In an earlier blog, we spoke about Australian surfer Sally Fitzgibbons using a wave pool to give her the most consistent conditions to practice some new manoeuvres, we’re now going to turn the focus onto our own coach, Oli Davis and his mission to improve his surfing.
It all started back in February, when some of the Surf Simply crew took a little trip across the border to Nicaragua. In between some fun little surfs, the team found that the hotel they were staying in had built a nifty concrete skate ramp, and even had a few old skateboards lying around. Harry and Oli decided this would be the perfect opportunity to, like Sally, get multiple attempts at adjusting some bad habits.
Oli in particular had never really had an opportunity to use a skateboard on a ramp before, but after a few tentative goes got fully stuck into his turns, and pretty soon both the boys began to feel their turns improving. Back out in the water, after several sessions on the ramp, Oli’s newly rotated shoulders had allowed him to tighten his cutbacks and helped improve the hit rate on his top turns. Mission Success.
Now, we have to state here that we are definitely not advocating barefoot skateboarding with no helmets (trust us, concrete hurts), but a little practice out of the water can really go a long way. Swimming when we can’t surf will help us catch more waves when we can, rolling around the block on a skateboard (with a helmet!) can really help your balance in the waves and a little stretching each day will make everything much easier when you hit the water!
In part 2 of this blog we’ll see how Oli likes a taste of his own medicine, when he gets a week of intensive video coaching back at Surf Simply HQ.
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Local surfer and old friend of Surf Simply, Adilia Zuñiga Diaz approached us a few weeks ago with the idea of starting a surf club for local Nosaranian girls who wanted to get into surfing. We were really stoked to get involved and so we took on the role of sponsoring the club with boards and equipment. They had their first meeting on Sunday and plan to meet every Sunday from now on at 4pm in front of the main beach car park at Playa Guiones. We just want to congratulate Adilia for seeing the project through and wish her the best of luck.
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Last week one of our guests was front man of the Lt Dan Band, Jeff Verzain. That’s him above rocking out with fellow band member and actor Gary Sinise. On the last night of his two week stay, Jeff wrote and performed a song about his stay at Surf Simply. It was obviously musically really good but it was funny too and at the end more than one of the Surf Simply coaches had a a bit of a lump in their throat.
And here’s how Jeff and the rest of his fellow guests, who you can here him lyricising about got on with their surfing…
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At the end of last week we asked our guests to try to put into words what surfing feels like.
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After having a fantastic time in France during the fall, Surf Simply’s resort in Costa Rica is now open again for the 2012/13 season. However if you fancy coming to stay you may have to wait a while as the resort now typically fills up 3 to 4 months ahead of time. Even a few high rollers from Google and Facebook have had to be relegated to the waiting list which, for some weeks, is as long at 17 people.
Laura Wilkinson, who runs the media side of Surf Simply, sat down with Ru Hill, Surf Simply’s owner and founder as well as senior coaches, Oli Davies and Harry Knight to talk to them about what makes Surf Simply unique.
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