Every week Surf Simply’s resident photog, Laura, spends hours down on the beach shooting video and stills of our guests. She then spends hours more locked away in front of the iMac lovingly molding it all together.

Laura during a rare moment in the water rather than photographing it.

I’ve tried to instill in her the motto that I took away from a recent visit to Facebook’s head office “Done Is Better Than Perfect” they say, but Laura just won’t embrace that idea and each week she emerges from hours in the editing room, eyes red, pale and blinking in the sunlight. And the result? Each week watching the movie she’s made, it’s clear just how much love’s gone into it.

This week though she out did herself, as did our guests. So I hope you enjoy, what I think is the best week’s end video highlights we’ve ever had.

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Every November we run an international beach lifeguard training and certification course. All the Surf Simply coaches have to renew their certification every two years anyway, so we thought rather than leave Nosara to do the course we would bring it to us. We fly in examiners qualified to hand out the certification and up to date with all the latest first aid and CPR protocols, then we figured it would be shame not open the course up to whoever else wanted to do it.

We run it on a non profit basis and as a result we had a great mix of people. From young surf coaches and yoga instructors to retirees and even a legitimate brain surgeon (who modestly assured us that brain surgery isn’t exactly rocket science). We put together this video of some of the best bits. Hope you enjoy it.

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We close down the Surf Simply Resort in Nosara for September and October each year, as they are pretty rainy months in Costa Rica. This left us with the irksome issue of having no outlet for our relentless surfcentric geekology.

As so often happens in these situations, Kerianne and Harry came up with the solution and a few weeks later we had rented a beautiful, big house in France, found ourselves an appropriately Gallic chef, and were hod nobbing on the beach with the world’s best surfers at the Quiky Pro in Hossegor, alongside an enthusiastic, if now newly neoprene clad, jolly collection of Surf Simply guests.

The whole trip was a blast. We got to see Kelly Slater tearing apart perfect waves right in front of us, as well as getting in all the usual surf sessions, video coaching, theory lessons and long European dinners where Costa Rican Imperial was upstaged by a nice French red.

We’re already getting emails about next year so that’s pretty much set in stone now as well as whisperings of a Surf Simply boat charter in Indonesia in September. So stay tuned…

Right now though we’re back in Costa Rica where the Surf Simply resort is being unpacked, polished and upgraded in readiness for the upcoming season which begins Nov 12th. Although before then we’ll be running the International Beach Lifeguard Award course (Nov 2nd-6th), which now just has one space available. So if you’re keen to do the enormously enjoyable lifeguard boot camp with us drop us a line.

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After school I went to Art College in London and I remember seeing my fellow students split cleanly into two categories. There were those who spent their time hungrily learning every new skill they could and there were those who spent a lot of time arguing that art was a subjective experience and not about acquiring a set of skills. The latter group may well have been right but 10 years later, it was those who spent time mastering every medium, that still thoroughly enjoyed making art.

Getting stuck into some mid session video feedback on the beach.

I’ve witnessed exactly the same phenomenon in the world of surfing. I’ve heard many people dismiss the maneuvers performed by highly skilled surfers, saying that they “don’t like all that flashy stuff, it’s too aggressive,” or “it’s not about how good you are, it’s about how much fun you’re having.” Ten years later, those same people are invariably still surfing at the same level and usually their enthusiasm for the sport has noticeably dwindled. By contrast the people who worked to master every new maneuver they saw, kept improving and remained in love with the sport.

Putting my body where my mouth is – laying back into a mid face hack is harder than it looks and consequently this was attempt number 3.

So what’s the art of learning to surf? Never dismiss anything you see being done until you can do it yourself because even if you decide that 360s, airs or headstands are not what you want to do on a wave, you need to be able to do them to know. Also, each new skill you learn will help you do something else better: chop hops will help you do airs, paddling a short board will help you catch more wave on your long board, carving a long board will help you do more powerful carves on your short board, noseriding will help your tube riding. No surf skill is isolated from everything else.

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Being able to set a tangible and achievable goal for yourself when you go out for a surf is a really productive thing to do. For level 3 surfers [?] it is often easy to fall into the trap of judging your surf by the length of your longest ride. This is a mistake for two reasons. One is that the surf that day may not offer any long rides, so you’ll just get frustrated. The other reason is that by focusing on length of ride it means you’re not going to be attempting any new maneuvers and it’s by practicing new maneuvers that you’ll improve faster, enjoy surfing more and ultimately be able to surf waves much further. Oh the sweet, sweet irony.

A great goal for level 3 surfers is to see how may times in a session you can get a broken, or breaking, part of the wave underneath your front foot.

…as demonstrated by two of the Surf Simply coaches, Martin (above on an 8’2″ NSP) and Jack (below on one of our new 6’8″ Pumpkin Seeds).

To begin with you will find that the white water will be breaking on top of your board and you’ll feel the water surge around you front foot and ankle. This means that you need to turn your board much more so that the nose of your board is pointing at the breaking, or broken, section of wave, when you hit it.

As a level 3 surfer you’ll know how to turn, but this exercise will tell you where to turn to. You will know when you get it right because you’ll feel the energy transfered from the wave to your board (that’s actual energy, not metaphysical hippy energy). It will feel as if someone has pushed upwards on the board from underneath. To begin with you’ll fall with surprise but, if you follow the Surf Simply blog or podcasts, you’ll learn how to turn as you feel that push from beneath, and a whole new world of fun will open up before you! SPOILER ALERT: make sure that your front foot is nice and square on the middle of the board or your board will flip over when the water hits the bottom of it (and yes, it may just get you right where the sun don’t shine), so get that functional stance right first.

Gem, co-founder of Surf Simply, neatly demos how you can even do this drill on the close out section at the end of a wave. She too is riding one of our new 7’0″ Pumpkin Seeds (photo by NosaraShack).

Not only is this the basis of almost every major maneuver from roundhouse cut backs, to top turns, white water climbs and floaters but more importantly, it makes surfing in messy, onshore surf as fun as surfing in clean, perfect waves because you’re constantly being presented with ‘targets.’ So why not go out and have fun when everyone else is complaining about the conditions.

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