Surf - Choosing Your Board and Applying Wax

Hi I'm Owen with OC Ground Surf Camp Headquarter to K-Coast Surf Shop, 35th street in Ocean City, Maryland. Today we are going to learn how to surf, the first point to learn how to surf is choosing the right board. We have three basic shapes of boards, the one we all know, we are familiar with is the traditional shortboard, it's characterized by shorter length and its pointy nose. Second board is the big longboard more buoyant board, has a rounded nose and more girth throughout the body, the last shape is called a fun shape, its a hybrid between a shortboard and a longboard, it offers the buoyancy of the longboard, but gives a little bit more maneuverability like the shortboard would offer. The commonalities between all three are the basic components of the board. At the top we have the nose of the board, at the bottom we have the tail of the board, if we turn the board around we have a fin configuration, most boards offer a three fin configuration. Some of the longboards have one single fin and you can find any number of combinations therein. Once we have chosen our correct board we want to look at a few different things, when first starting it's important that we look at a buoyancy of the board, we want a board that offers a lot of floatation, so we can have faster paddling and get into more waves. The last component of the board and a very necessary one is the leash. It keeps the board from getting away from us and running into other people, and running into own ourselves, and prevent us from doing a lot excess swimming. The leash is attached to the leg you use in the back of your surfboard while riding. It is attached low and snug around the ankle just like so.

Once you have your board and you are ready to surf, you want some traction on your board, traction is applied through a simple bar of wax, if you have a new board you can apply the wax directly to the board, if you have an old board and there is old wax on the board and you want to remove it, we use a wax comb. We take the end with the pointy piece, rub it in a circular motion on the board to loosen up the wax, then with the straight edge, scrape it off, leaving the clean surface of the board. Once the board is clean of all the old wax, we then apply our new wax with a just a circular motion like such. After the wax is applied on the board, we are ready to surf. It's important that the wax is applied on the top of the board, the part without the fins, not the bottom part. Apply to the bottom part, will slow you down also make sure that the wax is applied where you will be waving on the board, not too far up on the nose or too far back on the tail. Now that we picked our board, we can begin talking about our body position while riding.