Surfing Waves

As i surf as i learn. i used to look at those small waves like they were unsurfable and learned from watching others that if you tik tak left right left right that you can surf them(ride able) I would like to explore this technique. it will make my life easier in the small wave country im living in. i saw this man



this dude is on a shortboard and makes them surfable.
my focus is on the weak ones. cause that is what we usually get here/ oldmansurfer told me they were surfable but you know i just couldnt untill i noticed i can after surfing back to back. the thing is how do you keep going when they are so weak? the dude on the video seems to force himself into riding. what is the exact technique? ofcourse from looking obviously to the video. but i like some theory here cause surfing made me think its easy by looking when its not.

bigger waves are ok to me. they push me better. these small one man.

That is called pumping....lots of steps between where you are now and getting to that point....concentrate on popping up and trimming down the line; those waves are big enough to do that on your NSP....get good at that and then you can start to surf top to bottom to top to bottom....get the feel of that and it's just tightening up that top to bottom flow and you're pumping. As easy as that guy makes what he is doing look, you're looking at thousands of hours in the water practicing.

dude can als probably do 100 push-ups followed by 100 chin-ups without breaking a sweat, and has strength / weight ratio of a circus acrobat

DreamSurf wrote:
this dude is on a shortboard and makes them surfable.

sell (one of) your shortboards and get a beater, cheaper and better suited for catching weak waves. Then you can learn to pump to your heart's desire.

Quite honestly, pumping that much seems exhausting. Why not get a nice eggy mid-length for those days and cruise?

kookextraordinaire wrote:Quite honestly, pumping that much seems exhausting. Why not get a nice eggy mid-length for those days and cruise?

that seems very nice kook but really i have to deal with 0.2 to 0.8 meter waves that arent powerfull. because of the hard wind waves become flat.
i do travel mid france to have that, but unfortunately im just not that rich untill i go back to morocco and live there i have to do a dive in the brownish north sea.

i am like maybe i should adapt.
clearly this man has skill and hard muscle and cardio to do that cause those waves are meh. but he does them. gotta give props to that.

ofcourse to pump that hard you need that mid wave indeed to solid the skill and then when u go north sea it will be a known procedure. sometimes i wonder how im supposed to even achieve it when there is no pusher. i went mid france and im still amzed how the wave pushed you to give lesser effort to the surfing.

i envy that guy on the vid. he does it. maybe visit the gym before taking a surf or dive again.

Have you considered surfing a quad? They are much faster down the line (no center fin= less drag) and work well in mushy waves. Little to no pumping needed.

Someone could ride those waves with a lot of different boards. Longboards would work too. In small mushy waves you have to put the power into them if you are on a shortboard. Boards with more flotation will ride them more effortlessly. That surfer is just doing a bunch of small turns to try to keep the board moving in a gutless wave. Also it isn't going to make your life easier it is much harder to surf small gutless waves on a shortboard. The guy is doing a series of up and down speed turns. It's a lot of work not easier LOL

Yeah, it can be done but is it enjoyable? It's surfing more as exercise; no one would think it very aesthetic. As a session to keep/improve skills it's great, but as a way of surfing all the time it seems to miss everything that makes surfing fun to me and replaces it with ticcy tacking.

But what ever works for you of course

The true essence of surfing is TRIM, moving along the waves face no faster or slower than what it is. You can break trim, to slow down, speed up, turn, but always come back to trim. In trim, you really don't do much effort. If you need to tic-tac, then your board doesn't have enough float to reach that planing speed. Sure, sometimes we need to pump or tic-tac to make sections, but doing that all the time means you need a bigger board or have better technique to stay in the power spot of the wave. Beginners need to learn to work with the wave before starting to work against it.

Once you can do turns like that on bigger waves then you can try to do them on smaller weak waves. I think it will improve your surfing to learn to use your board on waves that are more difficult for you to ride. But first you need to be able to do the turns on bigger waves. I love doing speed turns. Used to be pretty darn good at them. There is a peak that is really fast that frequently breaks where I surf. I am not sure if I can surf it but have been thinking about giving it a try. One of these days I probably will just to work on my speed turn only because that is the only kind of turn I would likely do on that peak. But for now I have to do speed turns often anyway so I get practice anyway. I think challenging yourself is a good thing but not too much challenge or you may quit. How much is that? you need to decide. I am still working on my cutbacks.

Wijk!

Also pressure dings from your feet from pumping on it all day, might as well get a beater as people said or else your board is gonna be destroyed after surfing a few months on a board pumping that hard

Pumping, if not done smoothly, can look really bad. A nice soul-arch in trim on the other hand...timeless.

Was browsing around and came across this......small wave surfing done well.....the way he surfs reminds me of locals here; they have the same flow and rhythm when they pump and ride smaller waves.

kookextraordinaire wrote:Pumping, if not done smoothly, can look really bad.

yup, we addressed this in a previous thread when I asked for feedback on this gem:

Yeh I went out in a highish tide 2 foot day today out of desperation. It was weak, backwashy surf and man I struggled. I was frustrated. I surfed a 4 - 5 foot firing boulder point break down the road from my house here in Taranaki NZ a fortnight ago and had no problems. Great session. Today, I was bogging and falling off for what seemed like no reason at all. I was kooking it REALLY badly on little 2 foot mush burgers. Ah! yeh, I need to surf tiny waves more often. I feel like it's like a bike, the slower and less energy the waves have and the flatter faced, the harder they are even to balance. Whereas if a swell is firing into a point with nice energy and size it does all the work for you, Popping up is easier as the board falls away from you etc. and feeling balanced and engaged with the wave is Oh so much easier.

Kelly slater grew up in small waves. Got to be something in it ! I think it is really good practice to go out no matter what its like.