How Surfing Works

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Brought to you by Toyota.  Let’s go places.  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from How Stuff Works.com.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.  I’m Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and it’s Stuff  You Should Know.  Just the same as it always was, huh?

I guess so.

How are you doing?

I’m good.  I like your hat.  I’m ready to Hang 10.

Are you?  That seems like a probably a very difficult thing to do but not that great.  Not that cool.

Oh, it’s super difficult.

I can imagine.

I think it’s super cool, too.  It’s old school.

Oh, you remember Spuds McKenzie had that Hang 20 or Hang – whatever poster?

No.

Do you remember Spuds McKenzie?

Oh, yeah.

Well, that dog could surf.

Could he really?

According to the posters that I’ve seen he could.

People still call those dogs Spuds McKenzie’s too after all these years.

Yeah, what kind of terrier is it?  Some sort of pit bull terrier but it’s like a Stratford shyer I think?

I have no idea. It is a terrier though for sure.

Yeah.  because they go after rats.

Yeah.

And mailmen.  So, Chuck –

Yes.

– can you guess when the first recorded description of someone surfing was?  What are you going to guess, the ‘50s, ‘60s?

Well, I know what it is so –

Oh, well, all right, I’m going to tell you again.  It was 1779 in fact.  Did you know that?

I did.

So that was the one you were going to guess?

Uh huh.  That’s the one I said to you.

Everyone is a winner.  So – and as you know, I guess, by a named Lieutenant James King who at the time of the writing had just very recently become the captain of the HMS Discovery because his captain, Captain James Cook, a very famous explorer, had just been killed by the Hawaiians because he had taken their chief captive in order to force them to return a boat.

Because he surfed in their waters and localism was rough.

Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah.

I guess so.  And apparently the tradition among Hawaiians’, as far as localism goes, it was pretty serious and always has been.  It’s always been that way.  It’s very stratified out here.

Yeah.

But anyway, James King, he first described this sight of people riding these long wooden boards catching a wave and riding it on in and it kind of established or set the precedent for Hawaii as the originator of surging, but what’s pretty cool is it’s one of those instances where Europeans came in, eons after something had started, and actually got it right because Hawaii was, in almost all likelihood, the place where surfing was born.  Like it had started in Polynesia.  They had kind of belly boards I think they called them but they didn’t really ever stand up.  It was the Hawaiians’ who first stood up.

Oh really.

So Hawaii is the cradle of surfing.

Of modern surfing.

And man did they ever do it.

Yes, they sure did and do to this day.

Yeah, well, they’re carrying on a very long tradition.

They are.

Yeah, like we were saying, you mentioned localism and I said it was stratified out there, there are actually places in Hawaii where if you weren’t a member of the ruling class, you didn’t surf there and if you did, you got into huge trouble.

Oh, sure.

So like the – like King Kamehameha was a chief, a Hawaiian chief, a very famous one, that’s the club that Magnum hangs out is the King Kamehameha Club and he was noted for being a really great surfer.  Did you know that?

I did not know that.  Never heard of the guy actually.

King Kamehameha.

No.

That’s pretty much the only Hawaiian chief I’d ever heard of, probably from watching Magnum.

Really.

Yeah, but he was a great surfer and eventually surfing became known as the sport of kings because of that.  Because the chiefs surfed and they were pretty good at it and their social status was exemplified by the length of their board which was pretty –

So the longer the board the higher status you had as a –

Exactly.

– a commoner or a king?

Yeah.

Huh.

And you could be a very good surfer and not be part of the ruling class but you were still pretty well revered and actually you were called a kahuna.

Nice.

You were a surfing expert.

So what’s a big kahuna?

Yes, that was the fat surfing expert.

Oh, okay.  Which a lot of those guys are.

Yeah.

It’s like one part of the world where you can be a big ole fat guy and lay around on the beach and you’re, like, king daddy.

And have face tattoos.

Oh, do they have those, too?

Well, the – Maori do and I think they surf.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

I thought we were talking Polynesia.

That’s Polynesian.

Oh, okay.

I think.  Oh, man, I hope so.  So let’s talk some more surfing history.

Okay.  They were surfing big time in the late 1700s, standing up, pushing up, doing all the modern moves – well, not all the modern moves because they were pretty much long boards back then.

Yeah, long, long, long boards.

But, you know, it was a huge part of society, still is, but they likened in this one article to like baseball was in the U.S., how it was in Polynesia.  And even though it’s all just a guess how it evolved, we have no idea really because Polynesians – there’s really no certainty about their movement around the earth thousands of years ago.  So we’re all just sort of guessing at this point but Mark Twain surfed.

Yeah, he did.

He didn’t have a very easy time with it.

He tried it at least, right?

Yeah, in 187 – I’m sorry, 1866.  He published in his book, Roughing It, I tried surf bathing once.  Everything was bathing back then.  Sun bathing, and then I think just bathing was when you started going into the ocean, even though you weren’t washing your butt or maybe you were.

Right, because no one really bathed back then.

Sure they did.  I tried surf bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it.  I got the board placed right and at the right moment, too, but missed the connection myself.  The board struck the shore in ¾ of a second without any cargo.  I guess he was the cargo.  And I struck the bottom about the same time with a couple of barrels of water in me.  So Mark Twain’s first experience was probably like many people’s first experience with surfing, mine included.

Yeah, and so Twain visits Hawaii at a time where there are a lot of Americans hanging out there and they were growing a lot of pineapples and since Hawaii wasn’t a state, there were a lot of tariffs against those pineapples and a couple of the guys, two cousins, with the last name of Dole, decided to overthrow the Hawaiian chiefdom so that they could get the U.S. to annex Hawaii and get these tariffs lifted.

And as a result of this, and missionaries coming and cooks people and all that, Hawaiians had dwindled from about 800,000 by the time Cook showed up, to like 40,000 and surfing kind of went with it.  The interest dwindled but there were some people still surfing.  And just enough so that there was a resurgence.  When Mark Twain was doing it, he was probably like the first – the second – I guess the second white guy ever to write about it. The third white guy, Jack London, was the one who brought surfing into popular culture.

Really?

Yeah, he visited Hawaii in 1907 and he hung out and one of the ways that he helped spread surfing was just by writing about a guy named George Freeth.

Yeah, he is – he basically invented modern surfing.

Yeah.

And was heck of a life guard, as were some of the – a lot of the early surfers it seems like.  They were great swimmer, great lifeguards, great surfers.  Duke Kahanamoku, he was a five time Olympic swimming medalist.

Yeah, and he traveled Europe and everything and gave swimming exhibitions.

And maybe the first guy to play beach volleyball, too.

Is that right?

Mm hm.

He has a great restaurant in Waikiki.

And supposedly one of them invented the little backboard, like, the rescue board.

Oh, yeah.

Even though that’s debated but some people – I think it was Freeth or – was it Freeth, yeah, may have invented that.  But he was the first dude to like stand up, do good moves, I think his boards were shorter and this was turn of the century stuff.

Right, like, 1907, 1912 when those guys were surfing and they were surfing on long wooden boards and it – I mean, like, really long, like, 10 feet, 16 feet.  Imagine trying to maneuver one of those.

Well, you don’t really.

But they were the first ones who said, hey, we can kind of change these boards and make them maneuverable so they were the first ones to figuratively and I guess literally, shape modern surfboards.

Oh, did they create the short board?

They started to.  They started to make changes to it so that it wasn’t just a flat plank of wood any longer.

Nice.  So and then the 20th Century is when the short board came along in earnest and they added things like – they made them lighter, of course, which helps, easier to manage, new shapes, helped with stability and then they started messing with the fins, too, which we can get to in a minute. But the fins make a big difference. There’s a lot of stuff that the fins affect.

Well, like what?

I guess we can go ahead and go there.  They impact stability, feel, drive, maneuverability, and you can have all kinds of things from like a single fin up to five, even though I get the impression that five fins is a little obnoxious.

Yeah, kind of like training wheelsy.

Well, I don’t know.  I think two or three fins is what you’re looking for.  Well, it depends on what you’re trying to do. The angle of the fin is called the toe and that’s the angle in relation to the center of the board so it can be cocked, you know, a little diagonally or just straight on.

Oh, okay.

If it – it makes the board more responsive the closer the front of the fin is to the center of the board. So the more – the closer – the more it’s angled, the more responsive it’s going to be and then you have the cant, that is the angle in relation to the bottom of the bottom. So if you have no cant, it’s just straight up and down. It’s not angled at all. It’s going to be super fast.  If it’s angled, it’s going to be more responsive.

So it all changes depending on how many fins and how deep they are, how big they are, what the angle is on how you’re going to drive this thing basically. It can be foiled on both sides or have no foil; more foil gives you more lift. It can have a rake, which is how far back the fin curves so if it’s like a super shark fin it’s going to be different than if it’s a little more straight.  Small rack is faster but again, not as maneuverable.  Flex, stiffness, they can be really super stiff or have more flex to them. Stiffness is stiff.

It’s not as forgiving but I think if you’re – like a better surfer, you’re going to want it more stiff.  And then the base link, the smaller the base of the fin, the tighter the turns, the height and the depth, if it’s taller it’s more stable but it’s not going to be as maneuverable. So some of them are removable now, some of them are set in but they make them now where you can actually remove the fins which is great for travelling and storage and I guess if you just want to mix things up a little bit. But there’s a lot of work that goes into –

That’s just the fins alone.

That’s just the fins on the bottom because I always wondered until I looked into this, like, why does that one just have one fin, why does that have three? Why are those fins huge and why are those angled and it all matters. It all makes a difference. It really just depends on what kind of – it’s like when you’re buying a car. Depends what you’re looking for.

We have the edition of fins, you can thank Duke and George for that at the very beginning but they kind of popularized surfing on the west coast and the west coast took over and then about the early 60s, thanks to things like Gidget and the Beach Boys, surfing just exploded.

And now we have just – I guess the change from surfboards in 1912 to 2012, in that 100 years, it’s just incredible and exponential and it hadn’t changed much for the thousand or so years leading up to 1912 so everything just kind of took off in the 20th Century. And now you can basically categorize the kind of board that you’re holding or surfing on as either a short board or a long board, right?

Well, yeah, and then there’s dozens of other boards within those categories but yeah, those are the two big categories.

So if you’re pretty good at surfing, you’re probably going to use a long board, right.

It just depends on what you’re looking to do.

Okay. But if you are a novice, a long board is not the good one to start out on.

Well, I mean, it’s easier to stand up on because it’s large and more stable but you’re just going to – you can’t maneuver it and cut back and stuff unless your super good and it’s – I guess akin to either driving in the big Cadillac down the highway or being in your little sports car.

Yes.  Okay.  Which you could learn to drive on either one of those.

Sure, you can learn on a long board.  It depends on what you’re after. I would be a long board guy now.

Would you?

In my earlier days, I tried surfing and it was like I tried the short board and tried to do the –

Because you were a hot shot.

Well, it was just – that was the thing but now I would get up on the long board and just stand there, like, walk up and down, hang 10, do all that good stuff.

Have you ever seen one of those Frankie and Annette beach movies where they’re surfing and they’re just – they are just literally standing there with their arms out like moving side by side and in the back it’s just a green screen behind them.

Yeah, and long boards you can get a couple of people on them and – two or three people if you’re good.

Yeah, and you just stand there and waive your arms side to side apparently from what I’ve seen.  Okay. So you’ve got long boards, you’ve got short boards, you’ve got the fins, the sides of the surfboard, the rails impact how the thing moves.

Sure.

Whether or not it’s a curved – the bottom, the board, the bottom of the board, the rocker, if it’s curved or not and how much its curved I imagine makes the board a lot more maneuverable, the more convex it is, right?

Yeah.

And then you’ve got long boards which are about nine feet long up to 12 feet long which is just crazy to me, like, you could fit three people on there pretty comfortably.

Yeah, I’ve seen, like, a lot of people on a long board, like, when they do the tricks and stuff.

Yeah.

I can’t name a number of people but I feel like I’ve seen at least four or five people get up on a long board.

Yep.  And then you’ve got fun boards, right?  These sound like the most fun.

What’s a fun board?

It’s kind of like in between a long board and a short board and it’s fun. It’s best for tricks. I think if you want to really kind of shred or whatever and also I should probably say I have no idea what I’m talking about here because I’ve never surfed.

I think people have understood that by now.

But a short board is obviously better for that because you can – like I said, you can shred the wave, right?

Yeah.

But – and the long board is harder to maneuver unless you’re really, really good at it. But a fun board just kind of falls in between those too like you can kind of rest and relax and just stand there if you want but you can also maneuver.

Right.

That’s my impression of the fun board.

I’ll have to look into it.  I had never heard of the fun board.

Oh, you hadn’t? I had.

Really?

Yeah, I really genuinely have.

I believe you.

One thing I did know what I was talking about.

So back in the day they were all made of wood. Now you can still get wooden surfboards, in fact, I think a lot of the purists can still get those sweet, handmade wooden surfboards but mostly these days they’re going to be what’s called pop outs, mass manufactured, they pop out of a factory mold, that’s where they get the name and they’re either polystyrene or polyurethane covered in fiberglass and resin and – but you can still hand make those, too, obviously. You can get kits or you can pay thousands of dollars for some dude in California or Hawaii to hand shape your own sweet little board.

Yeah, Tracy said that surfboards cost between a $150 and $500.

I think that’s when you’re shopping on Amazon.com.

Yeah. I found some that were pretty awesome for less than a $1,000, I mean, like the vast majority are less than a $1,000 and I was kind of surprised because I thought she was way off but she wasn’t off by that much.

No, and I think you can spend over a $1,000 like anything, if you get like the sweet dude that hand makes them and he’s known for it, then you’re going to pay a pretty penny.

Right, but I mean, like, I even came across one that was Proctors Surfboards and they do custom boards and even those were less than a $1,000.

Yeah.

It was pretty neat. It’s nice because it makes it an egalitarian sport.

You think so?

A little.

I’d say they’re still a little pricy.

It definitely is but I’m saying at least it’s not like the – the gap between the poor man’s surfboard and the rich man’s surfboard is not 10, 20, $30,000, it’s a $1,000, $1,500, you know.

Yeah, I guess so.

That’s what I mean. You can easily be priced out of it but you could still get a decent surfboard for what, a couple hundred bucks.

Yeah, I had – I bought a surfboard for $50 that I just kept it for in college because I thought it was cool to have in the corner of my living room.

Right.

And I took it to the beach a couple of times and it sucked.

Did your bedroom look like a Pottery Barn teen catalog scene?

I’ve never seen that.

They frequently have surfboards like stood up in the corner and stuff.

No. It was just Chuck’s silliness in the day.

So did you say that stuff made of polyurethane?

Yeah.

An it’s covered in a resin?

I did.

And fiber glassed?

Which makes it light, it makes it buoyant but I can also that if you get hit by one of these things, it hurts bad.

Yeah, they’re lightweight but it’s – you whack somebody in the head with it or if you get stabbed with it, you know, they’re sharp on the front and sometimes on the back.

Yeah, I would never buy a sharp surfboard. I’d just be afraid of it.

What would you do?

Get one that’s more rounded.

You’d get a boogie board. I’ll just get an inner tube. Okay. So you’ve got your surfboard.

Yep.

Another really important thing that you have to have, you have to have – all this other stuff aside from the leash is kind of superfluous, it’s nice, it’s an add-on; you have to have wax because polyurethane, resin bound surface tends to be slick especially when you’re standing on in the water. And you can use wax to basically create a traction surface for your feet.

Yeah, it helps for sure. And they’re also not like completely slick on top, like, where you’ll stand, they’ll have – I don’t know – it’s not sand paper or maybe it is sand paper, okay –

Okay.  I was wondering.

– like blast into it to help out a little bit. But not always. Again, surfers are very particular about what they like and what they don’t like and there’s all sorts of choices.

And is there Dr. Zog’s sex wax like the wax or is that just the wax that guys like me have heard of?

I’m sure that’s the stuff that we wore as teenagers, like, that’s like saying was – who’s the guy that suntan lotion guy?

Panama Jack?

Yeah, it’s like saying was Panama Jack the lotion of choice?  I think it’s sort of like that.

But Panama Jack was the lotion of choice.

Was it really?  He was the t-shirt of choice, for sure.

Yeah. Rolled up sleeves.

Oh, yeah. Board shorts, Tracey Wilson wrote this, Tracey points out, board shorts are studier versions of swim trunks. I didn’t know that. I guess they’re beefed up in certain areas.

Well, they have a tie so it’s not just like a –

Elastic.

Yeah.

Is that the difference?

It’s got a strong tie. They usually don’t have elastic. And they are sturdy. I just think they don’t come off as easy. I think they’re designed not to.

Gotcha. Because that would be embarrassing.

Sure.  Rash vest.  Those are just like the little short sleeve Oakley shirt that you wear that keeps your – and she says it helps prevent chaffing with impact with the water. It may be true but it – if you’ve ever been on a surfboard, your chest, it gets a little chaffed as well from the sand and stuff like that. So that protects you there. And then of course wet suits when you’re cold or if you’re in the pacific ocean, which, you know, year round they’re wearing wet suits up there.

Yeah, I guess the wet suit is not superfluous, I mean, depending on where you’re surfing, you have to wear a wet suit.

Yeah, and you’re either a regular surfer or you’re a goofy foot which means which foot do you put forward? If you put your left foot forward and you’re right foot back, that’s just standard and then if you turn around and put your left foot back, you’re known as a goofy foot.

The same with skateboarding, too.

Yeah, and I don’t know if – well, surfing lead to skateboarding.

Some say. I think it directly lead to skateboarding. And I don’t know if that’s s slag to call someone a goofy foot or to be a goofy foot or not.

I think it probably was originally but so many people skate or surf goofy foot now it’s just like a term.

It had to be a slag because or they would’ve called it like cool foot or something if it was super cool to do it that way.

Right, or if a really popular guy named Tom had done it, they’d be like well, it’s Tom footed.

The Tom foot.

But wherever you put your foot in the rear, that’s the one you want to have the leash attached to and that is not superfluous either. You want to have your board attached to your ankle because if you fly off, you don’t want to have to go swimming too far to get it.

Sure, and it also can – if it’s attached to your foot and you’re having trouble, you can grab hold of your surfboard and help save yourself perhaps.

Yeah.

So how do you learn to surf, Josh?

It’s – I think one of those things that it’s easy to learn how but very, very difficult to master and it takes tons of practice and I also want to give a shout out to too – we got a lot of that history from a site from an article written by a guy named Ben Markus and the article is called From Polynesia with Love.  Good stuff.

It is good stuff.

And then the surfinghandbook.com has this whole section called Beginning Surfing Tips and they have everything you need to know. They’re so friendly and one of the things that they just kind of put out is this mantra just like go into this whole thing knowing that you’re not going to be good right away, that you’re going to fail and it’s – just try not to get frustrated and certainly if you start to get so frustrated that you don’t want to surf anymore, they say take a break, like, it’s supposed to be fun. It’s surfing.

Sure.

Don’t get so uptight and basically don’t come in like you’re going to be a champ right away. It takes tons of practice and a lot of the practice starts on land, like, practicing the pop up.

Yeah, I had the opposite experience that you described which was easy to do, hard to master. I had a really tough time doing it at all.

Oh, really.

Yeah, I did and everyone in my little group that had never done it, like, none of us could stand up on that first day at all.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, like, if you – just looking at it on paper and thinking about what you have to do, there’s not that much to it but being able to do it, mastering it, too.

Yeah, it was tough for me.

I can imagine, and it will be for me, too, eventually.

You going to try it?

Sure I am.  So basically when I say it’s kind of easy, there’s just a few steps. Basically you want to swim out, paddle out on your stomach to the breakers, right?

Yep.

And this is where the waves are starting to turn into white caps, they’re breaking. And when you get to this line, where is it that all the surfers hang out? What’s it called?  Oh, the line up. That’s where all the surfers are just hanging out waiting for the wave, right?

Yeah, talking philosophy and music and how to beat up people that shouldn’t be there.

Right, you want to go in a curve because you don’t want to get beat up and you want to avoid the waves and just basically it’ll make it easier to paddle out there and it’s easier to not get beat up from getting in another surfers way, right?

True.

So when you get out to the lineup and you’re starting to catch a wave you want to be facing the shore and as a wave starts to swell, as the swell comes in and it starts to break, you want to be right on top of or right in front of it, right?

Yeah.

And you’re paddling really fast.

Trying to catch the wave as they say.

Yes, I think that’s even in bold.

It is, catching the wave.

And right as the – right before the waves starts to break or right as it starts to break like maybe to your right or to your left, you do what’s called the pop up, right?

Yeah.

You do like a pushup and then you pop your feet underneath you and now you’re standing and you can apparently –

Hopefully.

Yeah, well, that’s the process, and you can apparently get onto your knees and then onto your feet and it can work but apparently you don’t want to learn to do that because it’s a really bad habit and it’s going to keep you from really surfing well so what you want to do is pushup with your hands and then put your feet underneath and stand up in kind of a crouching position. And now you’re surfing.

A sideways crouching position.

And then that’s it.

That’s all there is to it.

Yeah.

Yeah, my favorite part – when I tried it back in college and stuff was when you’re sitting out there with the other dudes and there is no surfing involved when you’re just sitting there feeling cool, bobbing up and down with the surfing guys.

I used to do – skateboard like that a lot.

Yeah, a lot of standing around and talking.

Just sitting down on the skateboard. It was called dimple butt because of the grip tape eventually would just kind of form a little pattern in your butt.

You would actually ride the skateboard sitting down?

No, you’re just sitting there talking.

Oh, okay. Sitting there talking.

Yeah.

Talking shop with the other crashers. So when you’re going out, you mention that you want to go out in a curve and not go at this thing straight on, if you’ve never done this and you don’t have anyone teaching you how, it can be very frustrating because you will paddle out and the wave will bring you back into shore over and over and over and then eventually you’re just going to go to the beach bar with your surfboard looking cool. But what you want to do is called the duck dive and that is as the wave approaches, before it’s cresting and falling on you, you just want to push down on the board and go through the wave and come out on the other side and if you do this right a couple of times, then you’ll be behind where the waves are breaking and you’ll be all good to go.

Because you’re maneuvering yourself out of the way of most of the force of the wave.

Yeah, and it’s – the duck dive – I think they call it – that you actually roll upside down and what’s called a turtle roll with a long board, but I bet you can duck dive with a long board, maybe not.

I don’t know.

I wonder about that.

But yeah, with the turtle roll, you roll underneath the board and then pull the nose down, right?

Yeah.

That’s the turtle roll.

Yes.

Duck dive sounds easier. Turtle roll sounds more fun.

I’ve never been on a long board. I should try that.

So let’s talk about waves, man. This is – that’s funny because I’m finally like, phew, we’re finally at a point where I know what I’m talking about.

Yeah, the physics of waves.

Yeah, so you can’t surf without waves and if you really want to surf, you have to understand what you’re dealing with, like, what you’re riding, you know. If you’re going to shred a half pipe, you better understand the physics of wood.

Right, so if you’re going to hit the Bonsai Pipeline – and by the way, we were talking about duck diving and all that, for these huge mavericks, like, near San Francisco, at Princeton by the Sea, the Bonsai Pipeline, most of these duds and ladies are being towed like a jet ski because they’re just too big. You can’t be like see that 50 foot wave, I’m just going to duck dive. You will be duck confit if that happens. So we’re just going to cover what your average west coast surfing waves.

Okay. So if you’re out to sea and some wind suddenly whips up, you’re probably going to see some white caps, right? Which is basically like the froth. Just the water being batted around by the wind but there’s also going to be little crests that form, right, and these crests give the wind a little more surface area to work with and all of a sudden you have what is called a peak. And this peak starts to travel away from the direction of the wind. Now, we’re not talking about just a nice little breeze or something. We’re talking about hurricanes typically to form a good size wave but any wing could conceivably create a wave, right?

Yes.

So when this peak starts to travel away from the wind, it actually expends a little bit of its energy and it goes from this kind of choppy wave to this nice rounded thing called the swell. It doesn’t look like there’s much to it. The reason it doesn’t look like there’s much to it is because it’s actually really deep at that point, right. So you get a bunch of these swells lined up. As they get closer and closer to the shore and they start to make contact with land at the bottom, the ones in front start and sometimes they combine into large swells. And as these –

Yeah, they get together, essentially, going in the same direction and say hey, let’s make a big wave.

Right and it’s called constructive interference as far as wave physics go, right?

Yeah.

What’s cool is if you look at a wave from the side, it looks like just – what’s called a transverse wave, like, something you’re looking at an EEG or something. It’s the wave length, the trough and the crest are up and down but they’re moving from left to right or whatever.

Left to right.

Yeah. But really what a wave is doing is actually an orbital wave where all of this motion is actually making a circle as it moves along.

These are the molecules actually.

Yeah, but you can make an animation where you could trace the movement of the waves and it’d be just this kind of big circle that goes from the back of the wave to the crest into the trough and then back down again, right?

Right.

So that’s a wave and as it gets closer to the shore, it starts to slow down and when it hits land, the force of land or the immovability of land and the force of the wave combined to push the wave upward above the water’s surface and then the front of the wave starts to slow before the back of the wave which means you have a wave breaking because the back crashes over the front. And if you have a really steep bit of land, you’re going to have a really steep crash that’s going to form a barrel or a hollow wave.

Yeah, it’s what happens when water meets land. So if you’ve ever seen a wave a 100 feet out in the ocean, it means that there is some sort of shallow reef right there making that happen.

Yeah, because a wave is about 1.6 times its depth, the height of a wave is.

Is that right?

It’s depth is 1.6 times it height. But yeah, if you’re riding a six foot wave which has a lot of power to it, that’s still only – what – less than 10 feet of water that you’re dealing with out there.

That’s a lot of water.

Yeah, it is but that’s still pretty shallow and you can hit the bottom when you’re surfing I think is the point.

Yeah, absolutely. And the shape of the land under the ocean makes a big difference in what kind of waves you’re going to get obviously so that’s why the really good surfing spots in the world are super limited. You can’t man make this stuff. They’ve tried.

In Dubai.

Yeah. But come on, that’s lame. It’s all mother nature, dude, so the best surf spots in the world are few and far between, especially if you’re looking for the big giant daddies. There’s only a few spots on earth that you can encounter those.

Right.

So wind obviously  plays a big difference, not just in the formation of the wave but in how it blows on shore or off shore. What you’re looking for ideally is a gentle off shore wind blowing toward the wave. If you’re blowing – if’ it’s on shore wind coming from the ocean toward the beach, it can be a little rougher to deal with as a surfer.

Yeah.

That’s when the surfers hear that on the radio, they get up early and go out there at daybreak.

Is that the best time to surf, daybreak?

Well, I mean, there’s all different times but – or maybe that has something to do too with –

Tide?

– work – well, no, people and what time they go to work.

Oh, yeah.

But I just see people all the time on the PCH all the time, like, super early morning and then in the evenings.

That’s pretty cool.

Yeah, but maybe it has something to do with the best waves, too, because surfers, they blow off work if the best waves are at noon, bra, that’s when I’m going.

Right. I’ve seen Summer School and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I’m familiar with surfing. So we’re talking about –

I don’t think either one of those actually had any surfing, did they?

Sure they did.

Really?

Sure.

They talked, really?

Summer School definitely had shots, like, establishing shots of people surfing. I don’t know if they actually showed any at Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Well, they’re in the valley. There wasn’t many waves.

Oh, okay.

But Spicoli of course was a surfer.

Yeah, big time.

And at the end, that was the great ending. He rescued Mick Jagger from drowning while surfing and the little interview with Stu and what did he do, he hired Van Halen to play his birthday party or something.

Did he? I know he won some sort of competition.

The competition was saving Mick Jaggers life.

No, he has like a trophy or something.

Oh, oh, in the dream sequence.

Okay. So we were talking about the power of waves, right. Did you know that a cubic meter, a cubic yard basically, a cubic meter of water – that’s not much, man. We’re talking like this. That weighs a ton.

What do you mean?

It weighs a ton. It weighs 2,200 pounds.

So if you took a box that big and put water in it, it would weigh 2,000 pounds?

Yes.  At four degrees Celsius. It’s very specific because as you remember from the metric episode, like, they calibrate like that. But yes, it weighs a metric ton. A cubic meter –

How is that possible?

– weighs a metric ton.

When a gallon of milk only weighs a couple of pounds.

I don’t know. I looked it up though. I swear I looked it up and I actually double looked it up because I thought the same thing. It seemed like a lot. But yes, it weighs a lot of – a lot. So when that comes crashing down on you, it’s kind of a thing and there’s different kinds of wipeouts but apparently the worst kind of wipeout, which I think Tracey described as falling off of your surfboard, is called going over the falls and it’s on one of those hallow barrel waves which are very, very powerful because they hit land really quick and break really quick and when you get caught in the lip, that part where it’s breaking at the top, it trips you up and basically throws you right in front of the wave at the trough so you have the full force of the wave just doing this orbital wave right over you.

You’re like in a washing machine at that point.

So falling in, falling off your board, wiping out is one danger. We should probably talk about surfing dangers. I want to alert people to these things because they’re out there.

Have you ever been caught up in a wave like that?

Yeah.

It’s scary, man.

Yeah, because you don’t know what way is up.

Well, and you feel completely helpless. Like, mother nature has got me and is throwing me around like a little rag doll and I’m completely helpless to do anything about it.

Yeah, it makes you feel like you’re six.

It does. No matter how old you are. And if you’re six, boy, that’s really scary. So rip tides are dangerous and that’s one of the things that is at play there. That is the water returning to the sea and that retreating water can be a fast moving current to take you really far out to sea before you know it. So they advise you and you’ve always heard swim perpendicular –

Parallel.

– parallel to avoid the rip current.

Swim perpendicular to the shore, away from the shore until you pass out.

Exactly. So that can be kind of scary. The pull of the rip current.

Oh, yeah, you can also hit stuff under water, like we said, if a waves out there, whatever its height is, I think times 1.6, that’s how deep the water is. So you can very easily, especially in a heavy wave, get thrown to the bottom, you can get thrown on a coral reef –

Yeah, or hit by another board.

Yeah, which brings us to etiquette. Surfing etiquette. There’s – because it can be very dangerous to run into people and because really great surf spots are few and far between, that means there’s often a lot of people out there. So there’s kind of two informal rules of catching a wave of who gets precedent, right?

I guess the first one up or first one – or closest to the break.  That gives you the right away.

And everybody else has to get out of your way.

They should.

And if they don’t, what happens to them?

Well, people – if you’re in a nicer area, people might say hey, bra, that’s not too cool.  Here’s how it’s done.  Or they might just drag you to the beach and kick the crap out of you and break your board and throw it in the back of your car and put you in that car. That happens.

And regardless of what beach experience you have, they’re probably going to call you a kook, too.

A what, a kook?

A kook. That’s somebody who doesn’t follow surfing etiquette.

Really? I bet you’ll hear other words, too.

Sure, but I bet kook’s in there.

So are we at localism?

Yeah, I think so.

I wrote an article, why do surfers have gangs and it’s a thing and it’s been a thing for a long time. I know most people think of surfers as the zen spouting, easy-going philosophical beach duds and a lot of them are like that but a lot of them are not. Surfing has been tied to violence over territory for many, many years and that is because, like we said, there are only so many surf spots in the world and when duds like you and me get all excited to go try it out, we’re taking the limited amount of space and waves that exist for them.

That’s why I’m going to try in Dubai first.

In Dubai.

At the wave machine.

No, you should – if you’re taking a class or something they know to go to a place where you teach classes and everyone knows, don’t go anywhere near the classes. So that’s a good thing to do. But surf gangs have been around for decades and localism since the 70s has gotten kind of bad in some areas and the boogie board is a big reason why because all of a sudden this thing was invented for all these little kids to go out there and they can ride waves without any experience or technique and skill whatsoever and they don’t know the rules and they don’t care and their parents don’t care as long as they’re not in their hair on the beach. So thanks to the boogie board the violence picked up in the 70s and there are well established surf gangs even though you won’t hear them called that.

No, they call themselves families.

Yeah, the Wolf Pack in Hawaii on the north shore of Oahu, they’re just a family but they can also be pretty violent. Russell Crow did a – narrated a documentary called Bra Boys, Blood is Thicker than Water about Australia’s bra boys and they were some tough duds since the 1960s, who have – some of which that have spent time in and out of jail. The Abberton Brothers, in fact, I think one of the Abberton Brothers made the documentary, but if you ask them, you know, they’re just protecting their area and something sacred to them.

Yeah, don’t be a kook.

Don’t be a kook.

Southern California, I know San Diego has long been noted for localism.

Is that right?

I didn’t know that.

The Silver Strand locals, the SSO and the Oxnard Shore locals.

Oh, they’re from San Diego?

No, those aren’t.

Okay.

The Peerpoint Rats in the 80s and 90s. These are just some of the notorious surf gangs that, you know, they have run-ins with cops, some people have been beaten to death in 2007 in La Hoya, a surfer was beaten to death. Hawaiian surfer was killed in a fight in 2008. So this stuff happens and if you go out to surf, just – don’t be scared, like, these people are going to hurt me but it’s definitely cool to try and ingratiate yourself somewhat.

Right, bring them some home baked cookies or something out to the lineup.

Right, ask questions. There’s probably some nice guys that would be, like, hey, you should probably do this.

And steer clear of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, if you ever run across them in a lineup, you want to get away because they are bad duds as far as surf gangs go.

Is that a real surf gang?

No, don’t you remember in Point Break?

What were they?

They were like a surf gang. They were the rival surf gang that Patrick Swayze and –

They were in the movie?

Yeah.

I don’t think I knew that.

Yeah.

Boy, that was early on for them.  That must have been their formative days because that was in the 80s. Or early 90s, was that early 90s?

It was maybe like ’90, ’91.

And who directed that was Kathryn Bigelow. That was one of her first movies.

I didn’t know that.

Yeah.

That was a great movie.

So we should point out, Tracey points out that surfing, it’s pretty cool. Not many sports have spawned a musical genre and a film genre like surfing has. There’s not a lot of songs about basketball outside of – I guess Grand Master Flash and maybe Run DMC but people aren’t writing songs about football –

Or crocket.

No, there’s no crocket songs.

But if there are, they’re from the 1890s and they’re not good.

Surf music was a huge thing and still is in a lot of circles. And then of course the movies Point Break, what’s your favorite? Have you ever seen Big Wednesday?

No.

Good movie.

Have you seen Surf Nazi’s Must Die?

I have not.

That was a good one.

Is it?

Yeah.

Is there actually surfing in it or is it –

Oh, yeah, there’s a lot of fights on surfboards and – yeah, people shooting one another on surfboards.

Big Wednesday is a classic, Blue Crush is a more recent one that covers the ladies. And Emily loves that movie, by the way. And then there’s some great documentaries, the old Endless Summer movie was really great and then Endless Summer 2 was not bad and then there’s – more recently, Stacy Peralta made one called Riding Giants which was awesome and another one called Step Into Liquid which is really cool, too.

Yeah, I think that’s like number two or something like that on the best surf movies after Endless Summer.

Yeah, well, Endless Summer, that stuff was cool but that was like old school and today they have the technology to get inside the tube and go under water and the footage they get is pretty amazing.

It’s very neat.

Thank you [inaudible].

You got anything else?

Nope.

Cool.

I can’t wait for you to try it.  That’s the next thing in this podcast is for you to report back on your experience.

Okay. I will go do that.

I think you’ll be good. If you spend a day or two, you’ll be able to get up and go, like, hey, I’m surfing, look at me. I’m Frankie and Annette but I mean –

[Inaudible] surfboard.

It’s crazy what you’re doing though. You are standing on top of a plank of fiberglass and riding water. It ain’t easy.

No, I’m sure it’s not.

Yeah.

And I already can feel my ankles getting banged up on the surfboard.

Do you have good balance? Are you good at things like skateboarding and –

I’m not so bad with balance.  Yeah, surprisingly for my size I’m – I can stand up on, like, one leg. That’s balance.

Yeah, you’ll be okay. You’ll be able to surf a little bit.

It’ll be fine. I’m not – I’m going to go in there with an attitude suggested by the surf guide.

Have fun.

Yeah, it’s going to be fun.

Yeah, I’m not one of those people that gets all aggravated if I can’t do something like that.

You don’t get agro, bra.

No, man. What’s the point? I’d quit doing it before I got aggravated.

Well, that’s good. That’s very healthy.

I’m more quitter than I am agro.

If you want to learn about surfing and I mean a pretty decent amount about surfing, you can type that word into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com and I said search bar so it’s time for listener mail.

I’m going to call this Black Museum. Remember we talked about that?

Mm hm.

In the Death Mask episode.

I still want to go. I was really hoping somebody would write in and be like I can actually get you in there. No one did.

No. But I bet if we really pushed for it we could.

Well, let’s start pushing.

We have lots of fans and everything.  All right.  Guys, just got done listening to your show on Death Mask. Heard you mention the Black Museum and you said they should make a movie about it. I instantly had a flashback of listening to a radio show by the same name when I was a teen. Although it was in the early 90s, my local AM radio news station would air old radio dramas in the late evening and I would tune in occasionally.

One of my favorites was the Black Museum. I went and looked it up, the Black Museum was a 1951 Radio Crime drama based on real life cases from the files of Scotland Yard’s Black Museum. Orson Wells was both host and narrator for stories of horrors and mystery. So the show would open with Orson Wells speaking from London, Big Ben chimes and then the Black Museum, a repository of Death, Here in the Grim stone structure on the tims which houses Scotland Yard in a warehouse of homicide where everyday objects, a woman’s shoe, a tiny white box, a quilted robe, all are touched by murder. That sounds pretty cool.

I mean, and Orson Wells, too, I like, him saying things like that really gets to you.

Sure, Chuck Bryant saying something, it doesn’t have the impact of an Orson Wells.

It’s not bad, but what does, Chuck?

So there you go, guys. Maybe someday, somebody will make a TV show about it or a movie and for now, you can go on the internet and listen to the old episodes, 51 of them in all. So that’s awesome. Big fan, looking forward to seeing your TV show soon. That is Dan from San Diego, which I believe means Whales – no, it doesn’t.  What does San Diego mean?

It means Saint Diego.

That’s right.

In Spanish.

I would not quote anchor man in [inaudible] in this G-rated podcast.

If you have some additional information for something that we talked about or if you can get us into the Black Museum, we want you to get in contact with us. You can tweet to us at SYSKpodcast, you can join us on Facebook.com/stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com.  Or you can hang out with us online at our house, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

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50 minutes