Skimboarding is fundamentally about embracing creativity and rejecting boredom, constraints, and fear. Embedded in my skimboarding journey and the history of the sport is the DNA of this innovative, open-minded spirit. Skimming has always been an improvisational approach to the beach. You are daring to access waves that others deemed irrelevant or unridable. In an act of sandy Jiu Jitsu, you’re turning the intimidating hazard of a shorebreak into a beautiful and dynamic dance with the shoreline. With every wave you spot and catch from the beach you’re problem solving and charting new paths. Neither limited to the sand or the water, skimboarders delight in ignoring boundaries and playing in a liminal space. Using your vision, speed, coordination, and balance you are proudly, briefly, amphibious. While hydroplaning is normally the stuff of nightmarish car accidents, when skimboarding, you embrace it. You harness the frictionless freefall, turning an otherwise terrifying slide into a a transcendental encounter with the full energy and spirit of the ocean.
-Reilly Brock, later on in this essay
Step 1: Run
When I finally got to the titular beach in Pismo Beach, my heart sank. My biggest fears about this vacation had already come true in two chilling words: Shark Attack!
The red and white sign jammed into the sand implored me not to go in the water because of a recent Great White shark attack on a surfer. I didn’t need to be told twice.
Having spent more than half of my 14 years as a self-professed shark expert, it was clear to me that if I stuck a toe in the chilly water of the Central Coast I’d be quickly swallowed whole by a 20 foot man eater. While it wasn’t the Red Triangle, the Central Coast was still known to be a playground for large sharks. Just a year prior a 50 year old swimmer had been fatally bitten by a Great White just up the coast at Avila Beach. In 1957 a Cal Poly Student had been taken out by a 20+ foot Great White in Morro Bay. While I’d brought my trusty red foam boogie board and had planned to spend most of my days in the water, now I had no desire to set foot in the ocean. Thankfully I had a backup option: skimboarding. There was just one problem. I’d need to re-learn how to do it.
I first taught myself how to skimboard on a boogie board when I was eleven. After arriving in Kauai for the first time with my mom, we’d realized that the waves on our side of the island were basically flat in springtime. The boogie board I’d brought in my checked bag now seemed like dead weight. Battling boredom like the Balrog that it was for middles schoolers like me, I decided to try to ride my boogie board like a skateboard in the shallows. While this most often ended up with the board sliding out from under me or me pitching forwards onto the sand, I found the challenge exhilarating. Even the falls felt fun. Landing on the sand felt consequence free, like learning to skateboard on a trampoline. At eleven I also weighed 70 pounds soaking wet, had no concept of my connective tissue being fragile or finite, and healed as fast as Wolverine.
A few years later, I finally had a proper skimboard at Pismo Beach, and a homemade one at that. Handcrafted wooden gifts are my father’s love language. Years later when I later expressed an interest in making my own tortillas he made me a tortilla press in his wood shop. After hearing about how I’d gotten into skimboarding using a boogie board in Kauai, he’d holed up in his wood shop and made me a proper skimboard out of plywood. Spray painted a jaunty red and orange color, it looked like a flaming teardrop.
Constraint is the mother of creativity. With the ocean off limits because of sharks, it was just me, the beach, and this new wooden board that I had to figure out how to ride. My first few rides were a high-speed revelation. Compared to the reluctant boogie board that I’d pressed into skim duty, this wooden skimboard was built for this and cheetah fast. Where the thick foam boogie board wanted to slow down and rise to the surface the moment I was on top of it, this heavier wood board had momentum of its own and allowed me to gleefully hydroplane down the beach for dozens of yards before eventually sticking in the sand.
With the proper equipment, my rides were now longer, faster, and much more fun. Despite Pismo Beach being coldier, gloomier, and sharkier than our usual summer destination of Pacific Beach in San Diego, I was too busy falling in love to notice. I dutifully spent all day every day of our Central Coast vacation at the beach teaching myself to skimboard. I felt a full body enthusiasm for the learning curve it entailed. By the time we drove home I knew that I was all in on this new hobby with the certainty that only someone who has never paid taxes can feel.
I finally understood on a visceral level why my brother liked skateboarding, snowboarding, and surfing so much. Board sports are a shortcut to a truly unique and intoxicating kind of kinesthetic high. Having felt it for the first time as a middle schooler, I was hooked for life.
The next year, rising in the foggy pre-dawn of a Berkeley summer morning, we hopped into my moms Volvo S-80. She floored it and we prayed, hoping to make it through LA before rush hour. After listening to an audio book for an hour I drifted off to sleep somewhere around the towering windmills of Altamont pass and blearily woke up amidst the one of the mind-numbingly endless stretches of farmland along I-5. After napping some more, I came to again amidst the tangle of freeways ringing Los Angeles like carelessly dropped pick-up sticks. With my flame red skimboard nestled next to our boogie boards in the trunk I couldn’t wait to try out what I’d learned in Pismo on Pacific Beach.
It didn’t take long for my adolescent eyes to wander. Exploring the beachfront shops lining the Pacific Beach boardwalk, I spotted a blue skimboard for sale. At over 100 dollars this would be a sizable investment in my newfound hobby. Yet I felt a bit guilty about abandoning my dads board. On the other hand, professional equipment, would help me take my skills to the next level. So I used my saved up allowance money to purchase a royal blue skimboard with the word Victoria printed on the nose. Wider, longer, and thicker than my homemade board, it looked like a short surfboard with no fins. I couldn’t wait to see how good I could be with even better gear.
I was humbled immediately. The new board rode totally different than the wooden one my dad made me. I couldn’t figure out why my skills weren’t transferring. Where my dads board was heavy and would slide for yards even without me on it, this one was light, buoyant, and slowed to a stop unless I was quickly on top. It was finicky, needy, and seemed reluctant to move how I wanted it to. Sometimes it felt like I was back on the boogie board I’d started on. However, when I could get enough speed to reach the waves, it magically rose up in the water to meet them where my wooden board would normally sink and slow down. It was clear that to ride this board properly I’d have to re-learn how to skimboard, again.
Step 2: Drop
Skimboarding consists of three components: the run up, the drop, and the slide. To be a good skimboarder you have to thread them all together with speed of a sprinter, the footwork of a dancer, and the balance of a surfer. However, the trickiest of these three parts in my experience is the drop. It’s when you transition from the running phase to the surfing phase. Miss your drop and there’s no ride to speak of. 99% of the time, the difference between a perfect ride and a painful, embarrassing wreck is in the drop. You have to be fast and coordinated and there is little margin for error. It’s like the quick switch from max effort sprinting to aerodynamic sliding that bobsledders or their insane cousins that ride that skeleton contraption do. As a brief, nonskim tangent, what mad man looked at a bobsled and wondered: “how can we make this more dangerous? Oh yeah we’ll have them go face first down the ice like a seal with a death wish!”
It’s all in the drop. While sprinting as fast as you can you have to gingerly let go of the board such that it lands perfectly in front of you, matching both your speed and orientation so that you can then run onto it seamlessly. Drop the board too far away and you’ll have to sprint longer and jump further, ruining your timing and causing the board to rapidly decelerate. Drop it too close and you’ll trip painfully over the board and get a mouthful of sand, or worse. Since it’s firm and saturated with seawater, skimmable sand has the firmness of concrete with the texture of sandpaper, a far cry from the dry, pillowy goodness you voluntarily dive onto while playing beach volleyball. The real danger, however, is your board. Tripping on or even stubbing your toes on your board at full speed hurts like hell and can bring you down immediately. My board has bloodied and bruised my shins and ankles much more than the sand has over the years.
To advance to the next level of skim boarding I needed to re-learn not just the drop, but my entire sequences of movements. With the homemade plywood board, I’d been riding the way most beginners do: throwing the skimboard down the sand, chasing it down, and then hopping on. While this got decently long rides on a heavy wood board on flatter sand, it didn’t work for a lighter foam board or with bigger waves. I looked to the internet for inspiration. The nascent skimming community on Youtube had all the answers I was looking for. It turned out I had my order of operations all wrong. Instead of throwing, running, then jumping, I needed to sprint down the beach while holding my board, drop it directly in front of my path, and then hop on. Run, drop, hop, slide. How hard could that be?
Skimboarding was invented by bored lifeguards in Laguna Beach in the 1920s. Wanting to ride the shore breaks that were too hard to surf, these adventurous lifeguards fashioned homemade skimboards not unlike the one my dad made me. They then took turns hopping on them, sliding down the steep pitch of the beach in the wash from a receding wave, and then hitting the next wave just as it was about to break and attempting to ride it back to shore.
To this day, you just can’t talk about skim boarding without talking about Orange County. A red county in a blue state, named after a citrus industry that was long ago replaced by suburbs and strip malls, Orange County is an outlier in most senses of the word. However, love it or hate it, you can’t dispute that the OC is ground zero for skimboarding. Laguna Beach in particular is a skim Mecca. It is to the sport what the North shore of Oahu is to surfing. Some of the best and most consistent skim breaks in the world happen to be in this affluent stretch of conservative, coastal real estate. As a result, many of the best riders in the world live and train there year round.
Skimboarding beaches look scary to the untrained eye. All of the good ones including the OC’s crown jewels are truly viscous shore breaks. While waves like this are a hazard for swimmers and a nuisance for surfers, if you’re on a skimboard they are the holy grail.
Shore breaks are caused by steep beaches where the deeper water gets suddenly shallow close to shore, forcing an incoming wave to gain size and power very quickly. Waves like these are notoriously dangerous since they crash right onto the sand. Unlike a traditional surf break where you can see and feel a set rolling in gradually and have time to react, shore breaks emerge in a violent ambush of saltwater just feet from dry land. They can and do break necks and drown people with shocking regularity. They’ll slam you into the beach before you can react and sweep you out to sea, hence their other name: “sneaker waves.” Since the sand drops off quite suddenly beneath the backside of a shore break, once you’ve been pummeled by one, you can end up in suddenly deep water, get pulled out to sea via a rip current and left to swim amongst the 18 foot Great White Sharks, or so I imagine.
The company that I’ve bought all of my boards from, Victoria, is named after Victoria Beach in Orange County. Victoria is home to the perfect trio of a steep beach, notorious shorebreak, and super fine sand that makes for perfect skimboarding conditions. Victoria was the first skimboard manufacturer. Founder Tex Haines started making boards in 1976, and has a board model named after himself, with a quirky “fishtail” design. What’s Victoria’s secret? As far as I can tell, a first mover advantage, being a part of the skim culture since the beginning, and quality manufacturing. As with surfboards, a huge seachange for the technology happened when Victoria embraced synthetic materials like fiberglass and polycarbon. These materials made for boards that were much lighter and more maneuverable than the original wood boards could ever be. Feather-light and as responsive as a sports car, they’re wave catching machines. I adore my two Victoria boards. Just holding them makes me happy.
Today some of the best professional riders are sponsored by Victoria. Two of them: Amber Torrealba and Paddy Mack are even engaged to each other. Victoria also puts on a yearly competition called “The Vic” in Orange County. At the Vic, the best skimboarders from all over the world descend on Aliso Beach, just South of Victoria Beach on Highway 1. Bombing down the vertigo-inducing pitch of the beach directly into the maw of the angry ocean, they compete for the title of best skimboarder in the world.
Step 3. Slide
For most of my 20s, my skimboards sat unused in a bag in my moms potting shed. My beach hobby lay dormant for almost a decade. Other adult passions and obligations siphoned away the energy that used to pull me compulsively to the beach. Then, at age 31, after booking a trip to Kauai with some friends I decided to bring my skimboards and see if I still had it.
It didn’t take long for me to fall back in love. I spent our first full day at the beach of Hanalei Bay alternating skimboarding sessions in between games of Spikeball. After a joyful re-entry into the sport I wondered why I’d ever left.
I was just browsing at a surf shop in Hanalei with no intention to buy anything when I saw the board. Amidst rainbow racks of Roxy bathing suits, Ripcurl rashguards, and Florence Marine sun shirts, I saw a familiar shape jutting out from a stack of boogie boards like a sharks fin. It was an eye-catching jungle green and had the sun logo of Victoria stamped on its snout. When I went to pick it up I was astounded by how insanely light it was compared to my thicker blue Victoria shred sled, which I’d unoriginally named Victoria.
For men in my family, a gear purchase is a powerful signal of our identity and intentions. Brocks head to REI for the same reasons that wolves howl and humpback whales serenade the seas. So when I saw this beautiful, featherweight board with a surprisingly high price tag, I knew the only proper response to its sirens song. I bought it on the spot. I named it Skimberly.
Skimberly, Alexis, and I arrived in San Jose Del Cabo the day before the hurricane did.
The beach is the last place you want to be when a hurricane rolls into town. We spent most of our first full day in Baja sheltered in the restaurant we’d chosen for lunch as the sky emptied violently all afternoon. Fierce winds drove hungover and underdressed tourists off of the narrow streets, seeking refuge from the delirious deluge in nearby shops and bars. As we alternated between nursing Topo Chicos and Tecates, I strategized where to make my skimboarding debut in Mexico the following day.
The tip of the Baja Peninsula is one of the few parts of the planet that has consistently better skimboarding waves than Orange County. While the gulf side of the peninsula is sheltered, calm and bathtub warm, where it meets the Pacific Ocean by the picturesque arch, the water gets colder and a lot more powerful. The very tip of the peninsula is exposed to the full force of incoming Pacific storms like a raw nerve. This is where a diabolical shore break rears its head up from the sand and roars like a lion with a saltwater mane.
The two largest skimbreaks in Los Cabos are this very Southernmost part of the Baja peninsula. They both notoriously hard to get to. Lovers Beach is accessible only via water taxi or a very precarious cliffside scramble. Solmar Beach is heavily guarded by the Solmar Beach Resort, who unsucessfully tried to block non-guests from using the nominally public beach until local skimboarders finally won the right to use them. If you can reach them, the waves are supposed to be the ultimate rush, thrillingly huge and extremely perilous. From my vantage point on the shore, they beckoned like the Cave of Wonders at the start of Aladdin: a gaping maw that could either swallow you whole or deliver treasures beyond your wildest dreams. While I’d seen a lot of footage of thrilling rides, I’d seen just as many scenes of salty veterans getting walloped by the raging surf. I knew for sure that I was not good enough to ride there. One mistake on a shorebreak that big could be fatal.
I settled on trying Costa Azul Beach, a famous surf break just outside San Jose Del Cabo where we were staying. I reasoned that even a surf break in this part of Cabo would have some “training waves” closer to shore for me to practice on. The hurricane passed over head and blew across the gulf towards Mazatlán and the following day dawned clear and bright. So we headed to the beach.
After chatting amicably with our Uber driver in Spanish he looked back at my bag and remarked:
“Has traido tus tablas.”
You’re brought your boards. It felt fitting, like how Hemmingway might start his terse account of my skim odyssey.
When I got to Costa Azul I realized three important things: the temperature was well over 90 degrees in direct sun, the beach was Black Diamond levels of steep, and there would be no training waves here. The surf was violent, with restless sets of waves slamming onto the sand with the leftover fury from the hurricane. While the sky was sunny as if it had already forgotten about the storm, the ocean, it seemed, had a longer memory.
The steep beach, blistering heat, and huge waves weren’t the only obstacles. To make things even trickier, I was also trying to yet again re-learn how to skimboard. This time I needed to take everything I’d learned and rotate it 180 degrees.
After watching some Youtube videos from dreadlocked skim guru Blair Conklin, it became crystal clear that that I had been holding the board on the wrong side of my body for two decades. I taught myself to hold it on my right because that felt more comfortable. This placement actually meant that my drops could never be as fluid as the pros. According to Blair, since I ride “goofy,” or right foot forward, I needed to hold the board off to my left side. While demoing the movements on a beach in Laguna, he explained why. This was so while sprinting I could drop the board directly in front of my feet and have my last step on the sand be with my right foot so my left foot (my back foot when riding) could end up exactly where it need to be on the back of the board where my right foot would join it up front a millisecond later. In theory, a drop like this meant no momentum was lost and your board would actually speed up. In practice, I needed to practice it a few hundred times in the wake of a hurricane before I could find out.
I had a new piece of gear that might help my feet out. After relying on surf wax to grip the top of my board for decades, I’d finally invested in some traction pads. Traction pads are to surfboards and skimboards what grip tape is to a skateboard. They’re essentially large, textured grippy stickers that you apply to the back and middle of your board that give your feet more purchase so you can control it better on the water. As an added benefit, they tell you if you’re feet are in the right place after your drop so you don’t have to overthink that while sprinting towards a wave.
Sprinting turned out to be less important than I’d imagined. The beach was so steep that gravity did most of the work for me. The natural pitch of the beach was so dramatic that I barely had to run to gain speed. The slope yanked me and my board right into the oncoming face of a wave like I had been launched from a slingshot. Breaking in the suddenly shallow water, the waves were big and steep, functioning like watery ramps to launch me into the heavens. As I careened into the slick face of an oncoming wave I had to drop into as low a stance as possible to absorb the sudden elevation gain. Each speedy descent down the beach required required monastic focus to get the result I wanted. Every time I hit a wave and ended up in the ocean I’d hold a triumphant thumbs up to Alexis up on the beach so she’d know I’d made it out unscathed. After a few thrilling rides, I understood why Southern California riders were so loyal to their favorite shorebreaks. While they were undoubtedly scary, the speed of the slide combined with the raw force of the wave awaiting you was a unique kind of high.
After returning from Baja I bought my first wetsuit, the final piece of gear to complete the skim gauntlet. This would let me keep skimming regularly despite the much colder water in Northern California. While you didn’t spend as much time immersed in the water as you would surfing, in my experience all it took was one or two falls to remind you how cold the Pacific was this far North. Following the advice of the Mill Valley surf shop employee, I settled for a 2 millimeter wetsuit, not thick enough for a long session of cold water surfing, but plenty warm for the running and splashing of skimboarding. It was made by a Japanese company called Isurus, the latin name for the Mako Shark. Makos are the fastest shark and one of the few sharks alongside Great Whites that can actively heat up their bodies in cold water.
The wetsuit’s “zipperless” design had required some awkward contortions to climb in through the shoulder. It felt like having to enter your car through the sunroof. Yet once I got it on and splashed around at Pacifica State Beach I was amazed at how little water got in. Whatever technology was afoot here was well worth the sticker price. The North Pacific felt as balmy as the waves in Cabo had been.
Skimming was normally a solitary, meditative practice for me, so I was amazed to see a teenager in street clothes sprinted the full length of the beach to come talk to me.
“I saw you skimming. I don’t know many other people up here that do that. How long have you been doing it?”
“Since I was eleven. I just got back into it though.”
“Oh wow. Wait, how old are you?”
“31.”
“Wow. I thought you were like 23.”
“Thanks, that’s kind of you. I guess I try to take care of myself.”
“Would you mind if I took a couple rides on your board?”
“Sure. Go for it.”
Watching him ride once it was clear that this 19 year old was leagues better than me. He sprinted full speed and dropped his board underneath his feet at the last possible minute with the cocky fluidity of a someone who has been skateboarding since puberty. He ran onto the board in a seamless, fluid motion. The board gained speed the moment he stepped onto it. This meant he had the speed and control to hit the choppy small waves that were breaking close to shore that day and whip his hips back towards the beach and ride them in. Skimboarders call this maneuver “wrapping” a wave. Watching him, I lamented having never been able to do it myself.
Despite him being visibly better than me and totally hogging my new board, I found myself grinning. Sensing a rare connection I asked:
“Would you mind giving me a few tips?”
He watched me do a couple of rides and then asked:
“So you’re a two step then hop guy?”
“What do you mean?”
“When you drop your board, you take two steps and then jump onto the board with both feet. It’s fine. It just means you don’t get on as fast, the board slows down, and the weight of landing with both feet slows the board down even more.”
“Oh. So basically it’s not fine.” I sighed. Despite thinking I’d finally figured out my form after a week in Mexico, there was still so much to learn.
He laughed.
“Yeah, you might want to try a one step drop. Here, I’ll show you.”
To practice this new one step drop I needed to unlearn my old habits yet again. This meant slowing down and starting from zero. To rehearse this new footwork I had to slow down to a snails pace and literally walk onto my board. I felt awkward and embarrassed but my new friend Hugo didn’t seem to care. He was too busy shredding small waves on Victoria, my blue backup board. I chuckled knowingly when I saw him eat shit on a wave, soaking his street clothes in icy Pacific water. You ought to wear a wetsuit, Hugo. The ocean always wins.
At 31 years old I was yet again re-learning how to skimboard. It felt like I was eleven again but I honestly couldn’t have been happier to be a beginner once more.
Grey Whale Cove Beach is a “blink and you’ll miss it” turn off nestled in a stretch of San Mateo coastline so steep and jagged it’s known as the "Devils Slide.” This nickname is fitting for a beach with one of the best shorebreaks in the Bay Area for skimboarding.
I just hoped I could find it. I’d gotten the recommendation on the Reddit skimboarding forums but had never been there before. Yet there it was. Five miles North of the world famous Mavericks surf break in Half Moon Bay I saw the small sign and pulled into a parking lot cut into the steep hills. I carefully Frogger’d across highway 1 with my board bag before trekking down an even steeper embankment and some wooden steps to finally arrive at the beach.
The cove I was greeted with was straight out of a postcard promoting California tourism. It was an immaculate, spectacular crescent of sand, with a steeply pitched beach funneling you into a roaring, frothing and fittingly frigid Pacific shorebreak. Since it was the dead of winter, the sky was battleship grey and overcast, but I didn’t mind it. The cooler temperatures meant that I was one of 8 people on the beach. The seven others were an engagement photoshoot and an Indian family enjoying a picnic with their young toddlers. I could sense the raw energy coming off of the Pacific from the shore. The booming explosions of each break echoed in the gloom.
Sliding into my form-fitting Isurus wetsuit I felt like a superhero poised to take on a new adventure. I did a quick dynamic warmup on the sand, getting some odd looks from the engagement photoshoot. Muscles warm and already starting to sweat beneath all the skintight Neoprene, I was as ready as I was going to be. After watching a few sets peel back to get a sense for the cadence of the waves I saw my opening: a huge wave had broken farther up the beach than any of its predecessors and as it receded, the salty film left in its wake looked like a red carpet to me.
Holding my board up and to my left I pushed hard off my right heel and sprinted down the steeply pitched beach. As the next incoming wave began to rear its head I dropped the board at my feet, took my last steps on the sand and leapt aboard. The wave was getting ready to break, the mass of water now angled upward like a ramp that was threatening to become a wall. I hit it at close to full speed, and launched off of it, catching what in those sublime milliseconds felt like an X-Games worthy amount of air.
Careening back into the ocean next to my board I re-entered the water feet first with a big splash. When I’d hopped on the board I’d been in millimeters of water and now I was in up to my shoulders. I felt the chill of the Pacific meet the edge of my wetsuit. I felt supremely, powerfully alive.
“Wow.”
I knew with absolute certainty that I needed no fewer than 10 rides like that before I could possibly go home.
Hours later I was wearing a fiendish grin and chilled to the bone despite my wetsuit’s valiant efforts. I trekked back up the steps and crossed Highway 1 back to my parked Jetta. A man walking to his white pickup truck saw my skimboard bag and stopped me:
“How were the waves? You get some good rides?”
“Incredible! Really big break today. I’ve never been to this beach before.”
“You been skimming long dude?”
“Yeah, since I was eleven actually. I just got back into it. I did a skim trip down to Cabo a month ago. It was insane. Such perfect waves down there!”
“Right on, Cabo’s where it’s at bra. Nothing bigger than the breaks at Lovers and Solmar. As far as Mexican skimming goes, that’s kind of the top of Everest. Next time you’re down there though check out playa Melaque in San Patricio. They have a real OG scene down there in Jalisco.
“Where do you skim around here?”
“I keep tabs on most of the breaks along the peninsula to see what’s biggest. Some days it’s Montara, some days it’s Grey Whale, some days it’s neither. Honestly, there’s not much of a community this far North. A lot of dudes ride down in Santa Cruz and then of course everybody skims in Laguna.”
“Right on. I’ve heard that. I’ll have to check it out some day.”
We bid each other good afternoon and he drove South to Montara while I booked it North back to Berkeley. I got home and showered and rinsed my wetsuit off in our guest bathroom, having been warned by Alexis of the annoying landfall of “Hurricane Sandy” after my increasingly frequent skim sessions. Finally clean and still riding high on the post-Pacific ocean endorphins, I ventured online to see if anyone else had footage of them skimboarding at Grey Whale Cove. The top result on Youtube was: Grey Whale Cove shark attack.
Apparently the summer prior, a 39 year old surfer had been bitten on the leg by a juvenile Great White Shark. A juvenile, mind you is only one Reilly, or 6 feet long, as opposed to their mothers who can grow to 3 Reillys or 15-18 feet long. Falling asleep that night it felt like submarine-sized white sharks were patrolling the murky edges of my dreams, coralling me to the shore so I’d keep skimboarding.
Step 4. Rest
Skimboarding is what first introduced me to what is to this day one of my favorite feelings on Earth. It’s the full body afterglow of a physical day at the beach. When you feel sunned but not burnt, muscularly tired, but simultaneously energized and grounded from your exertions, and a nice shower sounds like the best simple pleasure you can imagine. After rinsing the sand and sunscreen off of your face and excavating a surprising amount of it out of your ears and scalp, you feel like a newer, better version of you. You change into your favorite vacation chic look and settle down with a cold beer to recollect your favorite memories of the day before lazily deciding what to do for dinner. While my dad lives for the hygge of chili and a movie after skiing and others chase the post spin class latte or after-yoga-brunch-catchup, for me there’s no feeling like the Après-Skim beer. I’ve later replicated this feeling from epic days of Spikeball, but Skimboarding was my first and most primal exposure to it. The sleep you get after spending a day in the sun, running on the sand, and splashing in the water feels as deep and cleansing as the Pacific.
Step 5. Repeat
I’ve been skimboarding for two thirds of my life now. I couldn’t have known at age eleven that it would turn out to be a side of myself that I’d end up expressing and exploring the longest. Yet here I am.
Whatever skimboarding skills I have are entirely self-taught. Compared to a non skimboarder I may look somewhat coordinated. All of those hours at the beach and training my balance on the Indo board at home may have added up to something. Compared to the pros you can find on Youtube or Instagram, my technique is laughable. I move too slowly, don’t drop seamlessly, and have never once wrapped a wave. I’ve also had to re-learn my technique no fewer than four different times. For me, being a “true skimboarder” feels more simultaneously appealing but more elusive than ever. The more I learn, the more there is to learn, but the older I am. As I continually circle doing the basic movements properly, hordes of tanned and affluent middle schools in Laguna Beach are learning to shred with more flair that I’ll ever have.
Fittingly for a sport conducted at the intersection of wet sand and powerful waves, assessing what skimboarding means to me and how much longer it will be a part of my life feels a bit like sizing up the longevity and legacy of a beautiful sand castle.
As the years have gone by, the more the physicality of the hobby has sunk in. It is a thrilling workout, but is also incredibly draining activity to do for an hour, much less all afternoon. It boils down to running sprints on the sand. Throw in a good deal of lunging, hopping, balancing, and season with falls and saltwater to taste.
By the end of a day of skimming I always feel it in my hamstrings, Achilles tendons, and hip flexors. Some people pay lots of money to personal trainers to experience that kind of full body soreness. Lately I catch myself wondering how many more hard sessions at the beach these bones and tendons have left in them. This is especially true after reading the injury horror stories on r/skimboarding, which are only rivaled by the ones at r/ultimate. I seem to seek out high-impact hobbies.
Yet skimboarding is as defined by contrast as it is by its intensity. There is a natural Yin and Yang to the sport. For as much time as you spend intensely running, jumping, and falling, you spend a greater amount of time just waiting and watching the water. While it’s undeniably physical, skimboarding’s biggest impact on me has been psychological.
Like surfing, skimming requires you to be deeply attuned to the rhythms of the ocean. Subtle details an untrained eye might not even notice matter a lot to you. The perspective of a skimboarder is also unique. You are straddling land and sea, as attuned to the texture of the sand and slope of the beach under your feet as you are to the temperature of the water, and the size and frequency of the waves. Where surfing asks you to learn to read waves from amongst them, skimboarding requires you to read the aftermath of waves from the shore. And where a surfer looks at the form of a wave and the energy of a set, a skimboarder looks at the negative space around each wave and the gaps between sets.
You begin to understand that your patience and calm are as big an asset as your speed and balance. The result is an observant, meditative state.
You become attuned to the ongoing micro-dramas of the shore. Seeing where and how the waves break and how quickly or slowly the water recedes from them, you absorb all of this information, do some mental calculations, and look for creative solutions. This teaches you to see the beach differently than other people. This spirit of unconventional thinking is innate to the spirit of skimming and is also part of what ties this genre-bending boardsport to its strictly sea and land-based cousins: surfing and skateboarding.
Most board sports are fundamentally acts of defiance and creativity. In the face of the limitations of nature, gravity, and physics, surfers, snowboards, skateboarders, and skimboarders choose to see things differently. Where the law, the terrain, and the equipment available seem to say “do not enter,” a small but daring set sees an invitation to enter and innovate. This spirit of rebellion is interwoven in the fabric of the sport and its culture. Look at the big names in any board sport like Laird Hamilton, Tony Hawk, and Shawn White, and you’ll see fearless and successful athletes, but also people for whom intentional playfulness and relentless experimentation is an innate part of how they view the world. They simply couldn’t have gotten this far without it.
Board sports ask you to embrace a paradox. To embrace the risk and uncertainty of your natural environment, how do you surrender full control while still having full confidence in yourself?
This contradiction is what the Tao of Skimboarding boils down to as well. To truly skimboard you must sprint at the ocean with no fear. You know if may wreck you, but you have to still run as fast as you can. Ultimately hesitation is as counterproductive and dangerous as bad form. The faster you can run, the better your ride will be. At the same time you must be at peace with the fact that however fast you’re running will be how hard you will fall. The ocean, ultimately, is indifferent of your greatness. The same powerful waves that can launch you to the heavens can also pummel you into the sand.
I have accepted years ago that I will never reach anywhere near the heights of the pro skim athletes I’ve idolized on Youtube. At this point I may never even be as good as Hugo, who gave me some pointers at Pacifica, or the man who stopped me to ask about the waves at Grey Whale Cove. However, I still find their example inspiring. I take great comfort in what we have in common. Connecting all of us immersed in this quirky subculture is our mutual devotion to and reverence for the ocean, an adoration of Mexico, and our passion for creatively pursuing ephemeral encounters with awe-inspiring waves.
Skimboarding is fundamentally about embracing creativity and rejecting boredom, constraints, and fear. Embedded in my skimboarding journey and the history of the sport is the DNA of this innovative, open-minded spirit. Skimming has always been an improvisational approach to the beach. You are daring to access waves that others deemed irrelevant or unridable. In an act of sandy Jiu Jitsu, you’re turning the intimidating hazard of a shorebreak into a beautiful and dynamic dance with the shoreline. With every wave you spot and catch from the beach you’re problem solving and charting new paths. Neither limited to the sand or the water, skimboarders delight in ignoring boundaries and playing in a liminal space. Using your vision, speed, coordination, and balance you are proudly, briefly, amphibious. While hydroplaning is normally the stuff of nightmarish car accidents, when skimboarding, you embrace it. You harness the frictionless free fall, turning an otherwise terrifying slide into a a transcendental encounter with the full energy and spirit of the ocean.
No matter how many times I do it, I still get this rush like I’m getting away with something. From far away it just doesn’t look like it should be possible. You’re sliding on such a thin film of water that it defies your initial understanding of how both water and sand should work. It took me hundreds of hours, countless falls, and multiple years to fully understand just how little water you can get away with skimming on top of. Even decades later, it’s always a little less than I think it will be.
