SURFING (POV Pictures): Small bumpy waves are still a challenge on a shallow reef

Hello everyone on HIVE and especially the Sports Talk Social Community! My name is Jasper and I’m writing to you from Cape Town, South Africa! One of my topics that I tend to post about a lot on HIVE is one of my favorite sports, surfing!

Now I have a full-time job in the renewable energy industry, and I’m a part-time musician. I’m also a father to a beautiful 1 year old daughter! Needless to say – there’s not much free time for surfing and I’ve got to grab my opportunities when I can.

One of those opportunities came on Sunday morning, but oh dear, the wind was going to switch directions entirely at about exactly that time! This meant that I could either choose:
•the side of the peninsula that started out with good conditions but would go messy quite quickly, or…
•I could choose the side of the peninsula where it started out messy but the new offshore wind would hopefully clean things up while we were there.

We chose the latter – if those spots looked doable when we arrived, hopefully they’d improve with the favourable wind and pushing tide! So, we chose some small bumpy waves on a shallow reef…

Why Waves Break

I thought I would use this opportunity to try and explain my understanding of why waves break. Did you know that a wave is not really moving water, but rather a rolling wall of energy that transfers itself through the water, rolling away forever as long as nothing gets in its way? The energy is usually created by storms or wind out to sea…

Well eventually that wave will arrive at the coast. At a depth of about 1.5 times the height of the wave, the wave will “feel” the bottom of the ocean floor and slow down, causing the visible part of the wave energy above the surface to rise, and then tip over and break into turbulent white water. If the ocean floor goes from deep to shallow in a gentle slope, then the wave will break in a gentle fashion. If the ocean floor goes from deep to shallow rapidly because it has approached a shallow reef or sandbank, then the wave will break more powerfully in a steep or even hollow fashion.

One bumpy critical little wave

So, Sunday morning’s session was at a spot where the small waves broke steeply and relatively powerfully on the shallow rocky reef, before becoming gentler and flatter as they ran off the reef and into a deeper channel. Let’s give you a surfer’s eye view on just one quick bumpy little wave:

Paddling hard to catch the wave. Notice my friend Max, who is the only other surfer out, is also paddling for it… so I must yell at him that I’m on the inside with right of way and I’m going to commit to taking it. Also notice that the shallow reef is coming up in front of me, and you can see the water becoming turbulent around a particularly shallow rock before the wave has even arrived. This is because the wave arriving seems to suck water off the reef towards it.

Max is honouring the unwritten rules of surfing, and is pulling back to let me, the surfer on the inside, catch the wave. It is starting to steepen up, and more shallow rocks are making themselves known with the “rock boil” turbulence!

By now I’ve got to my feet but I’m probably still holding onto the rail with my hand, pulling it up to help the inside rail and fins catch into the wall of the wave and help me ride sideways along it. As I ride right over this shallow rock boil, the wave is going to get very steep and my rail and fins will slip out for a split second, causing me to nearly fall!

As my fins and rail slip a bit and I nearly fall, the lip of the wave breaks on me, and I have the added challenge of blindness while trying to regain my balance before I fall properly!

Luckily my fins and rail catch into the wave again as I reach the bottom of the wave face which is less steep. I think the wave calms down a bit as well, now that it has passed those particularly shallow rock boils… can I get back onto the open face?

Yes I can!… here you can see my shadow in the morning sun as I reach the much calmer shoulder of the wave running along the deeper channel!

So… the waves were small and bumpy, but because of the surf spot we chose, Max and I actually had a lot of fun practicing these critical steep, little take-offs.

It was almost as if we had less time to get to our feet because the drop was so short, making it maybe more “technically challenging” than bigger waves... but at we weren’t as scared! Hahaha

THE END