As I wrote in the last newsletter (sign up below if you haven't yet), I am at the point where student vids stoke me out more than highly produced surf movies. I like seeing the gritty parts of learning surfing because I am obsessed with figuring out common issues and better articulating how to work through them. But before I came to this phase in my own practice I was an obsessive surf video watcher. If you know me, you know that I am just kind of obsessive in general. From the age of about 8 years old I’d watch everything surfing related on TV: Gidget, Ride the Wild Surf, Surf Nazis Must Die, Beach Blanket Bingo, Back to the Beach, North Shore, Big Wednesday, Point Break, and the ESPN coverage (way after the fact) of what was then the ASP World Tour (now the WSL). The Hollywood surf films are pretty corny, but they’re worth a watch to get a handle on surfing’s cultural history, which is something I always recommend!
Bali High was on high rotation in the Mattison household throughout the 1980s. Hard to find on the inter webs as of now.
My dad had a few 1970s surf movies hanging around, the most pivotal one for me was Bali High (1978), which was made by his good friend Steve Spaulding. When I was 13 my uncle, Ted Satterthwaite, gifted me Ripcurl’s The Search (can’t find it anywhere on the inter webs), and that would change my surfing forever. The next summer my mom lived in Stinson Beach down the street from an ice cream/video store called Odyssey. They stocked all the shred flicks by Tony Roberts and Josh Pomer of the Northern Californian (mostly Santa Cruz) pros shredding our local waves. Friends at the beach would burn VHS tapes and share them around too. Then Dvds came out and I had quite the surf video collection. I’d watch 2-4 surf videos a day, and watch some of my favorites — Litmus, The Search, Bunyip Dreaming — multiple times a day. This lasted well into my 20s.
The original Jack McCoy trilogy was a staple of my 1990s.
I remember watching Jack McCoy’s Green Iguana in 1994 at a surf film festival that my local beach put on every year at the Elkhorn Yacht Club and there was footage of Luke Egan duck diving a wave at G Land in Indonesia. I had been struggling with duck diving all year and that was a huge lightbulb moment for me when I saw him put his whole foot on the tail of the board under water. I turned to my best bud, Andrew Dolan, and was like, “That is how you do it! You can put your whole foot on the board!” I had a similar experience watching Tom Curren in The Search and Derek Hynd in Litmus. With Tom it was like, “Oh I can hold the small crouch through the bottom turn.” And with Derek it was seeing his laybacks in the tube, and I thought, “So, you just kind of um, lay down on the wave!” I’d use all this visual info and go try it out in my surf sessions. Welp, it works.
As I like to say all of the time, if you don’t know what good surfing looks like then it will be hard to become a good surfer. You want to really think about why certain styles and moves are appealing to you and then take note of where on the wave the person is doing what they’re doing. What does the wave look like vis a visa their body? What are they doing with speed — slowing down or speeding up? What is the ratio of pressure from back foot to front foot? How much is the surfer moving their feet? Where are their eyes? What about their hands? Take note of everything. You won’t be able to do this in one watch, so that’s why I recommend a healthy and steady diet of surf vids to add to your quarantine regime.
Fortunately we now have the internet and Vimeo and YouTube, so you don’t have to go out and necessarily buy all that I mentioned above. You can get subscription to The Surf Network — they are running a free trial right now or you can subscribe at $60 a year — and find many (but not all) of the titles I list in this post, plus tons more of every kind of style and variety of surfing, surfing history, and other surf related stuff. Surfline has been posting vids to its news feed of late. Those are worth watching. New York’s own Pilgrim Surf + Supply — if you surf with me a lot you see the owner Chris Gentile in water with his smooth style — made a great surf film and put it on YouTube for free (see below). Thanks Chris!
And then of course you can always go the the Conatus Vimeo Channel and see more down to earth and humbling surfing sessions in our own waters. You may see mistakes that you often make and will find yourself rooting the person on when they get a good ride. You can go way back into the archives and see how people actually do progress! If you stick with it and keep up a strong whole mind body game you will get better bit by bit. And then there are the ‘Coach Vids’, which is my own surfing. I’m no Tom Curren, but I like to think that I have pretty solid, simple technique. I am surfing consciously in a way that I know that the material is pedagogical. I am also having a lot of fun. You can have fun and pay attention to form at the same time. In fact the more you actually work on form, the more fun that you have. Also in these vids we include the take-offs, which is something so sorely missing from many surf films. This is the hardest part of surfing for most beginning and intermediate surfers. It has to do with wave judgment, timing, positioning, and body mechanics all working in harmony together.
I’ve only scratched the tip of the online surf video ice berg in this post. Get out there and explore on your own and even share some of your favorites with me! Remember to press pause and rewind a lot to truly understand some of the basic mechanics. It is not unlike reading a difficult text of philosophy!