“You’ll never get good” Surf icon drops coldest truth on Vulnerable Adult Learners

"The only way to get good at surfing is to live on the beach and start when you're 12 or younger."

I am a Johnson-era Beach Boys fanatic and today is dedicated to a favorite bit from “Catch a Wave,” third verse, opening line, and I hate that Mike Love sings it, but anyway: “So take a lesson from a top-notch surfer boy.” 

A lesson. Singular. One lesson. Mike Love, for once, got it right. 

Thirty minutes of instruction on the beach with appropriate small and gentle waves in the background, followed by a fully supervised hour in the water, mostly to get the paddling sorted out, then double-shakas, have fun, good luck, you’re on your own.

Learn by doing. Watch, try, fail, try again. Ask questions, maybe not while in the water, wait till after.

But the main thing, pretty much the only thing, is to hydrate, go heavy on the sunscreen, and block out massive chunks of time to stay in the water. There is no getting to the “understand” part of Einstein’s quote, up there in the subject line, without becoming half amphibious. 

The how-to-surf algorithm is against me here. You learn to surf in 2026 by getting two BOSU balls, tying your ankles together with a short leash-like cord, and doing this until your friends catch you. Or this, which I think is is the same thing, except there’s mention of a belt-buckle. Do this to improve surfing balance and woodworking skills. 

Meanwhile, Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” theory got cancelled back when Carly Rae Jepsen owned the charts (possibly supporting the Gladwell critics; I’m not sure Carly Rae Jepsen was even 10,000 hours old when “Call Me Maybe” had everyone, Boomers included, singing in the shower). But I suggest we cancel the Gladwell cancel.

For surfing, anyway.

96.5% percent of your progression in this sport, Malcolm Gladwell just texted me, is down to water time. Which is why c; you’ll never get in the required hours otherwise. 

That said, I believe just as strongly that if the fever is well and truly upon you during those first months and years of what today’s YouTube instructional gurus would call your “surfing journey” then you will snatch up all that water time and watch the how-to videos, do the gyrating excercises, read the comments, everything. You will be obsessive. And none of these extracurriculars will hurt—you will in fact almost certainly get a tiny boost, in fitness if nothing else, in your inch-at-a-time advance up surfing’s Nazarre-sized learning curve. 

I mock our too-eager generation of beginners, in other words, but not really.

If on-demand instructional surf videos had been a thing in during my early 1970s gremmiehood, I’d have gone half-blind from watching. Instead, we had skateboarding, which was kind of its own thing but mostly just surfing practice—not so different I suppose from many of the YouTube surf-exercise clips, except way more fun—and we also had Peter Dixon’s The Complete Book of Surfing, which I read like a Yale Law first-year incel permanently behind on his casebook study.  

Dixon was a dedicated Los Angeles area surfer, and a versatile writer (he went on to do TV screenplays for Flipper and Bionic Woman), and his Complete Book of Surfing was a minor pop culture phenomenon. It arrived at the peak of the 1960s surf boom and was rushed into mass-market paperback, which meant it was on supermarket spinner racks coast to coast, and by the end of the decade, counting revised editions, Complete Book was up to 300,000 in sales. (I haven’t bothered to open my check-free royalty statements for years, but I’m pretty sure History of Surfing ran out of gas well before 25K.)

The Complete Book of Surfing quickly knocked the wind out of four or five similar how-to books, the most popular of which was The Young Sportsman’s Guide to Surfing, one of a series of young-adult titles published by the venerable Thomas Nelson and Sons publishing house, ranging alphebetically from The Young Sportsman’s Guide to Archery to The Young Sportsman’s Guide to Wrestling. 

Young Sportsman’s Guide to Surfing by and large doesn’t hold a candle to The Complete Book of Surfing. Then again, it’s aimed at a younger audience (middle schoolers), and I appreciate that where Dixon illustrates his book with surf-mag-quality images of name surfers (Noll, Farrelly, Hemmings) at name breaks (Malibu, Waimea, Huntington), Young Sportsmen’s Guide to Surfing walks us through the learning process with a set of tight-focus shots of an unnamed blond kid who looks about 12, and his instructor (a stylishly turned-out Con Colburn), all of which makes more sense in terms of catching and holding the attention of an adolescent newcomer. 

These how-to photos, shot on a gray-sky beach just north of Santa Monica, are beautifully framed and composed. But something else caught and held my attention when I first saw this book and it took a while to zero in on what it was—the seriousness Con and his student are bringing to the task. No smiles. No false encouragement. What Colburn and his young charge are doing is a different thing altogether than the fun-fun-fun version of surfing the Beach Boys sing about.

This has a lot to do with the fact that the sport at this point was trying mightily to shake off the beach-hooligan rep it had earned over the previous ten years. But on top of that, by luck or design, the photos also get to an overlooked truth about surfing, which is that the fun part is mostly found on the perimeter. Driving with friends to go surf is fun. Hanging out on the beach afterward is fun.

But nearly everything having to do with actually riding waves—especially at the beginning—is difficult. Really, endlessly hard. But the good kind of hard, the addictive kind, with achievements small and large that scroll out for years or decades, and peak flow-state moments that you will be smiling over on your deathbed.

But look, kid, each of those moments will cost you a hundred of hours of time and attention.

Have fun on the way, sure.

ust understand that Uncle Con here, with that stern look on his puss, is doing you a favor. Pay attention. Take it seriously.

“Don’t treat it like a toy”—the Beach Boys got that right too. 

PS: Better than Con Colburn, better than Peter Dixon, the finest contribution to the surfing 101 canon—print version anyway—arrived in the 1990s, and was organized and mostly written by Nick Carroll for Surfing magazine as a Special Collector’s Series. I still have a couple more issues to post, but here is “How to Surf,” “How to Surf Your Best,” and “Waves.” All three are detailed, well-organized, fun to read, and authoritative to the last drop. 

(You like this? Matt Warshaw delivers a surf essay every Sunday, PST. All of ’em a pleasure to read. Maybe time to subscribe to Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing, yeah? Three bucks a month.)