Sometimes it takes getting out of your comfort zone to know. Photo: Matthew Hume//Unsplash
No surfer forgets their first wave. The sensation of gliding on water, feeling the power of the ocean under your feet. It’s magical, exhilarating, and flat-out fun. But when I started surfing no one told me how hard it eventually would become to replicate that unblemished bliss. Surfing isn’t always that much fun, and expecting it to be so set me up for failure.
I remember my first wave like yesterday. It was an ankle-high roller at Cowells in Santa Cruz on a cloudless spring day. Three friends and I had to wait for the dead low tide to find a wave that was barely big enough to hold me up on a borrowed nine-footer. The feeling of harnessing the energy of the ocean was unlike anything I had felt before. I was hooked. It didn’t take long for me to be the one banging on my friend’s window at the crack of dawn to wake him up for another session. Each surfing milestone would provide another off-the-scale spike of dopamine – my first wave on a shortboard, my first surf trip, my first barrel.
But it didn’t last.
I’ve become a modestly proficient surfer over the years, however, that level of fun became increasingly more elusive. I think other surfers can relate to this, too. It required bigger waves, better waves, and less crowds – elements that are relatively rare in California. Whether it was frustratingly packed So-Cal lineups, freezing pre-work dawn patrols that did not pay off, or angry old men unleashing their fury on those around them in the water, too often I would come out of the water wondering if I even had fun.
Of course, not all my sessions were this dismal. But I couldn’t help but notice as I added more years of surfing under my belt, it became harder to recapture that initial joy that once was so easy to obtain. I would force myself to go surfing, but at times I felt like I was just going through the motions. I’d often ponder how much fun I was supposed to have while surfing anyway.
These were complicated thoughts to have when surfing had dictated the direction of my life for so long and had ingrained itself as a part of my self-identity. But in 2021 I made a radical life change that lent itself to rediscovering surfing’s joy. I quit my job and bought a one-way ticket to Brazil. That one-way ticket blossomed into 22 months on the road chasing waves in 12 countries across South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
During the trip, that bliss came easier, and more frequently. I was surfing waves I had only dreamed of and had largely removed the stress and schedule of an office job from my shoulders. I still dream about my uncrowded sunset surfs in the Mentawais, dreamy Sri Lankan A-frames, powerful point breaks in South Africa, and perhaps the best back-hand tube of my life (which isn’t saying much) in a remote corner of Madagascar.
And while I discovered that consistently surfing good waves certainly was an ingredient to rediscovering the stoke, it wasn’t everything. I also learned that entering a session with the right mindset was just as important. After a month-long surf hiatus in the mountains of Colombia, I returned to the ocean on the country’s Caribbean shores yearning for waves. The time away from the sea had recalibrated my surfing standards and I had the time of my life longboarding knee-high waves that endlessly rolled around a jetty.
When I was questioning my dedication to surfing in California, I never would have guessed that a cure to my surfing doldrums lay in the meager swells of the Colombian Caribbean. I found the sensation in places I least expected again over a year later when I shared laughably weak Mediterranean waves in Lebanon with a handful of friendly locals. And it returned while watching Madagascan children having a blast in the shorebreak on their home-shaped plywood surfboards.
These experiences made me realize it was possible to enjoy surfing whether the waves were pumping or not. I just had to approach it with the proper mindset: not holding my sessions to unrealistic standards and just enjoying surfing for what it is, in whatever form.
As that trip came to an end, I returned to Santa Cruz, the place where it all started, where I grew up and first discovered surfing’s delight. My first day back I pulled up to Pleasure Point to find some small, but serviceable waist-high waves rolling through a typically crowded lineup. In the past I may have paddled out only to leave with that same sense of regret and frustration, but this time I was pleasantly surprised at how I was able to find peace in the chaos.
While I exceeded my expectations of how many waves I could snag from the crowd, it didn’t matter really. My surfing (and non-surfing) experiences abroad had molded my perspective. I was finally just enjoying surfing, not setting unrealistic expectations of what it takes to have fun. I was more conscious of the mindset I brought into the session.
That doesn’t necessarily mean I feel as high as when I rode my first-ever wave at Cowells 17 years ago, or when I was spat out of a tube in Mozambique, but that’s okay. And I know it’s easy to ride on the residual high of the years-long adventure I just returned from. Let’s see if I’m singing the same tune after another couple months scrapping for waves amongst the masses in California.
But undoubtedly, the trip taught me to appreciate surfing for what it is. Even after nearly two decades, that euphoric feeling is still there, lurking beneath the surface. And every now and then a particular wave or session will release it, reminding me why I surf in the first place. After all, it’s that same special feeling that originally hooked me on surfing that keeps me coming back. Surfing is not always the time of my life, but I know that somewhere just around the corner, it will be. And once I obtain that high, the pursuit continues again.
