Day 2 - surfing recap

Another beautiful day today, with a low tide session in the morning and a high tide session in the afternoon. Today the focus was on basics, specifically body position and popup form. In our morning session, we spent about half the time doing popups in the whitewater, and the other half out back trying to catch unbroken waves.

Practicing popups in the whitewater sounds like a pointless exercise once you've started being able to catch waves out back, but it's really essential. Because the wave has already broken, and there's so much less power behind the board than with a breaking wave, everything slows down, and flaws in your stance, posture, and weight distribution become painfully apparent. As humbling as it was for me to realize that some of the basic popup skills I had worked on so much in the past weren't up to snuff, it was encouraging to see that everybody, even the experienced surfers in our group, had similar problems. The beauty of video replay is that you can see in painful detail what you are doing wrong, and hopefully correct it in the future.

The rest of the low tide session was theoretically spent catching unbroken waves. In my case, it was mostly spent being pummeled. Low tide waves are more challenging for a beginner like myself because they tend to stand up and break quite quickly, so the window of opportunity between not-yet-steep-enough and holy-shit steep is often only a few meters. At high tide, in contrast, the waves tend to be fatter and stand up more slowly, so there's more margin for error in judging where and when to catch a wave or let it pass you by. So this afternoon's session went much better, and I was quite pleased with myself when I caught the first ride of my group. Our instructor Harry's refresher course on paddle technique and turtle rolls (given in the pool between session) was invaluable, and for the first time I finally was able to execute a few proper turtle rolls. By the end of the session, muscle fatigue set in, though, and now sheer exhaustion is overtaking me, so it must be time for bed.