Surfing Waves

Do you remember your first wave? What is the first wave you can recall? First wave you caught on your own? I remember my first wave. It was at Wailua beach and a Kalapaki beach beachboy who I was hounding to teach me to surf who kept telling me he was working, but we were at Kalapaki beach where he worked showed up at Wailua beach. He got me on the board and was going to push me into a wave and have me stand up but I could stand on the board while it was still in the water so I told him to just push me in standing up and he did. I rode the wave in to the beach and then he did another wave. I was not too impressed with surfing at that point. Having learned to bodysurf surfing seemed like nothing to it and no water rushing off your body as you go along. The next time I tried about 9 or 10 years later was with my younger brothers board which was a 5'2" superwide board. At the time most boards were around 18 inches wide and this one was 20 something inches wide so it was a little bigger than the paipo board I was so used to at that point. It took me 20 minutes to figure out where to take off on the wave as compared to my paipo board. That first wave I took off and popped up and before I could stand was covered up in the tube and came out then stood up and cut out off the end of the wave. I wasn't so impressed by the tube ride because I had been tubed paipo boarding in huge tubes numerous times. Little did I know that surfing wouldn't be that easy and getting tubed would be a much less common thing than paipo boarding. I don't recall my first bodysurfing wave or my first paipo boading wave but I do recall the first wave I caught with a good paipo board as I zipped around with so much speed it was mind boggling. What about you all?

I remember the first wave I caught bodysurfing after I learned that you could go along a wave instead of riding the whitewater in. I made up my mind right then to never ride whitewater again if I could avoid it. That idea stuck with me through paipo boarding kneeboarding and surfing.

First wave was on a very used and repaired longboard that weighed a ton. Caught a waist high left after a few weeks of trying (yes, weeks). Got a 10sec ride that felt like forever and was hooked.

I caught my first wave when I was around 10 years old on a borrowed surf mat. It had a slow leak and I struggled to blow enough air to keep it afloat - especially after I lost the valve cap. The closeout shore dump knocked me down, sucked me under and beat me up until a lull mercifully allowed me join my friends outside. My glorious ride was a journey over the falls into a pounding on the sand. I held on for dear life and was stoked!

My friends dad had this old transition era shortboard that we dragged out of the basement during the 80's boogie board era. We started getting too big to stand/drop knee on the old bodyboards anymore, so we decided to make the leap to fiberglass. Most of the early sessions I can remember were basically kneeboarding and nosedives.. but the new found speed from that board and the occasional sections that we scored had us hooked for good. I remember the surfboard more than the waves.. with the glide and drive that board had, it completely changed the experience of riding waves.

Can't remember my first wave, but I remember 'that wave' that got me hooked on surfing like it was yesterday. I learned to surf pretty young, and kept getting super stoked on it for a couple weeks, but then after that would have to wait another year to surf again and would not remember all the stoke, only getting up at 6 into a cold wetsuit, but I progressed slowly over time as I have always been a good swimmer, but it was a weirdly perfect day for me who was scared of being deep because it was big (for me at the time, probaly only 2-3 foot but my memory definitely inflated the wave, which I can vividly remember being overhead ) yet breaking on the inside, a nice set came, and was peaking right on me so I turned and paddled and climbed to my feet, putting my front foot slightly in the wrong position. I essentially unintentionally knifed the take-off pretty damn nicely and felt the speed and adrenaline of actually surfing. It was my first unbroken wave which was not a 1ft reform, and my first time properly taking off. Went home and searched up surfing on youtube, hoping to never lose the stoke I had on surfing at that moment and started watching Jamie O'Brien. I think I watched every video he had up. Happy to say that it worked, and after surfing to the max that holiday and with very confused parents at what I was doing, surfing like 3 times a day on this holiday. Bought a super cheap surfskate and would surfskate and watch surf youtube to fill my itch at home, and a while later some dude whose house I had been skating in front for the last month turned out to be a former surfer, and gave me all the insight on local surf, including pretty hush hush info on some spots that to this day I am still trying to claw out of my memory. This lucky string of events within a few months of each other turned me into a surfer, and I have never looked back since. I guess I just waffled about how I became a surfer rather than my first wave, but this was a sick nostalgia trip to write, and hopefully someone found it interesting, if so hi