Your First Surf Lesson
The Surf Simply coaches have given over 15,000 people their first surfing experience. Not everyone is a natural but everyone, without exception, thoroughly enjoys their first time in the water. A few minutes before your lessons starts, we meet at the board store, where we will select a surf board for your first surfing experience. We have all shapes and sizes from large 9’6″ longboards to 5’6″ shortboards. All you’ll need to take to the beach with you are your boardshorts or bikini, t-shirt or rashguard, and of course, your enthusiasm.
On your chauffeur driven golf cart ride down to the beach we’ll have a chat to you about why Playa Guiones is such an ideal place to learn to surf, we’ll find out whether you plan to make this a one-time fun experience or plan to incorporate surfing into your future and we’ll (try to) discover if you have any personal demons to conquer (where water sports are concerned, there are usually a few!) You’ll also have the chance to ask any questions you might have.
We’ll sit down in the warm sand and teach you how to select and catch small, white-water waves lying on your stomach. You will learn an efficient paddle technique, which will be applicable throughout your whole surfing career (let’s start as we mean to go on) and as you are riding the waves lying down on your belly, you will also learn how to stall and accelerate, then the difference between trimming and carving turns. We know it sounds like a lot but we’ll all have a good old experiment and fall off a lot (that’s all part of the fun). Don’t worry, you’ll be in waist depth water the whole time, so you won’t be doing any swimming. The skills you will learn in this first lesson will give you the foundation you need for everything you’ll ever go on to learn on a surf board and it will fill you with confidence as you’ll realize how unintimidating the surf is, when you know exactly what to do.
Then we come back on the beach and collapse onto the sand (usually grinning from ear to ear). While you’re having a well-earned rest, we’ll teach you how (and more importantly why) you should stand up on a surf board. We don’t just stand up because it looks cool, we stand because we have more control than when we are lying down. In other words, the surfing part is all that stuff you will have just learned, on your belly in the first part of the lesson, and the “standing up part” is something we learn so that we are able to surf better.
One of the most popular misconceptions about surfing (one propagated by many surf schools) is that the only objective is to stand up. The truth is that surfing is about creating speed by putting the board on different parts of the wave to do just that. That’s the fun part. Standing up becomes just one of many things we learn how to do on a surf board which allows us to control the board better. If we take this approach everything you’ll subsequently learn about surfing will fit logically into place.
For the remaining half hour of the session we all get back into the tropical Pacific, and have a good old try to ride the gentle white water waves practicing popping up into the correct stance on the board.
Surfing is a great sport and gets you fit. By the end of your first lesson you will have really earned that second breakfast or cold Iocal brew. You will leave your first lesson feeling confident in your ability to progress and meet future lesson objectives.
