They say you usually have to see them before they happen in order to successfully ride them. A lot of times, we’re having to ditch speed in order to find the barrel section.” Photo: Jack Coleman//Inspire Courses
Leah Dawson vividly remembers the first barrel she caught on Oahu’s Sunset Beach. She was surfing with her mentor, Rochelle Ballard, who watched the whole thing go down.
“It was a big, big wave — a full keg on the west bowl,” she explains in her Guide to Alternative Surf Craft with Inspire Courses. “But I made my bottom turn and came right up into it and just stood there, like amazed that I got into this thing. But she’s like, ‘Why didn’t you pump? You have to pump, you can’t just stand there.'”
As you’d gather from her story, Leah didn’t make it out of that particular barrel. And both the experience and the simple note from Ballard encapsulate one of the biggest early humps when surfers first start getting barreled: finding or creating enough speed to then start making it out the other end.
“Finding tubes can be really elusive and challenging,” she admits. “They say you usually have to see them before they happen in order to successfully ride them. A lot of times, we’re having to ditch speed in order to find the barrel section.”
And therein lies the challenge. We often need to slow ourselves down to find the barrel. And then manufacture speed to get out of them. Sometimes we find it with the correct line to drive us through, adjusting foot placement, and even pumping. Since no two waves are alike, Dawson points out that no single technique will get the trick done each time. For example, Dawson analyzes the wave below:
“On this particular wave, I saw that the wave was going to be steep enough down the line. And so I was able to kind of draw out my bottom turn just a little bit in order to ditch enough speed. And then as I came off my bottom turn, that’s when I shifted my feet into the middle of the board. And without shifting my feet into the middle of the board, I may have not been able to recreate the speed I needed in order to get the board planing and going again.”
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Editor’s Note: Read more about Leah Dawson’s Guide to Alternative Surf Craft here, and you can also access more in-depth analysis of Leah’s barrel-riding technique(s) in the Guide to Alternative Surf Craft with Inspire Courses. The 17-video digital course highlights several of Leah’s favorite boards as well as insights into the techniques and mechanics that can be applied to surfing a variety of boards. Access the course today.
