Wingnut's Complete Surfing - Softcover

Weaver, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0071497064 ISBN 13: 9780071497060

Verlag: International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

From a world-class expert and one of thesport’s greatest legends comes the onlytotal guide for surfing

Surfing is a sport that anyone can pick up and enjoywith the right instruction. Yet many how-to books failto address crucial basics such as wave dynamics, boarddesign and performance, and strategies for paddling outthrough the wave breaks. Wingnut’s Complete Surfingcovers all this and more, providing you with a complete guide.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert “Wingnut” Weaver is a surfing legend and one of the most talented surfers in the world, with millions of dedicated fans and students. Famed especially for his longboard mastery, he was the star of the surfing movie classic Endless Summer II.

Scott Bannerot is an avid surfer, sailor, and writer whose feature articles appear regularly in adventure magazines.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

WINGNUT'S COMPLETE SURFING

By Robert "Wingnut" Weaver Scott Bannerot

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2009 Scott Bannerot and Robert Weaver
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-149706-0

Contents

Chapter One

Surfing Success A PREVIEW

by Scott Bannerot

In surfing, as in anything worth doing, proficiency comes with practice. Practice in our case means picking up a purpose-designed fiberglass "board," walking to the water's edge, and literally taking the plunge. This plunge will cost money, time, and considerable energy. Since this book is designed to help you do this with the least pain and the most fun, we'll naturally present the topic in some detail. But before we get into the how, let's address the why. Why go surfing?

Can you remember, as a child, giving yourself wholly to the pursuit of an activity that brought you joy? It might have been swimming, shooting baskets, fishing, or some more sedentary activity, but while you were engaged in it hours would melt away unnoticed. When we come of age and in all likelihood are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time earning money, we forget the timeless joy of undistracted engagement in an activity pursued for its own sake. We forget how to play.

Surfing takes you back there. It makes you feel like a kid again. Even for the average, garden-variety participant, surfing is such a unique synthesis of physical exercise and conditioning, intellectual stimulation, and immersion in natural beauty, and is just so downright happy and thrilling, few who experience it can ever let it go. Surfing makes your soul smile.

Defining Success

Whether you start playing the guitar, taking golf lessons, training for marathons, acting, writing, learning martial arts, or participating on a sports team, you usually have an ultimate goal, conscious or unconscious, and you keep running and rerunning a cost- benefit analysis relative to that goal—prospective pain versus prospective gain. When will you consider yourself successful? When you receive an award, a trophy, or public acclaim?

Surfing is hardly immune from this sort of thinking, but success in surfing is fundamentally different. Maybe this is because of surfing's malleable, highly fluid nature and the fact that success is so completely defined by the participant. Surfing is an intensely personal activity—just you, your board, and a wave. Every day is different. All you have to do is catch the wave, stand up, ride, and do it again ... three times, five times, ten times. You win. It doesn't matter whether you're surfing a one-foot wave on a sandy beach break or a roaring hollow monster at Pipeline on Oahu's famed North Shore. Cameron Weaver and Ryan Bannerot started before their third birthdays. Many continue into their seventies, a few into their nineties. It's the cheapest life insurance around. Success is measured purely by the personal happiness you generate. There is no obligation to impress others, win accolades, or even worry about what anyone else thinks.

This makes surfing about as close to pure fun as our species can approach on this particular planet. Other crazes come and go, yet the popularity of surfing has never waned since the modern worldwide explosion that began in the 1960s. There's a wave out there for every-one—every generation, race, and gender—and each surfer comes out a winner. Success in surfing is wrapped up in that infectious attitude of making every day great over the largest possible variety of conditions.

And in the Beginning ...

Watching a superstar perform often triggers questions about how it all began. Wingnut grew up in Newport Beach, California, not far from a fairly consistent and reasonably friendly break known as Blackie's, between the Newport Beach Pier and a rock jetty. While he had boogie boarded and body surfed since a young age, he didn't actually surf on a board until age sixteen, not long before his seventeenth birthday, during the summer between his junior and senior years in high school. He was on the high school wrestling team, weighing in at a mere 115 pounds, and his coach lent him a 1960s-era "log" in the form of a forty-pound Dave Sweet longboard. Wingnut took to it instantly. Already accustomed to the hard part—catching a wave—he started out by paddling vigorously onto the first few waves, and after experiencing the thrill of popping up and standing as the big board surged along at an angle to the shore a few times, he was hooked. Thousands of waves and twenty-five years later he can't actually recall the very first wave, just the feeling that it was something he'd always do. Needless to say, his wrestling coach never saw the board again, and Wingnut became a regular at Blackie's, often grabbing a ride with his next-door neighbor, a surfer who was also a firefighter. He has never looked back.

At six years Wingnut's senior but with a lifetime wave count that will never put a scratch in his, I can easily recall my first wave. I attended junior high and high school near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (to this day undiscovered for surfing), and once participated in an exciting family beach vacation to Fenwick Island, Delaware. It was 1972, I was thirteen, and although I'd seen Endless Summer some years earlier and had the dream, it wasn't until I saw my cousin Jack Glanville out in some small waves, sitting expectantly on a kid-sized Corky Carroll egg-style board, that I knew I was going to get a first shot. I was out beside Jack in a flash, where I learned that he hadn't been able to stand up yet but that I could have a go. Beside myself with excitement, I paddled onto the first foaming white breaker, every bit of twelve inches tall, stood up shakily, wobbled in, and T-boned the beach moments later. Neither of us could believe it. Surfing was no problem; I had it down. Little did I know that that would be my best ride for the next twenty-three years.

The Worst Record in Surfing History

While Wingnut was rapidly honing his skills in California, I was accumulating what just might be the worst record in surfing history. In case anyone doubts me when I say that if I can surf, you can too, perhaps it's worth recounting the highlights from that record:

* Summer of 1975, Waikiki, Oahu, Hawaii. I've been invited by high school friend Roy Stang to accompany him on a supercheap trip to Hawaii with his parents and a large group of elderly people. When Roy and I rent boards and paddle out into the surf, we notice right away that the two Hawaiian guys catching graceful rides on the long, slow swells have boards much longer than ours, but we don't worry about it. Instead we paddle ourselves silly trying to catch waves on our rented shortboards, and we catch nary a one. We leave the beach feeling sad and defeated. As Wingnut's friend, surfing legend Mickey Munoz, says, "There are no bad waves, just bad equipment choices."

* Spring of 1986, Rincon, Puerto Rico. With a few days to kill between trips on a high-seas swordfish longliner, I rent a car and strike out for what I've heard is a world- class surf spot to get the monkey off my back once and for all. Pretty little right- handers (waves that peel to your right when your back is to them and you're facing the beach) are breaking in a beginner-friendly area, but once more the only rental boards available are shortboards. Gamely paddling onto wave after wave, I experience hours of failure in every imaginable form, but not one ride. As I walk bedraggled down the street to return the board, an aging overweight surfer accosts...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0071497064
• ISBN 13: 9780071497060
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar