Surf Tips: Zeke Lau, Eric Arakawa & Pilgrim Surf + Supply

July flew by, can you believe it’s the last day of the month again? What are the best months for surfing in your area?

While you think about that, check out this month's Basis Surf Podcast recap, packed full of surfing tips and gems from some of the best surfers and coaches around the world.🏄🏻‍♂️🏄🏻‍♀️

Here’s a quick recap of the podcasts from July:

• Zeke Lau: On How CT Level Pros Train and Think About Technique
• Eric Arakawa: On Shaping Surfboards for Jack Robinson, Andy Irons, and the Hos
• Pilgrim Surf + Supply: A Guide to Alternative Surfboards

Check out the podcast videos below along with some of our favorite tips from each episode.

"Essentially when you're doing a turn, once you start pushing on your board, you start to slow down. So it’s about finding that place where you’re going to be able to push hard and maintain speed all the way through. But most of it’s just me getting way back on my tail, and once I feel the kick of the tail pad, I know my foot is in the right place and I’m basically just going to lay everything into it.

And the more speed you have, the harder you have to push and the quicker you’re going to have to transition that weight where throwing the head over the shoulders is a huge thing for me. I actually learned that from Fred Patacchia, he told me, “Dude, you’re not turning your head when you turn, so you’re turning halfway. If you turn your head, everything will follow through.” Once I was able to figure out how to push hard and simultaneously shift that weight and then turn my head over my front shoulder, everything just kind of flowed."

- Zeke Lau

“There’s this whole fad of just hyper-focusing on volume. Static buoyancy isn’t the end all to the answer to catching waves. You just can’t go ahead and look at volume and go, ‘Okay, well if 35 liters is good for me and I can catch waves on this one board, then all I have to do is choose a board that has 35 liters matching volume and go.’ It doesn’t work that way. Everything has to balance, outline, rocker, foil, foam distribution, all has to come together.” 

- Eric Arakawa

"A lot of my friends that were like, bro hammer short borders, no matter what the conditions, they’re on a thruster. And after a while, their surfing style, you would notice they start surfing off the back of the board, off the fins a lot and not using their rails in cutbacks as much, kind of doing that kind of flicky thing just so they can fan the spray, but they're not carrying their speed through the turn and not surfing very gracefully and kind of missing sections.

Some of them would get midlengths or a 6ft egg or a single fin, and you’d start to see it smooth out their surfing. You start to see them go, ‘oh now I’m rising and falling and I’m using the rail more.’ When I do a turn, I have to use the rail more. And when they bring that back to the shortboard, it’s like, whoa, new dimension opened."

- Chris Gentille of Pilgrim Surf + Supply

Hope you learned a thing or two from our podcasts! Stay tuned for next month’s content! 🤙🤙🤙

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