Climb and drop update

I've been striving to get the hang of the climb and drop for a few weeks now. It's been slow going, mostly because the surf conditions haven't been very cooperative. What I need in order to practice it effectively is medium-sized, clean, peeling waves. But what we've mostly had in recent weeks is no waves, tiny waves, choppy waves, and closeouts (waves where the whole face breaks at the same time instead of peeling). It's been frustrating.

In the last week, however, I've had three or four sessions where the waves were doing what I wanted and I was able to successfully execute some crude approximations of the climb and drop. In one or two cases I was even able to use it to get around a section of the wave that was closing out (a section closes out when the crest of the wave actually topples over and crashes down into whitewater - once you're surfing in whitewater the only thing you can do is let it push you straight in to shore or jump off and end your ride). A competent surfer can often get past a section that is closing out by dropping down the face and going around the front of the section, then climbing back up the still-peeling face on the other side. I haven't quite got the last bit down, but I'm getting there.

But most exciting of all for me was the one ride I had this morning when I for the first time managed to gain noticeable speed using the climb and drop. Being able to add speed beyond that at which the wave is peeling opens up a new world of possibilities in surfing. And it turns out that the climb and drop allows you to do this without violating the first law of thermodynamics. Here's my best attempt at unraveling the physics: most of the energy of a breaking wave is in the upper part of the wave face. You tap into that energy when you're riding along high on the face. When you drop down the face you trade some potential energy for additional speed, but because you are now lower on the face, you get less energy from the wave and quickly slow down. The climb and drop lets you use muscle energy to quickly move the board up and down the face in a kind of a salsa-ish body motion, and in so doing you repeatedly gain speed during the drops and then reclaim the high-energy region of the wave face before you lose all of that new speed. At least that's how I understand it. However it works, it works!