Mid-length propaganda…

Here’s the thing: you’re riding the wrong surfboard.

The wrong surfboard, that is, if you have no surf contest trophies in your well-stocked boardroom, no sponsorship deals, less than six stickers top and bottom and only family and friends subscribing to your vlog.

Forget what all the promo clips on various websites try to get you to believe, because you perform like none of the super-hot surfers featured in those “test rides”, with their tail slides, vertical backside hacks and aerial antics.

As recently as last month a New York Times feature covering our sport’s Covid-truncated entry into the Olympics, asserted that surfing’s three fundamentals were airs, turns and barrels.

Yeah, right, and you get your boards for free, too.

Whole quivers, like little Jackson Dorian, whose grasp of those fundamentals is on display every time he hits the water, fresh or otherwise. But he’s not you, so while Baby D might actually tick each of those boxes on every Waco pulse he rides, let me tell you how you surf, if you’re old enough to have read this far and still insist on riding any surfboard that even remotely resembles a pro’s.

You thrash your way into most waves, paddling furiously, occasionally kicking.

Most of your drops are late, because you have to take off under the lip.

After getting to your feet you immediately start back-foot pushing against your fin cluster, rather than applying pressure to the inside rail, in an effort to get the board moving down the line.

You rarely do an actual bottom turn, but for the most part just push the board ahead of you across the middle of the wave face, seldom, if ever, achieving enough planing speed to apply the rhythmic weighting/unweighting that defines true rail-to-rail surfing.

After running ahead of the curl, and if you’re lucky enough to find an accommodating shoulder, with the board flat on the wave face you lean, not carve, into a cutback, not engaging the rail but simply re-directing the nose of the board toward the curl or advancing whitewater.

Slowing down considerably, you then step on the tail, lift the nose, swing the board back around and begin the fin-pushing process all over again.

And that’s if you’re lucky.

A more typical ride sees you pushing your board flat across the wave face, trying desperately to generate and maintain speed until the wave inevitably closes out and you crank the nose of your board up above the lip and then swing it back down in the whitewater in a classic “roller-coaster” maneuver that Mike Purpus would’ve been proud of…in 1969.

Is all this to say that you’re a bad surfer?

No, simply that you’re riding the wrong surfboard.

Just like fundamentals for the vast majority of surfers today do not include airs or barrels (we’ll give you the turns, however feeble), an equally vast majority take advantage of absolutely none of the design/performance qualities built into boards ridden by professional grade surfers.

These boards, primarily thrusters with various, subtle variations, are designed to do exactly what all thrusters have been designed to do since Simon’s first incarnation in 1981: go vertical and then back down, with alternating pressure on the side fins, carving turns on-rail.

Now be honest: is that how you surf?

Ever?

So here’s your problem… and the solution, all in two sentences.

Problem: you’re riding a pro model thruster like you’re on a mid-size.

Solution: Ride a mid-size.

Seriously.

Have you seen that video of Torren Martyn in Iceland?

Or Rob Machado on his Stretched Seaside?

Go ahead, scrounge up any of the latest CI-Mid clips and ask yourself this: who do you surf more like, Italo Ferreira or Devon Howard?

Of course, and why do you think that’s so?

Because mid-masters like Howard, Martyn and Machado ride boards that are designed to accommodate the needs of, I’d say, 99% of all of the world’s competent surfers — you included.

Unlike the pro model boards, with their anorexic volume, wide-point-back, narrow-nosed templates and demanding fin-clusters — each designed to be ridden in a manner you never have and most probably never will — today’s new mids, with their continuous curve templates, generous width and foil and sensible fin setups let you do all the things you’re trying to do now, only better.

Not sticking trampoline aerials or GoPro-ing fifty-eight-second barrels, but getting into the waves that you regularly surf early and with authority. Immediately achieving trim, then flowing, not fighting, from top to bottom and back again. Generating speed with the rail, not scrubbing it off with the fins. Carrying that speed through a legitimate figure-eight, not rectangular, cutback. Catching more waves, making more waves, riding faster, cleaner, stronger.

Your own surfing experience reflecting those additional core values that in the same NYT story they assign as if solely applicable to professional competitive performance: speed, power and flow.

Forget the New York Times — that could be you.

Tomorrow.

But only if you’d stop riding the wrong surfboard, and get yourself a mid.

(Oh, and for those particular BeachGrit readers out there who, after reading this, are no doubt feverishly working up some predictably caustic response—some variation of “Fuck that guy, I don’t need a mid-size.” — I have only one word: bullshit.)

Man stronger than rabid bird dog gets extra power from champion cornerman…

Five years ago, the wife and baby of surfing photographer Chris White were swept across the North Shore’s Kam Highway by one of those great North Shore pulses.

The kid, who was strapped into his pram, was separated from mammy and deposited upside down, drinking water etc.

Now, if your kid and gal were washed across the Kam Highway by a rogue wave, who’d you want to be there to scoop ‘em up?

How about Kelly Slater, who just happened to be around ‘cause he couldn’t get out at giant Waimea?

A ludicrous dream, no?

But there he was, talking to a pal at the lifeguard tower at Rockpiles when he saw the catastrophe about to unfold: women in headphones, with pram, on bike path, about to be belted

So he runs over, gets to the pram, flips it upright, gets the kid’s head out of the water, scoops sand out of his mouth so he can breathe, helps out mammy, gives ‘em a lift home.

It’s the sorta thing that brings people together.

Ever since, Chris and Kelly have been buddies.

“He’s a surf Jesus,” says Chris, who is forty and lives in North Beach in Western Australia.

A year ago, Chris’ kid was watching a TV show called Ninja Warrior and asked his daddy, a water photographer, jiujitsu expert (purple belt, heading to brown real soon), bodyboard hellcat, if he had the strength and guts to throw himself into that sorta challenge.

“I thought I’d put my money where my mouth is,” says Chris.

He trained every day for nine months, “guns blazing.”

Ice baths. Recovery sessions. Real serious.

Submits an audition video to the TV station with testimonials from Kelly Slater among other celeb pals.

Does the physical test (chin-up bar dead hangs, push-up tests etc). Gets in.

And, there, on television, as he prepares for his run, Kelly on a giant screen, talking about his dear pal Chris White.

And then the run itself, Chris cavorting and thrusting towards various cones, furiously jiggling as he heads for the climax.

Does he win etc?

Nah.

“But I got so much out of it. It lived up to everything I hoped it could be and more. Fit, healthy and it had a flow-on affect to the rest of my life, mentally and physically.

Watch Chris here, with cheerleader Kelly.