Learning to Surf #7 - Bali
Digging up the old Learning to Surf series to where I began - on setting goals, bingeing as a tool for learning, the progress of a beginner surfer, and realising your personal vision of perfection.
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Beginner’s Journey
I went to Bali because I wanted to learn to surf. I thought if I took a crash course for a week that I’d make some progress towards having the beginnings of a lifelong skill, and if my previous experiences with boardsports were anything to go by, something much more than a pastime – a true passion that transcends physical activity into more creative and spiritual realms.
A week ought to do it, right? Learning to surf is a part of the experience of surfing, and an inextricable lifelong part of it. Of course, this is true of most physical activities, as well arts and crafts for the truly devoted practitioners – even the pros will tell you they’re always still learning.
The learning curve for surfing, I’ve subsequently found out, is so long that progress along it occurs in imperceptible increments, so slowly that it’s barely possible to distinguish the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of when you’re able to ‘do’ it. I already knew this. It’s not like I could become a master in just a week. My aims were a bit more modest, though still idealistic, and probably the same as anyone’s:
I wanted to be able to stand up on the board on a wave.
Which is pretty much the definition of surfing, isn’t it? Although you learn down the line that 95% of your time is spent not doing that, and so part of the experience is the waiting, the floating, the paddling, the studying, the preparing – all of which, of course, is part of the learning – and you may come to love and appreciate and enjoy all or some of these things, the only reason you’ve dedicated yourself to doing them is so you can stand on the board on a wave.
That is the surfer’s purpose, and so it became my purpose.
I arrived to Bali having booked myself into a hostel which offered several hours of daily lessons, board and gear rental and pretty much all the assistance you could want in achieving your stated aim of learning to surf.
A week ought to do it, right?
A Quick Note On Bingeing New Pursuits
Bingeing is good for you. Throw yourself into things with no safety net. Just dive right in and let yourself be immersed in another world, so that when you climb out again a whole new identity may have stuck to you, to intertwined with you and become you. Binge on new hobbies. Take a week, or a month, or a year to do nothing else. Renounce all your worldly possessions and become obsessed with your newfound passion. Quit your job and your life and move to the beach to do nothing but surf.
Or at least just take a week for a dedicated holiday or trip to learn some new activity – devote an intentional journey to integrating it to become part of you. With a bit of luck, you might even pick up some practical skills and training in the art along the way.
It’s the only way to learn.
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Surfer’s Paradise
I went to Bali because it’s the first place that popped into my head when I thought of surfing in Asia, perhaps the world, though it’s one of those things where the origins of the inspiration and its circumstances are forever lost, and I really wouldn’t know how to recover them.
When I got there, it really was a surfer’s paradise, at least in terms of the international development of that culture by non-native parties (though there was some small evidence that locals also surfed). Surf shops, surf cafes, surf schools and surf rentals were everywhere. Guys zipping by on scooters with often makeshift surfboard racks on the side. Everyone, everywhere, has the ‘look’ – the board shorts and the t-shirts and the hoodies, the brands, the haircuts, the now seemingly-obligatory ironic moustache, the hats, the music. And when it’s done right, you can’t argue with it, to be fair.
My first impression of Bali: no matter where you go, surfing is there (and being done by some very beautiful people).
When I got to the beach I could see why. It seemed to me over the next couple of weeks that no matter where you are in Bali (including on its satellite islands), and no matter who you are, on any given day you can surf somewhere along its coast. There are beaches everywhere, and breaking somewhere along the shore of these beaches there is a wave for every skill level, the consistent tropical weather conditions meaning they just keep on reliably coming, day after day after day.
The weather didn’t hurt either. In Ireland a wetsuit is a necessity, of course. As are boots, gloves and a hood most of the time. I’ve since come to see cold as the natural state of water, and warm water to feel a bit weird, like someone’s pee’d in the pool, but there’s a lot to be said for sitting in a warm salty bath being part of the whole surfing experience, not to mention lounging on the beach eating coconuts, and the general sunshine and summer vibes, compared to hiding from the wind while you’re getting changed and shielding your face with your board to stop yourself getting battered by hailstones. An Australian once compared going to the beach in Ireland in the cold to how we view those pictures of shit pints of Guinness poured in pubs in London – a crime against humanity, morally disturbing and just, well, wrong. When you make it to a surf beach in the tropics you begrudgingly admit that she was right, and that swimming in the cold ocean is bullshit, a lie, a symptom of poor mental health rather than a cure for it.
The sun is king.
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Learning to Surf
So how did I do? My progress was suspiciously linear, actually. Every day felt like a progression from the last, despite one or two days of flatlining – where it feels like you’ll never be able to do the thing again, and will never get better at it, doomed to be a beginner just shy of a level where you’re able to enjoy it. Thankfully I progressed slowly but steadily as the week went on, just enough improvement and just enough reward over the first day or two to make me always hungry for more, and confident I could improve more.
There are setbacks along the way, of course. Weather and wave conditions and off-days and most of all, days where there’s nothing ostensibly wrong, where your enthusiasm is at its peak, and still you just keep getting it wrong and it’s nothing but frustration. These are the days where you feel at your lowest, where you question why you’re even bothering at all. And these are the days where when you push through, you create your greatest rewards.
There really is no better feeling in the world than taking up a new hobby, being able to commit to a full week, or month, or even just a day at it, and seeing your progress improve in real time. That ‘just one more go’ feeling is infectious, and the sort of feeling that you want to be able to bottle and take into everything you do. The gains you get starting out sadly will always flatten out the more you commit to something, and you’ll never make those addictive improvements again, as long as you do it.
The beauty of surfing (and things like it) is it transcends the boundaries of the physical and creative to become something more-than. This is where the spirituality of it comes in, this integration of physical and mental, and creation of a rather dextrously challenging canvas on which you do the same thing over and over again, and yet every iteration is different.
After a week, I couldn’t really think of anything else I wanted to do, and so I booked in for another three days. As I said, I wasn’t much interested in ‘travelling’ at that point in time, and was enjoying surfing too much. Rather than go on an outer physical journey around an exotic land, I became focused on going an inner journey by trying to surf the same waves over and over again, depth over breadth.
It was the best decision I could have made. Having traded in my foam beginner’s board for a harder, shorter one, I made a huge leap in progress after plateauing again. It turned out I needed to up the challenge a little bit. On a smaller board, lighter and with more ease of control, something suddenly clicked where the size was closer to that of a snowboard – I felt more at home on a supposedly more difficult board than I had all week. It felt so much more natural, and so I progressed much further. Catching more waves, longer, bigger, the timing of take-off that bit better, and learning for myself that bit more when to paddle, rather than just relying on the instructors to do most of the thinking for me.
Sometimes the thing you need to progress is to take off the training wheels, as the trade-off of stability and convenience is only holding you back.
I still wasn’t quite satisfied though. I’d caught plenty of waves, though there was always something missing. Always a bit of awkwardness, something not quite right, split second decisions and my natural lack of co-ordination throwing me off. ‘Just one more go’. Back again, try the next one, and the next one. I don’t want to go home but I’m exhausted. What was missing? This is the curse of the surfer – it’s never good enough. Always need to get better. Could anyone ever be happy living like this?
And then I got it.
On my tenth day I achieved perfection. It’s all relative, I guess, but I became the competent intermediate surfer I’d dreamed of being all my life.
I don’t know what it looked like but what remains is how it felt. Amidst a crowded lineup of beginner and intermediates scattered around the break at Kuta, bobbing 100 metres out in the sea, I saw it, lined it up and went for it all by myself. Caught it at the right time, rode it all the way to the shore. I won’t go into the numbers – how high the wave was, how far I rode it, how many seconds I was on the board – because there is no objective number. Everyone saw it but no-one could measure it. The ocean could have been 2 kilometres of 50 metres, or something in between. The wave could have been one foot or 15 feet.
Surfers always exaggerate these things anyway.
I just remember how it felt.
So content was I that the instance even cured me of the curse of ‘just one more go’, calling it a day after lunchtime to chill out on the beach. In retrospect it might have been better to build on my success but I felt like I’d done all I’d come to do.
I was a surfer.
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Epilogue
The next time I found myself in the water with a board was at Carrowniskey, Co. Mayo, Ireland about a year later. It was a lot colder. The waves were powerful, though still surfable for the handful of others out there. I was so excited to finally get a chance to build on my success from the Island of the Gods, a group whose numbers I now counted myself among.Â
 It was a lesson that when you come back to the real world, you get reset to zero. I felt like a complete beginner again – I was. I got pummeled by waves and submerged underwater, my board threatening to break free from my leash anytime I got knocked off. I caught no waves and I may have dropped in on someone as they were catching one of their own.
A humiliation ritual. Â
All that progress, it felt like for nothing.
The subsequent journey is by necessity long and difficult, and I’ve found when you commit to something you often get thrown back to zero when you commence it, just to test your resolve and commitment to the journey. The enthusiasm and mild experience that brought you to begin is mysteriously stripped away, and you begin with nothing. On a long enough timeline, we perceive full weeks and months as nothing more than flashes on the inward eye.
The surfer’s journey is so long – potentially lifelong, and of course not everyone who embarks on the journey attains mastery, or even close to it – that the whole week and a bit in Bali will probably be remembered in years to come as nothing more than the ‘first time I surfed’; rather than a series of days of steady progression leading to a neat resolution and certification at the end of a year or two’s course, it was just a day, a moment, a single memory.Â
An instance of beginner’s luck that lured me into the sport with an early victory, though my progress by the end of the week not reflective of where was really at. The call to adventure answered and perhaps some assistance from the so-called ‘Magic Hand’ of the surf instructors, which would give a gentle push to propel us into waves while we still learned to paddle into the moment of take-off. Perhaps the week was a full cycle of the Hero’s Journey, and I began another one when I came home. Maybe the colder conditions in Ireland don’t suit me. Maybe it’s the lack of consecutive practice, or the ‘Magic Hand’ of the instructors guiding me to catch waves. So much of surfing is beyond the practical physical actions required to stand on a board floating in water. There are no shortcuts. A crash course can help you in increments but this was the honeymoon was over, and this was the reality of life now: You need to pay your dues, and spend your time in the water.
It’s the only way to really learn.
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