But I think that this is one most important difference in who catches and do not catch good long rides.

Surfing skill improvement is very iterative, because advancement of one technique depend on another, and only once I improve one aspect, I can start to improve another, but then eventually that will expose the lack in the first technique, and there are just dozens of skill parts to them each of which is tied.

I will be focusing on this aspect of surfing and will be reporting further how much progress.