🏄‍♀️ Everyone wants a piece of surfing 🫨

👋 Happy Swap Ideas Day! We’d love to swap ideas with you about how to keep surfing surfing. Because with El Niño eating our coastlines, AI flooding our apps, and fashion swallowing our sport, what will be left for the rest of us? 😜

🏄‍♀️ Let’s surf:

• Everyone wants a piece of surfing 🫨

• What’s your angle? ↗️

• Hurricane mud surfing 🌀

• From stinging eyelids to beginner surf trips 🏄🏻‍♀️

• Surf news roundup 🗞️

^SURFODRAMA

🏄🏻‍♀️ Everyone wants a piece of surfing 🫨

Fashion designers want it. Pharrell wants it. Bros with keyboards want it. Property developers want it. Everyone wants a piece of surfing.

As if surfing wasn’t hard enough already, there are powers at play that want in on the action.

Because surfing is having a moment. Again.

Every few years, yet another industry, or group of people who have never stepped into the ocean, happens upon surfing and thinks: My gosh, has anyone considered doing XYZ here?

🩳 First, they came for the board shorts
At Louis Vuitton’s Spring/Summer 2027 menswear show in Paris, Pharrell Williams sent models around an eight-meter artificial wave wearing a collection described as taking us from the beach to the boardroom. Models carried surfboards.

Miu Miu featured satin board shorts. So did Dries Van Noten. There were a ton of flip-flops on the catwalks at Chloé, Balenciaga and Bottega Veneta. And in the UK, on the high street, Asos is selling a blue baseball cap embroidered with the words “surf instructor”.

Marie Claire magazine coined the phrase “board short summer”, which apparently translates into “dressing like you surf even if you’ve never set foot on a board.”

The co-opting of surfing by fashion is nothing new. It is more of a cyclical thing. Chanel has made surfboards, after all. And I have nothing against Pharrell either.

His Atlantic Park Surf project in Virginia Beach also supports Next Wave, a program providing free swimming and surfing lessons, equipment and coaching to local kids.

Clothes are clothes. Surfing looks good. A surfboard is an undeniably excellent photographic prop. Not a big deal, right?

🤖 But then AI paddled out
I always thought of surfing as being pretty AI-resistant. It’s not like a large language model can pick up a surfboard and run into the surf.

But then, last month, SURFER published an article titled “Where and How Artificial Intelligence Is Coming to Surfing.”

The answer was: pretty much everywhere.

AI is already being used, or proposed, in forecasting, shark-risk assessment, coaching, surfboard manufacturing, competition judging, media, imagery, virtual reality and the analysis of surfer movements.

Some of this is genuinely fascinating and extraordinarily useful.

Some of this may look extraordinarily useful, but may also become rather harmful.

Just because anyone with a keyboard who hasn’t even stepped into the ocean and doesn’t understand the complexities of surfing can vibe-code a surf app, it doesn’t mean that they should.

Take all the new surf forecasting apps that have flooded the app stores.

A forecast presented with enormous confidence, which is a hallmark of AI, may be technically correct while being practically useless. An app can know the swell height without understanding what that swell does at your particular beach. And advice about where and when to paddle out can have consequences, especially for beginners.

Or imagine a digital-clone surf fitness app teaching you how to pop up. Actually, this is too scary. Let’s NOT imagine that.

When prompted, AI puts "surfing" high up on a list of promising niches to build your business around. Guess what the number one idea it recommends for a grand money-making scheme is:

"A beginner-friendly forecast app that tells you where and when to surf based on your ability, rather than simply showing you swell data."

Figures. There are about 20 vibe-coded surf forecasting apps clogging the app stores right now, and we don't recommend any of them. But we do have a list of the surf apps worth checking.

🏨 Hotel magnates want in on it too
This is going to be quick. Because the less said about wave pools, the better. 😜

They are one of the fastest-growing parts of the surf industry and are increasingly being built as part of larger developments with hotels, apartments, restaurants, shops and other infrastructure.

They are not cheap either. The surfing and entrance experience alone can cost at least $20 million to build, while an hour of surfing can cost around $200.

👀 Stay vigilant
Listen. This isn’t a call to chase fashion designers off the beach.

Surfing does not belong exclusively to people who discovered it first. Newcomers bring ideas, money, attention and sometimes genuine improvements.

Fashion can celebrate surfing and make us feel good about being part of something. A quickly built app can solve a real problem. A multimillionaire’s surf park can give children their first experience in the water or be a godsend to a landlocked surfer.

But stay vigilant. Because among people who care about surfing, there will always be unscrupulous parties trying to cash in.

So, “read the reviews”, so to speak. And ask:

Who made this? What do they know? Has it been tested by people who actually surf? Does it offer good value? Is it contributing something to surfing, or merely extracting something from it?

Surfing is for everyone. But that doesn’t mean everyone who sells it to you knows what they’re talking about or has surfers’ best interests at heart.

^{SURF SKILLS}

↗️ What’s your angle?

You know how you’re told to take a wave at an angle and look where you’re going? It’s the next big step in your surfing journey after catching waves and standing up.

Angling means riding across the face of the wave rather than straight in toward the beach. You point the nose down the line and follow the shoulder as it peels, staying just ahead of the whitewater. Simples.

Without it, there’s no progress in surfing. You don’t get to truly ride the wave, and you don’t discover your lefts and rights.

It’s also the foundation for every fun maneuver that comes after: cutbacks, noseriding, tuberiding, aerials.

Common sense, right?

But there’s more to the story of angling than meets the eye.

Surfers have been doing it since long before anyone thought to write it down. Ancient Polynesians veered their finless boards across the face, and in Hawai‘i there was a word for it: lala. Then, as surfing itself nearly disappeared in the late 1800s, angling largely disappeared with it. Most surfers who did paddle out at the turn of the century just aimed at the sand and rode straight.

Angling came back around 1905, when a small crew at Waikiki began treating surfing less like a straight shot to shore and more like a performance. Ten years later, writer Jack London returned to Waikiki after a seven-year absence and reported that surfers were now riding at “astonishing slant angles,” something he simply hadn’t seen the last time he was there.

Today, you’ll hear “slide,” “trim,” and “cut” for more or less the same idea.

With thanks to the Encyclopedia of Surfing for keeping the history of angling alive.

^{ViD OF THE WEEK}

🌊 Hurricane mud surfing

With all the depressing weather-related news this week, here's a bit of mudsurfing fun from Jamie O'Brien.

Massive waves, flooding, power cuts, destruction, and the surfers just shrug: Hurricane who?

^{LATEST FROM GIRLS WHO CAN’T SURF GOOD}

💬 3 things we’re figuring out this week

🍁 A Montreal beginner looking for a solo three-week surf trip in May or June, with a hostel and coaches? Community top picks: Witch’s Rock in Costa Rica; Casa de Colores in El Salvador, with one-on-one coaches who’ll offer package rates; Dreamsea in Avellanas; Sayulita and Puerto Escondido (Oasis Surf Camp) in Mexico; Canoa in Ecuador; and a Ysanet Batista retreat in the Dominican Republic. From a fellow Montrealer: Mystery Surf Camp in Imsouane, Morocco, is a direct Air Transat flight to Agadir. It’s all-inclusive, great value, has small beginner waves, and is safer for solo travelers than Central America, where the waves can be big and difficult to learn on.

👁️ Sensitive eyes and stinging eyelids after multiple days of surfing? The community verdict: it’s almost certainly the sunscreen. Fixes: switch to a tear-free mineral sunscreen (Sun Bum Baby Mineral, Blue Lizard, Coppertone “No Tears,” or Babyganics Tear-Free); use a mineral zinc stick above your eyebrows so nothing runs down; wear a surf hat to keep sunscreen off your forehead entirely; rinse your face and eyes with fresh water the moment you get out (one member keeps a gallon in her car for this); try Ombraz sunglasses if you want something on your face in the water; and ask a pharmacist about hyaluronic acid eye drops if the skin itself is genuinely irritated.

🎒 A Boston-based beginner adventurer looking for December or January hostels where she can surf, fish, hike, and roam? Community top picks: Morocco (Surfstyle Morocco, Surf Sun Stay, and Mint Surf), New Zealand for summer longboard waves, and El Salvador (Odisea Latina). One member also flagged a girls’ surf trip happening in November, if you can move your trip up.

👉 Join us for more recs, chatter, and support

^{THE WIPEOUT WEEKLY SURF NEWS ROUNDUP}

🗞️ Hurricanes Marie and Lowell hit California and Hawai'i

Two weeks ago, we told you Aliso Beach had been stripped bare and El Niño was on its way. Hurricane Marie just showed us what that actually looks like.

🌊 Hurricane Marie never made landfall. She battered the California coast anyway.
Marie churned offshore before being downgraded on September 6, but her long-range swell, combined with 7-foot king tides, sent 8-to-20-foot waves toward south-facing coastlines from San Diego to the South Bay. Aliso Beach got hit again, Salt Creek is basically gone, and homes in Dana Point were hit, too.

🪵 The Wedge unearthed the skeleton of its old pier
The swell scoured away so much sand at Newport Beach’s Wedge that remnants of the old Wedge Pier resurfaced after decades underground.

🚨 A surfer was swept over a Newport Beach jetty
Video from Newport Beach Lifeguards shows a surfer being swept onto the rocks of the 56th Street jetty, briefly getting to his feet, and leaping off just before a second set crashed onto the same spot. A lifeguard ran in seconds later. No injuries were reported. Hordes of surfers showed up despite NWS high-surf advisories.

🌀 Hurricane Lowell knocked out power to 90% of Kaua‘i
While California was reeling from Marie, Lowell’s core passed just west of Hawai‘i, knocking out power to 33,000 customers on Kaua‘i, about 90% of the island, closing Līhu‘e Airport, and dumping more than 17 inches of rain on Mount Wai‘ale‘ale.

📈 An El Niño Kelvin wave is about to raise California’s sea level by another foot
A coastal Kelvin wave, a slow, invisible slosh of water traveling north from Baja at 6 mph, will raise sea levels along the California coast by about a foot by mid-October, according to CNN. Combined with warm-water expansion, the sea level is expected to be 10 to 14 inches above normal. As one UC Santa Cruz researcher put it: “Every 2 to 4 inches of sea level doubles our flood risk.”

👉 Read the full news roundup

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⬆️ Aaaaaaand that was the last wave of the week!
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With stoke,

Zuz & The Wipeout Weekly