🏄‍♀️ Be like Jason Bourne to avoid getting run over 🤕

👋 Happy Fall (and Spring)! Do you know where you’ll be surfing this winter (or summer)? Let’s make this the year of surfing—all year round. 🌎🏄‍♀️

🏄‍♀️ Let’s surf:

• Surf like Jason Bourne 🕵️‍♂️

• Hang heels is a flex 🦶

• The second best wave in the world 🌊

• Weekly popup returns! 🍿

• I keep my car key…where?! 🔑

• Feel-good news only 😊

^SURFODRAMA

😱 Be like Jason Bourne to avoid getting run over 🤕

If you’ve ever been run over, run over someone else, dinged someone’s board, or had your board damaged in a collision—this one is for you.

Do you remember that scene from The Bourne Identity where Jason Bourne goes:

"I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars outside. I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed and the guy sitting at the counter weighs 215 pounds and knows how to handle himself. I know the best place to look for a gun is the cab of the gray truck outside, and at this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Now why would I know that? How can I know that and not know who I am?"

I love this mini-monologue! If Jason Bourne were a surfer, he’d navigate the Pipeline lineup like it was goddamn choreographed.

Having your head on a swivel and being spy-level observant is a surf skill we rarely talk about. We get so focused on positioning, paddling, and popping up that we sometimes don’t even realize we’re dropping in on someone. Once again—it’s not you. It’s your goddamn brain.

Ever heard of target fixation or object fixation?  It’s when your brain locks onto the thing you don’t want to hit… and then, because you’re staring straight at it, you end up steering right into it.

Sounds familiar? That’s because our eyes lead our body. Where you look, you go. And under stress—like dropping into a wave or seeing another surfer in your path—your brain zooms in on the danger. Instead of scanning for a safe route, you unconsciously zero in on the hazard… because that’s where your attention is.

So picture this: you’re looking at another surfer instead of the open wave—boom, you collide. You’re staring at your nose during the pop-up—boom, you fall right there instead of trimming down the line. You’re eyeing the sand instead of looking forward—congrats, you’ve booked yourself a guaranteed nose dive.

As one of the Girls Who Can’t Surf Good put it:

“One of the most important things I teach students is to be aware of object fixation. You will run into what you look at—simple as that.

As kids, we learned this after our first collision and never did it again. As older learners, there’s a lot of overthinking. Instead of just learning the lesson and moving on, we get stuck. Always only look at the shore if you're going straight, or the wave face if you're up to that.”

So—how do you not crash into people? Look where you want to go, not where you don’t. On a wave, turn your head and eyes down the line—your body (and board) will follow. If someone’s in your way, don’t fixate on them—look for your escape route: the shoulder, the channel, open water. That’s where you aim.

You can practice this on land too. On a bike, a skateboard, even when driving—keep your eyes on the path ahead.

Basically: your board is a very obedient tool. Point your eyes somewhere, and it’ll follow. Stare at trouble? You’re headed straight for it.

^{WORD OF THE WEEK}

Forget hanging ten. Hang heels instead! 👠

Californian surf journalist Bill Cleary described nose riding as a "sport within a sport" back in 1965. If you can call a bunch—maybe half a dozen—maneuvers performed at the front of a surfboard a sport. 😜

Among nose riding positions, you’ve probably heard of the cheater five, hang five, and hang ten.

But what about hang heels, also known as heels over?! It’s an insanely difficult move that’s frowned upon by longboard purists, according to the Encyclopedia of Surfing. That’s when a surfer hangs ten, then quickly half-turns and hangs their heels over the tail—while riding backwards. 😱

How did all this nose riding start?
No one knows for sure!

It was either Rabbit Kekai, who pioneered riding the nose in the 1940s in Waikiki on a finless board, or Dale Velzy, who hung five in 1951 at Manhattan Beach.

How does it even work—like, physically?
Also: no one knows for sure!

It could be that the falling curl anchors the tail of the board, working like a counterweight. Or maybe it’s the water flowing upward along the wave face, pressing against the underside of the nose and creating a cushion of support.

Why did it decline?
Ah, that one, everyone knows for sure!

Nose riding pretty much died with the shortboarding revolution in the early ’70s. But the decline started earlier—during the first round of the 1966 World Surfing Championships. (You know, the one where either super-duper nose rider David Nuuhiwa of California won… or Nat Young, Mr. "I hate nose riding", of Australia won.)

Nat was kind of an a-hole about it:

“If you just stand on the nose from start to finish, you’ve defeated creativity and individualism—the very essence of surfing!”

Never liked the guy. 😜

These days, if you want to see how it’s done, go watch the queen of nose riding, Kassia Meador, glide her way through an IG feed near you.

^{WAVE OF THE WEEK}

The second best wave in the world–JBay 🌊

“It’s an almost indescribable sight," said South African pro surfer Marc Price of Jeffreys back in 1982. "Watching from the beach, you start off looking up to your right and end up facing left as the wave travels down the point. This 180-degree perspective is something no photograph can capture."

A wave for certifiable nutcases then? Yep, that’s J-Bay for ya.

🏄‍♂️ J-Bay’s many breaks
Jeffreys Bay—or J-Bay—is actually multiple different breaks with spectacular names. The names you might’ve heard before: Kitchen Windows, the Point, Boneyards, Tubes, Magnatubes and Supertubes, Impossibles, Albatros. That’s a lot of tubes. It’s located in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, about 75 kilometers (47 miles) southwest of Port Elizabeth.

If you get extremely lucky, a ride at J-Bay can last two minutes, taking you through a few of the aforementioned breaks.

There are dolphins. There are sharks. A lot of sharks. That nibble on surfers quite regularly. And a mussel-covered rocky beach. It gets windy. It gets really cold. And yet, surfers love it. In 2015, Mick Fanning bumped into a shark—it got tangled in his leash—during the J-Bay Open finals.

According to Wikipedia: Fanning punched the shark and tried to wedge his board between the shark and his body, and he emerged from the attack physically unharmed.

📜 J-Bay’s surf history
Jeffreys Bay was “discovered” by South African surfer John Whitmore in 1959, but it wasn’t surfed until 1964, when five surfers—including John Grendon from Cape Town—tried to ride it on their 9’6” longboards at Supertubes. But the break was too super fast for the equipment, so they moved to the Point and rode there instead.

You’re probably hearing Bruce Brown and The Endless Summer made J-Bay—but it wasn’t actually featured in the movie. At all.

Here’s how it connects: St. Francis Bay, a neighboring right-hand point break just up the coast, was featured in The Endless Summer. In fact, it was one of the film’s most famous segments—Bruce Brown narrated the discovery of the “perfect wave” there. But, but, but—Surfer mag called it “fluky and unreliable,” according to the EOS, so anyone who traveled to South Africa and discovered J-Bay instead was pretty thrilled.

Today, J-Bay is as popular with tourists as it is with surfers, and it’s known for its seafood (especially calamari 🐙) and migrating whales.

It also hosts the J-Bay Open—formerly known as the Billabong Pro Jeffreys Bay—on the WSL circuit. This year, it was won by Gabriela Bryan of Hawai’i and Connor O’Leary, representing Japan.

^{WEEKLY POPUP}

 🍿 The less you do, the more you do

We haven’t had a Weekly Popup segment for a while, because honestly—I haven’t come across any brand new, practical solutions to help us get our pop-ups better.

Until last week, when we learned that:

• 🧠 Your brain gets fried when you throw too many things at it in the surf

• 📦 Your best chance for progress is to chunk-ify skill learning until it becomes automatic

• 👀 Your body will follow your eyes

So I decided to test it out.

Instead of obsessing over my pop-up, I focused solely on one thing: taking off at a 45-degree angle (okay, maybe a few more degrees than necessary… 😜).

Doing that forced me to look down the line instead of straight at the beach, like I usually do. And my brain—so surprised by this new, singular focus—let the pop-up just happen. Automatically. Faster. Still clumsy, sure, but definitely faster.

And? It was waaay more fun.

I can’t guarantee this trick will work for you, but if you try it—let me know how it went!

^{GIRLS’ RECS}

 🔑 I keep my car key…where?!

Surfing is hard. But the hardest thing a surfer will ever have to do—in addition to finding a parking spot in Newport Beach, California on the Fourth of July—is figure out where to store their valuables when heading into the ocean.

If you’re looking for a better place to store your valuables when you’re out and about in the surf, we have some recommendations from Girls Who Can’t Surf Good.

👉 Read the full story

^{THE WIPEOUT WEEKLY SURF NEWS ROUNDUP}

🗞️ London gets waves. Hawaiian highschoolers = championships. Young New Yorkers = the gift of surf. Surfing vet = new tooth.

🏄‍♀️ London gets first inland surf lake
Enfield Council (that’s north north London) approves 100-acre Surf London facility in Lea Valley, with surf, skate, wellness zones and £50M investment.

🌊 Rockaway surf school changes lives
New York Times profiles Louis Harris who offers free lessons, gear, and year-round mentorship to NYC kids via the Black Surfing Association.

🏆 Hawaii launches high school state champs
HHSAA announces first-ever varsity surfing championship at Hoʻokipa Beach Park, Maui, set for May 2026.

🦷 Tooth + surfboard = dentist saves day
Marine vet Brendan Gilmour loses a tooth at Waves of Valor—but gets it fixed same day by a fellow veteran dentist.

👉 Read the full news roundup

⬆️ Aaaaaaand that was the last wave of the week!
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^HOUSEKEEPING

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