I have been surfing for a little while now , not terribly long, but Im riding a 6ft shortboard, I can do little cutbacks (not proper roundhouse ones, just like a little turn around thing but not a proper full cutback) and snaps and I feel pretty good about where I am. Ive been surfing a beach break ever since I started, where the waves are quite small. Heres a picture of what it looks like on GOOD days :
but typically it will be blown out little waves . Infact probably at least a half of the days are just mushy little whitewater lines that look like this:
It actually still amazes me how the waves are so different like all the time.
Anyway, I have noticed that my pop-up has somehow become (or maybe it just started that way?) really slow where its like one foot after the other , and that sometimes ruins the waves for me because by the time I'm up theres only one little section i can hit instead of the usual 4-5. I was wondering if this is normal for someone at my level of surfing (for 1 year) and the pop-up will just naturally get better as I become a better surfer, or if its going to become a bad habit later in my life, and I should try and break out of it now.
Im only 13 if that makes a difference.
Ive been surfing that break for the whole time ive surfed, and I live right across from the best reef break in the area. Ive been watching it for more than a year even before I started surfing , infact it was probably the guys there that made me want to surf in the first place. Anyway here are some pictures of what it looks like when the swell is big :
- sdd.jpg (25.85 KiB) Viewed 5555 times
- ka.jpg (11.06 KiB) Viewed 5555 times
Anyway , I kinda fought off the urge to go jump into that break until yesterday, because it was just perfect . It was quite small and the tide was high so the reef wasnt poking up from the water like usual, so my parents said okay... I went in I probably caught three amazing rides (which made all the pounding into the rocks and scrambling through the kelp COMPLETELY worth it)before it got bigger, like really big (atleast for me) and I knew that I needed to go in, I was trying to scope out the best way out. In the end I took the smallest wave i could find and rode it half the way in before landing straight in the huge pile of kelp that surrounds the break (in the channels) scratched myself up pretty bad on the reef coming in and got some piece of something stuck really deep in my foot - didnt realise until this morning though , I guess my feet were so numb yesterday from the cold I couldnt feel it. The point of that story was that that was when I REALLY realised my pop-up was slow because it was such a fast drop in that I found myself frantically paddling to stop myself from being dragged onto the reef after wiping out (MANY times) . So what do you think ? Is it normal to be slow at popping up at first , or should I try to make it faster and smoother in one move?
Thanks very much
