Why — And How — to Watch Women’s Surfing in the Olympics — The Paddle Out — Part 3
Part 3: What’s at Stake: Navigating the Power of the Ocean — The Paddle Out
I really really really want the World Surf League to send recreational surfers out into the lineup before every contest so people can see what it takes to even get out through the pounding whitewater, the powerful currents, the driving lips of world-class waves. I don’t mean beginners — I mean surfers that are regularly athletic people who have put in time in the water. You would see a few lucky people, having a good day, fully in the flow. You would also see people trying to duck dive (more on this in a moment) under the waves, but instead being popped out, pushed back, and dragged towards shore in the powerful churning. You might see the occasional broken board, people drilled into the reef or the sandbar, and mass exhaustion. Mostly, you would see a standstill, people treading water as the force of the waves renders their paddling useless against mother ocean.
Getting out through powerful waves and currents might be the hardest thing of all to explain or describe. It takes years and years –and I would argue an innate divinely-bestowed gift– to learn how to read the currents, to sliver your board as you duck under the wave, to time the right depth and angle, apply the right pressure, in the right place, at the right time.
You have to judge how close the next wave is breaking, the depth of the explosion, the force of it, and get everything just right to continue any outward momentum. At the shoreline, the water is mostly pushing towards the shore. It does pull back, regroup, and reform into the next shoreward surge, but the primary push is TOWARDS the shore, or into the churning whitewater itself.
And there is no practice for paddling out but paddling out. No gym workout. No yoga program. No rowing machine. It is experience, core strength, shoulder strength, hydrodynamics. Incidentally, this is why wave pools may produce the ability to perform tricks and turns on a wave, but they will never replicate what the unpredictable and ever-powerful ocean produces as the first major obstacle: getting OUT there.
So when you are watching these magical creatures flow effortlessly through blue-green mountains and foaming peaks, you are actually watching sprinters, hurdlers, steeplechase masters, marathoners, and gymnasts, perform feats during which many of us would actually PERISH if we attempted.
The obstacles faced when paddling out depend on many variables: the tide height, type of ocean floor (sand or reef or a mix of rocks and sand), the steepness of the shoreline, the rocks beneath, the direction of the incoming swell, the consistency of the swell, and the size of the incoming waves. We will go into depth (probably too much depth) about what makes a wave in the next installment, but understanding a few basics will help you appreciate the skill and conditioning surfers must develop to even BECOME surfers.
Whenever possible, surf contests are held when the waves are at least six feet on the faces, or ten or twelve feet or more (head high, head and half, double-overhead, triple-overhead). When waves are this size, they produce a lot of water moving to and from the shoreline. What comes in, must go out, so giant surges of water that drive towards the shore have to go back out somehow and somewhere. The surges usually flow in channels (formed by indentations in the ocean floor) that allow the water to make it out more efficiently. Surfers need to navigate these channels to have a chance to get out through the waves and not be pushed constantly towards the shore. Just being able to read what the water is doing is a long and hard-earned skill.
When there are lulls between sets of several minutes, these are easier to navigate. When the sets are super-consistent, it gets more difficult. But in any situation, no channel stays open. And when big sets come, especially from slightly different directions, what looked like an opening can suddenly become the impact zone of the next breaking wave. No matter what, surfers have to paddle through and under waves that break in slightly different places, at different times, with different force, and different shapes.
Duck Diving: Shortboarders do a technique called duck diving to get under a breaking wave, which is pushing the board under with your foot or knee, then releasing into an underwater arc and appearing on the other side. Gorgeous underwater photos of duck diving make it look magical and easy.
I promise you, it is not.
The main thing is timing. One of the scariest moments in surfing is when a huge hollow wave is about to break ON your body. If you time your dive incorrectly, the lip literally drills you in the middle of your back. Even if you see this coming and manage to get your body out of the way, the lip can drill your board and snap it like a pretzel. If you do it really wrong, like I have, you get swept up and over the falls, become the lip, hit the bottom, AND break your board. If you do it right, you punch through the other side like a mermaid gladiator and scratch as hard as you can for the inevitable follow up to that wave, bigger, scarier, on the other side, and do it again.
All waves, even in the same set, don’t break in the same place. There may be a difference of 5 or 10 feet closer or further, and one or two may be a LOT bigger or powerful than the others. Paddling 5–10 feet takes time, and when seconds are at stake, or milliseconds, the results can be hazardous.
If the wave has already broken, and you are facing an enormous wall of whitewater steamrolling towards you, after the explosion of the lip drilling into the surface, and you do it wrong, you can get punted back, torpedoed out, or just rolled like el-rolo. All of these destroy your momentum and usually leave you in a more precarious position than you started. Namely, closer to the shore, with more sets on the way. Sometimes a friendly-looking foam ball has somehow taken on the power of a Pipeline bomb, and you find yourself rolled and drilled when you least expect it.
If you get caught inside and have to duck dive the whole set, it’s mostly going to drain your strength and energy, not cause you injury. It’s just bleeping hard to make progress out to the lineup with all that water moving in, so you get worn down by physical exertion.
The real dangers of duck diving have been mastered by the pros. They make it look so effortless, it is impossible to digest what it costs the surfer in time and energy.
Punching through, or over a wave, on a longboard: I wish I could explain how this is done. Our local lineup is full of young girls who perfectly time their mermaid launches up and through breaking waves, effortlessly slipping through to the other side. Every time I try it, I get flung back over the falls. So I settle for the turtle roll, which is rolling on your back and gripping the board with all your strength as the wave passes over you. Hugging a 9-foot log close to your chest as a mountain of whitewater rolls over you, when timed wrong, feels like having your arms yanked off by a primal foaming monster. The other poor result is feeling the board smash into your face. More often, the board is simply stripped from your grip and you hope you have not killed anyone with it as you tumble through the whitewater trying to regain control.
Of course, every high-level sport requires conditioning. It is just really hard to explain how exhausting it is even getting out to the lineup ONCE. These athletes ride a wave all the way in, sometimes into inches of water, then they have to paddle back out, again, to have a chance at scoring on that next wave.
Recently, contests have added jet ski assists to get surfers back into position to perform on the wave, and that has made it more fun for all of us to watch (it’s more fun to watch a surfer carving the wave face than duck dive under churning foam balls). But each time they catch a wave, they pay a price, and the mere act of getting in position to score again is more than most of us, even practiced surfers, could recover from within that 25–40 minute window.
But the thing to truly understand is there is one thing that sets surfing apart from every other sport on the planet — beyond exhaustion, injury, and disappointment. Surfers actually, truly, face the possibility each and every time, especially in powerful, world-class conditions, waves that are two and three stories high, of drowning. Yes, DEATH.
And we won’t even talk about sharks.
Links to the whole series:
Part 1: Why — And How — to Watch Women’s Surfing in the Olympics — What is Really Happening in the Water?
Part 2: What’s at Stake — Navigating the Ocean — The Wipeout
Part 3: What’s at Stake — Navigating the Ocean — The Paddle Out
Part 4: What’s at Stake — The Wave Itself
Part 5: What’s at Stake — The Surfer
Part 6: What’s at Stake — Scoring and Maneuvers
Sheila Gallien is a writer, channel, conscious creativity coach and soul surfer. Her screenplay, Dropping In, inspired by her own story of finding true courage through surfing is soon to be a major motion picture. She lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, where she dreams of someday getting barreled. Visit www.sheilagallien.life to find out more about her transformational work.
