Beginners tend to think that the take-off is the first technique they need to learn. In fact, surfing consists of riding along the wave, standing on the board, so the surfer must be able to go from lying down to standing up with his feet on the board. The take-off is the relatively short moment when the surfer stands up on the board.
However, to be able to perform a take-off, beginners need a few basic notions of gliding: in fact, the surfer’s initial aim is to catch a wave and be carried towards the shore. The bodysurfer glides with his own body as support, the bodyboarder usually lies down, and in many countries, fishermen on their boats use the waves to return to port, so there are different forms of surfing.
Generally speaking, beginners learn to ride lying down, balanced on the board, in foam or very gentle waves, before standing up. Gradually, they move on to tackle the waves. Taking off at the top of a wave is of course much more technical, for several reasons:
Unlike foam, which rolls uniformly towards the shore, a wave has to be caught at the right time in the right place. However, except in a wave pool, each wave breaks at a different place, depending on its size, propagation speed, orientation and tidal variations, and the surfer has to adapt his or her paddling rhythm to that of the wave in order to get onto the wave’s slope. Too close to the edge, too far ahead, and you’ve got a wipe-out: the surfer falls into the void because the wave has become too hollow, and he noses over before he can make his take-off. If he starts too late, lacks speed and tries to get up too early, even though the wave is not steep enough, he sinks and sees the wave continue towards the shore without him.
Placement and timing are essential for a successful take-off, but so is speed of execution: a late take-off at the bottom of a wave means that the nose of the board plunges under the water, causing a fall. The deeper the wave, the faster the board reaches the bottom of the wave, requiring the surfer to recover quickly and dynamically.
The quality of your footing is also essential to the success of your take-off: if your feet are too far back, you’ll create an imbalance that will cause you to fall backwards, and the board will brake and become dangerously stuck at the top of the wave. But it’s not enough to place your feet correctly on the board; you also need to bend your legs so that the board can roll down the slope. To ride along the wave, the surfer actually tries to get away from the breaker and the wave’s initial impact zone with the water’s surface.
Skipping the learning stages (technique and reading the ocean) generally leads to failure in the take-off, which is not the most obvious learning stage. So I strongly advise you to take a few surfing lessons to acquire the basics, without which it’s impossible to perform a take-off, which borrows from aviation vocabulary and initially means: take-off. Because it’s all about taking off into the wave and beyond, towards the incredible sensations that each stage of learning to surf will bring.
