Surfer's Start-Up: A Beginner's Guide to Surfing

That said, this book would be good fot total beginners who have not tried surfing yet and just want to be sure of the facts and basics. Many of these things you will pick up intuitively, but some of it will not automatically come naturally, thus the book is good to prevent/check bad habits, create good ones-- i.e. don't look down when you ride a wave, arch your back when you pop up, etc.


mediocre at best   January 17, 2004
 20 out of 20 found this review helpful

As a long-time climber who finally learned to surf this past year, I naturally assumed there would be a surplus of good instructional/reference books on the market for beginning surfers, like John Long's "How to Rock Climb" series serves for climbers. There aren't. This is one of the few I found, and I supposed it's better than the competition, but that's not saying much.

Surfing is less a technical and more of an intuitive type of sport. That said, there are plenty of technical aspects to it, and this book continually falls short in explaining or even mentioning many of them. The chapter on "paddling out," for instance, doesn't even mention duck-diving or turtle-rolling to get outside the wave break, let along teach them. These aren't easy things to do on a big, fat beginner's board, but at some point every surfer will need to learn how to get outside efficiently. A surfing instruction book should give you some hint here, but I had to go searching on the web to find step-by-step instructions because whatever I was doing wasn't working right and this tome is worthless as a reference book after you've been out 2 or 3 times.

Another example: the book recommends you get a "big" board. No explanation of the different types of beginner-appropriate boards (longboards, eggs, hybrids) vs intermediate-appropriate boards (shortboards, fish, etc). No description of the impact of different board parameters (rocker angles, nose and tail shapes, thickness) have on how a board handles surf; you're just told it's too complex for you to understand so don't bother to ask.

In any sport, you really need some basic instruction from someone who knows what they're doing to really get going. An instructional book should be there to help you remember and make sense of everything afterward, at night when you're not out there practicing. This book doesn't meet those criteria very well.


Best Beginner Book I've Seen   January 15, 2004
Having never surfed, I was in the market for a very simple book to explain some of the basics before I actually got into the waves. This book fit that bill perfectly. It gave very simple lessons about how to start the sport--the necessary equipment, where to surf, how to actually get on your board and a little history of the sport. It didn't rely on surfer lingo that muddles everything up for beginners who are not yet in the know and had a number of excellent photographs to visually capture what the words were trying to say. It is very well written for someone who does not have experience and I think it is a fantastic teaching tool. I would highly recommend this book for all beginners or parents of beginners who just want to have an idea of what their child is getting into. I can't wait to put these lessons into practice.


Incredibly poor binding from the publisher   September 2, 2003
 2 out of 4 found this review helpful

The book is basic, and not badly written; friendly and clear advice and instruction for the would-be surfer, but it's a slim volume-and here's the rub (and the reason for only 2 stars): the binding of this trade paperback was the worst I've seen in quite a while-it fell apart after one read-through, with whole handfuls of the sewn-in pages cascading to the floor. Most defintely NOT what you'd want in any how-to book.