Cutback (frontside)    Basic 360    Frontside waft    Backside tube riding
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		a. Want to show the line-up what your fins look like? Get a frontside waft into your repertoire.     Sequence: Respondek				Necked? Before you go to bed after a night on the juice, force yourself to eat and drink. I rarely think clearly in the necked state, and at the time there’s nothing worse, but get some grits and plenty of water down your gills. Next day you’ll feel craploads better. And if you don’t? Fight it. Surf, swim, just get out of bed and the house.
				You’ll experience different kinds of mates but the ones who compliment your turns will always be ones you’ll try to surf with. It’s not an ego thing, it’s just nice to reciprocate compliments and appreciate people’s surfing. Mates who pretend they didn’t see a turn suck. If I’m in the water and someone does a psycho turn, I’ll hoot or tell ’em it looked pretty sweaty. If a mate is paddling over the wave and you’re about to smack the lip, it’s so inviting to throw your tail as high as you can so the person can see all three fins. I love that feeling. I just want to get the whole fricken tail out with a big blast. Wanna do one? Come with me… advertisement advertisement THREE ON THE TREE… If you’re on this page then you probably know how to do a standard frontside reo. The standoid reo usually means you point the nose of the board toward the lip, move up the face and when your board is hit by the lip it changes your direction and you’re sent back down the face. The weird thing about wafts is that you may have already done them and not realized. I’ve often done frontside reos, gone home and seen the turns on video and they’ve been wafts and some even looked like airs! Thing is, your mates might have seen your fins from behind but be too rattled to tell you. Anyway, right now let’s pretend you’ve never done one. Wafting is a reo where you do a kind of rail-slide on the lip when your fins hang out the back of the wave. Okay, what you’re looking for is a lip just about to break, a crumbly section for you to climb up and follow through with your tail. The good thing about these is that you can waft almost regardless of the wind so you can get real tricky in the onshore slop. You can practice on closeouts and this will ensure you’ve always got a section. But they look best when you do them on the face and ride into the next turn. So, looking for the right closeout is the key: not too sucky otherwise you’ll find yourself getting stuck in the trough. For a good waft, you need a decent amount of speed. Not as much speed as an air but enough to get your board and body above the lip, so you get over it and can make it. Initially try it on waves that aren’t too steep. If there’s a section where you could get barreled and you try a massive waft, you’ll probably get smoked. As you bottom turn, look at the crumbly lip you want to hit. It’s an oldie but true: where you look is where you go. You can adopt a little wider stance than normal, one foot right back on your tail and the other in the middle of the board is cool for me. You need to be fairly compressed during the bottom turn as you want to extend up the face to hit the lip. As you move up the face pull your board under your feet and extend toward the lip. At the start, you’ll probably come up too late or too early but if you do, you can still do a good turn without wafting, so it’s a nice reliable turn. As you hit the lip, you need to become weightless and pivot on the lip. When you feel the lip connect with your board, you need to twist your body and push your tail. If you push too hard you’ll flick out and fall backwards, and if you don’t push enough, you’ll probably do some gammy jive on the lip. Once you get the feeling up there, you’ll know what feels good. If you’ve made reverses before, the weightless feeling will be similar. The key is to get a little sideways but now it gets tricky. You’re at the wave’s mercy. Your fins are free of water and when your fins grab it’s the wave’s say. You have to be prepared for the board to grab at any time, so you need to have weight on your back foot. Just to mix up your vernacular, pronounce waft as it’s spelt. Rather than “woft” accentuate the “a” to “waff-t”.
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