Surfing Waves

So, your center of gravity is somewhere between your front foot and back foot. Fins resist turning.

To turn would you pivot your body around your front foot while guiding the tail of the board with your back foot?

You really should get a longer board and learn how to turn with that.....your questions would be answered in the water.

Fins help turning. They keep the rail from popping out during a hard turn. I think of it as leaning and compressing then releasing. Back foot holds most of the pressure. I don't really see it as a pivot. You pre-rotate your body then move the board to bring your lower body back into more normal alignment.... moving in arcs not pivoting. I move my center of gravity more forward coming out of a turn and backward at the beginning of a turn.

Weight back to initiate a turn....

Yeah...I'm going to be taking my first board out a few times, the Bic Minimal.
I'm asking because , on the shortboard and the Bic, I've made some turns pretty high up on the wave face that were mostly foot play, and also which did not slow the board down too much.
My understanding was that bottom turns are mostly turning your body putting the board on edge so as to not lose too much speed, and top turns / cutbacks, involve more radical rotation.

Big H wrote:Weight back to initiate a turn....

Besides weighing your back foot, should there be a lateral motion component of your back foot?

Not unless you are doing a radical move like a tail throw or otherwise trying to break the fins free and slide....look at the video....turns, top, bottom, wherever is you lean back a little and weight your back leg....depending on the kind of board, your current position on the board, what kind of turn you want to make, you might take a step back or two towards the tail to more sharply weight the tail, or get back there in the first place if you're up on the nose or somewhere in the middle on a larger board...weight back and turn off the tail. A bigger board will help you learn this since there is no way to cheat it....smaller board you might be able to fudge a half turn half trim and call it a turn.....learn to do a cutback on a mid size or larger board and you'll get that nose up and out of the water and you will know what it means to stomp on the tail.....after that there will be no question in your mind as to whether you turn around the front or back foot....it will be a clearly ingrained feel.

Only when you are doing a tail release turn where the fins slide or pop out of the water otherwise it pushes down into the board holding the line of the turn. Oops bigH beat me to it.

I'll try it on the 7'9" board. I'd stall a lot of turns on that board and I thought it was because it's pretty heavy (plastic) but I think it was just me. Gotta go back to basics and then come back to the shortboard.

I put a tail pad on my longboard to help me learn to get back far enough to make a proper turn...helped a lot and made me get on the tail....once on the tail as Wchan has said many times, that 9ft+ board becomes a whole lot shorter as the actionable area in the water is about half the length and turns come alive since you start to REALLY turn and not just trim the board around.

pmcaero wrote:Fins resist turning.

Fins are about 90% turning. Think about it. What would happen if you took off on a steep 8ft wave, made the takeoff, were at the bottom of the wave just starting a bottom turn when . . . poof . . . a genie made your fins disappear? Your board would slide out from under you because your fins would no longer be holding your tail in the bottom turn. Or look at it this way, if you put a surfboard without fins on top of placid water, you can easily slide the board back and forth across the top of the water. Throw some fins on the board, however, and the back of the board is going to hold much more strongly in place while the front of the board will still slide in the direction you push the board in. Now think about what happens when you press your back foot down on the back of your board. You raise the front of the board out of the water and that allows you to do carving turns because there is no water resistance holding the front of your board in place.

You might benefit from riding your board in plank position and turning it on your belly. Observe what makes the board turn. It's one of the first lessons the Surf Simply folks have their students do to learn how to turn. Check out what he says at 1:43 and watch what happens at 2:54. Good luck.

RinkyDink wrote:Think about it. What would happen if you took off on a steep 8ft wave, made the takeoff, were at the bottom of the wave just starting a bottom turn when . . . poof . . . a genie made your fins disappear?

4:40 mark for finless surfing...

RinkyDink wrote:

pmcaero wrote:Fins resist turning.

Fins are about 90% turning.

Technically....fins are about creating lift - mostly sideways (horizontal) lift. It either helps you turn or resist turning (ie go straight) by giving you something to push off of - drive or hold. So you are both right!

Of course there is also drag.

Long or short, the action is the same.....on either board the nose comes up out of the water when the rider turns off the tail.......an easy way to effect this without getting too technical is the "drop wallet turn" .....reach down with your inside hand as if you dropped your wallet and touch the water, picking it up....do that and weight/alignment/ etc just seem to fall into place.....it's not automatic, timing and how far down you reach etc still matter, but you'll be on the right track.....

....and don't forget - look to where you want to go.....look at the eyes of all the surfers below.....they are all focused on where they are headed.....

Big H wrote:4:40 mark for finless surfing...

Oh yeah, finless surfing is definitely out there. Skimboarders are out on waves every day. As far as I can tell, though, it's pretty tough to pull off a serious bottom turn with a finless board. It can be done I guess, but it's definitely not easy. Check out Brad Domke's bottom turn. I'm not even sure I'd call that a true bottom turn.



I think he'd have an easier time of it on a thruster.

dtc wrote:

RinkyDink wrote:

pmcaero wrote:Fins resist turning.

Fins are about 90% turning.

Technically....fins are about creating lift - mostly sideways (horizontal) lift. It either helps you turn or resist turning (ie go straight) by giving you something to push off of - drive or hold. So you are both right!

Of course there is also drag.

Actually, after I reread his post I see that I misunderstood it. I definitely think the fins are a pivot point. I'm not sure about what role the back foot would play in turning aside from stabilizing the pivot point.

pmcaero wrote:To turn would you pivot your body around your front foot while guiding the tail of the board with your back foot?

What you just described is how to turn a Snowboard. Snowboarders pressure the front foot and slide the tail. Surfers pressure the back foot and swing the nose.

Do you snowboard ? That could be part of your turning problems.

Back foot pressure driving the fins with an emphasis on the side fin and rail, front foot steering the board through the turn . Front foot then anchors the turn in the position you have swung to.
Most unskilled turns are simply lean turns and are very unstable and limited in use!

pmcaero wrote:I'll try it on the 7'9" board. I'd stall a lot of turns on that board and I thought it was because it's pretty heavy (plastic) but I think it was just me. Gotta go back to basics and then come back to the shortboard.

This is a typical failure with lean turn.

waikikikichan wrote:
Do you snowboard ? That could be part of your turning problems.

not enough to have that habit