How to Surf Down the Line

Getting to your feet is great, but gliding across the wave face with speed? Now, that’s when surfing truly starts to get addicting as you get the magical feeling of flying down the line.

First, learn to Read Waves & Angle the Take-Off

There’s a lot to learn about reading waves, but one of the most fundamental skills is identifying the peak. The peak is the highest point of a wave and the first place where it will break. Look for a clear peak along with a dropping shoulder.

If the wave looks like a straight line, it’s likely a closeout, and you won’t be able to surf down the line for very long. In addition to finding waves that peel and positioning yourself into them, you’ll need to know how to angle your takeoff. There are two primary ways surfers trim down the line:

1- Angling the takeoff: Instead of fully dropping down the wave, you paddle at a slight angle, positioning the surfboard in the direction you want to go before even getting to your feet.

2- Dropping down the wave: This involves dropping all the way down the wave and performing a bottom turn to re-position yourself back onto the face of the wave.

The second method is more challenging, so novice surfers shouldn’t underestimate the importance of angling the takeoff. It’s the easiest way to learn how to ride down the line.

After you acquire the basics of predicting how waves will peel and angling the take-off, the next step is getting in the proper trimming stance.

We have full video courses on angling the take-off and reading waves on our online surf coaching platform; check out our online surf coaching platform for more information.

The Trimming Stance

When trimming, surfers typically place their front foot around the midpoint of the surfboard. Understanding the fundamentals of your stance is crucial: your feet should be slightly more than shoulder-width apart, your lower body bent, hands positioned over each rail, your chest straight, and your gaze directed where you want to go.

Two common things that may happen as you learn to surf down the line are riding over the wave or getting stuck in the whitewater. A good habit to develop is to aim for your line to be in the middle of the shoulder or slightly higher.

From our experience, most beginner intermediates surf lower than they think they do. You could aim to ride slightly higher than the midpoint, especially if you often can’t keep up with the peeling shoulder.

Once you get comfortable with that, the next step is learning to manage your speed by engaging and disengaging your inside rail.

Manage your speed with your inside rail

One of the most efficient ways to generate speed, especially on larger surfboards, is to ride high on the shoulder with your inside rail engaged. To achieve this, surfers often slightly shift their hips forward to apply more weight over their front toes or front heel.

When you do this, the surfboard’s rail engages into the wave’s face, forcing water to hit the bottom of your surfboard and get redirected backward. Think of it like a boat propeller: the more water it redirects backward, the faster it moves forward.

By engaging your inside rail while being high on the face, you maximize the water getting pushed back, and the result is that you maximize your lift and forward drive. Knowing how to accelerate is great, but sometimes, you need to do the exact opposite.

How to slow down

Surfers can slow down by making very gentle, subtle movements and returning to a more neutral stance with equal weight on both feet. The more you want to reduce your speed, the more weight you need to shift to your back foot by moving your hips back while riding lower on the wave’s face.

At the bottom of the wave, the water doesn’t redirect as much beneath your surfboard, resulting in less acceleration. While shifting your weight by adjusting your hips to manage your speed is technically not very difficult, many surfers find it challenging to know when to make these adjustments.

Adapting to the wave’s peeling speed

That’s why keeping your head up is important to monitor what the wave is doing. If you have a steep wall in front of you, you must stay high with weight over the inside rail. If there’s a steep drop in the shoulder line and the wave has a gentle slope in front of you, you’ll need to disengage the inside rail and ride lower on the face.

Once you get better at this, learning how to carve on your surfboard is next. To do so, you’ll start moving your feet to put weight on the back of the surfboard, lift the nose and change direction. This will improve your ability to keep up with the peeling even more.