New surf instructor?

No luck getting in touch with Betty---she has gone to Indonesia for a couple of weeks on a surf trip! There's a new surf instructor in town, a woman, and I'm trying to set up a lesson with her. I've gotta have some kind of hope! C. has totally flaked out on helping me learn to surf. Whether he ever meant that he would help or that was just a pickup line is debatable, but he's lost interest in me in or out of the water. What I'm most pissed about is that he made that promise and didn't keep it. That's just a shitty thing to do to anyone.

Nevertheless life must go on. I spent some time speaking with M., the new instructor, on the beach. I described my problems and tried to summarize, briefly, the various things I've tried over the years. Her eyes sort of glazed over by the time I got to "and I flushed three thousand dollars down the toilet at surf camp".

Here's what she told me:

What Ben Sargent* told me is totally wrong. Ben taught me to get up by turning my front foot and dragging it across the board, then putting weight on it to stand up. M. says you never drag your feet or legs on the board.

*Yes, I know, I don't name names here, but this is another exception: so that if anyone by that name ever tries to sell you a surf lesson you know to run the other way.

M. says you have to jump up. Both feet are supposed to come off the board and back down again. I asked her how you do this and she says you use your arms. But she also says people without really strong arms, like women and kids, can surf, which is confusing. I explained that I can only lift about 60 pounds despite my best efforts at the gym.

M. says you never use your toes to push up, which is the opposite of what I was taught at three-thousand-dollar camp. "That's silly---you can't do that on a shortboard, and the popup is the same no matter what board you use." I explained that the surf camp instructors put everyone on longboards and made the very valid assumption that these poufy surf-tourist women would never get in the water again after camp, let alone pursue shortboarding.

I attempted, right there on the beach, to do the little jump rather than dragging my feet, and I could do it; but when I do that I land on the balls of my feet and can balance there only precariously and for a second. I cannot imagine landing in that position and being able to balance on a moving board. She said it's OK to land on your toes like that as long as you then flatten out your feet as you stand up. I wouldn't last long enough to stand up.

M. says never, never get up by going to two kness, because you're doomed if you do that. I said, you see these people who take off with their feet in the air, how the hell do they get up without using their knees?

She didn't have an answer. I asked her if she could demonstrate a popup, on the beach, starting from feet in the air position. She said no. "It's hard." Her explanation was that something about being in the water on a board makes it easier. ?????

Does anyone out there start your popup with your feet in the air? Do you have some kind of super powers, or how do you do it?

M. says it's OK, however, to get up by going to one knee. I asked her which knee it would be for a goofy foot and she said left. That's my bad knee. It still hurts from falling on it three weeks ago. No way in hell I can do that.

"There's no one right way to do a popup," she said. I don't have to find the one right way, I just have to find some way, any way, that works for me.

I hope I can track her down for a lesson. She may not want to do it now that she knows the whole story of how hopeless I am.

In the end she said the one thing I would have paid considerable money not to hear, which made me as depressed as when I realized C. was not going to be any help.

"Just keep going out."

That's like saying, "Just keep doing the same thing that hasn't worked for the past three years." There has to be more than that. There just has to. "Just keep going out?" For how many more years?