Mike Jones has been surfing since he was only six years old. He was lucky enough to surf the pro tour for a few years before starting his own surf shop and clothing brand, As-hi-as-I-aM International. The brand now has shops in Tahiti, Hawaii, California, Florida, and Washington. Through his love of surfing, Mike has been able to travel all over the world.
MIKE JONES: Hi, I'm Mike Jones and today we're going to talk about how to paddle on your surfboard. Okay, well here I got my board here. Paddling is one of the first things you're going to realize that it's a lot harder to do than it looks. One thing that's going to be important is that you have the right-sized board. If your board's too small for you, you're not going to be able to paddle it right. So most people start out with what they call a fun shape. For me, I ride something in the 6-4, 6 foot 4 range, to 6-6 range, for everyday surfing. First thing with paddling is finding your center of gravity on the board, on your stomach. If--there's a couple of things that I see when beginners are coming out and paddling into the lineup. Sometimes they might be too far back on the board. And if you're too far back on the board, you're going to be paddling and your nose is going to be out of the water like this. If you're too far up in front of the board, you're going to have a tendency to what we call pearl diver, have the nose go down under the water. Ideally, you want the board to be planing through the water, on a flat surface, with the nose out of the water and the about the bottom rocker of the curvature, that's the only part that's out of the water. So you want to, basically, what you want to do is position your body back and forth on the board, finding your equilibrium, and also your side to side can also get a little squirrely if you don't have a wide enough board. Now that you've got your place on the board, you feel comfortable; the strokes are what become important, okay? You don't want to be paddling off to the side like this, you know, just kind of making little swirls off to the side here. You want to paddle deep strokes, digging down into the water actually, and cupping your hands, and feeling the glide each time. Boom, next arm over, you want to just feel the momentum, start to pick up and keep that momentum. You don't want to paddle following behind somebody too close in the surf because if they decide to ditch their board, you want to be clear of the area there. You don't want to be getting hit by someone else's board.
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