Hung up on the Ledge

The last two sessions have been really frustrating. Both days featured closeout waves, and both were just, I have to admit, beyond my ability.

The last time I went out, I spent about four hours on the beach first watching closeout after closeout, wipeout after wipeout. All that did was to bring my fear level up. Nevertheless going out in anything would have been better than continuing to sit on the beach doing nothing, but when I finally did go out my fear had gotten the best of me. It's not that the waves were too big; they were not, only about two feet. But they were just dumping and crashing. I spent my time trying not to take off too late, which resulted in my taking off too early and missing the waves.

Probably the best thing I could have done that day was just take off too late on purpose, to see what would have happened and to know I could have survived it.

The only time I got a wave that day, I ended up on the Ledge. (See post of January 31, 2008.) I hate the Ledge.

My only consolation was that A., the woman I was surfing with, couldn't do any better than I had. She and I are pretty much at the same level. Her way of trying to deal with the closeouts, she said, was taking off too late, which didn't work any better than mine, and she got worked more.

And today the waves were bigger than usual, remnants of the big storm that just passed. They were four to five feet. Even that isn't too big for me, but again they were mostly just closing out.

So I went out, and there I was on the Ledge again.

I didn't stay out long after that because I simply did not know what to do to make that not happen.

I asked another guy on the beach. This is a good surfer, an old guy I will simply call the Preacher, because that's what he is.

He didn't seem to understand what I was talking about. How can that be? When I tried to explain, he suggested what a commenter here did: take off at an angle. But I always do that anyway. Or at least I think I do, and if I'm not really doing it how the hell would I know unless someone tells me?

Then he said I had to get up and turn right away. I never try to stand up when I know there's going to be a big drop straight down. I just try to hold on to my board for dear life. I could try it---but I still haven't figured out how to turn on purpose, let alone to do it in the split second I would have before falling off the Ledge. I am years away from being able to turn that fast.

Someone else had some advice for dealing with closeouts: don't paddle. I'm not sure what that means. Maybe it has to do with getting the timing right.

I continue to think the Ledge problem could be avoided by getting my timing right, but fine tuning timing by fractions of a second is not something I'm advanced enough to do. Am I a fraction of a second too late, or too early?

Or is it something else entirely, as someone else suggested here: my weight not being on the right place on the board? Being too far back?

Preacher didn't seem to think that timing is the problem, but like most surfers, Preacher probably doesn't think very much about what he does, he just does it. Nor has any of the surf lessons I've ever had covered anything so advanced.

Well, I guess I just gotta go out there and figure it out by trial and error, but that hasn't worked yet, so why it would now, I don't know.