14 de diciembre, 2025

The Secret Technique to Hunting Waves

How to Hunt for Waves: What Kind of Hunter Are You?

One of the easiest ways to understand wave selection is to think of yourself as a hunter and of every wave as prey. So the next question is: what kind of hunter are you right now?

The answer to this changes based on (1) your skill level and (2) where you are in your session. Let’s break it down.

Beginner to Intermediate: Be a Ravenous Hunter

If you’re in the early stages of surfing, you should be going after everything. You should be hunting rabbits, squirrels, deer, or essentially anything that moves.

Why? Because you don’t yet have the memory bank to know what a “good” wave looks and feels like. You can’t reliably judge if you’re too deep, too far out, too far inside, if the wave is moving too fast or is even too soft. You haven’t logged enough reps to know this yet. The only real fix to this is repetition. The more waves you chase, the faster you learn:

What takeoff zones work
What waves outrun you
Which ones are worth the paddle
Which ones are not for you

If you only wait for “perfect” waves too early in your surfing, you end up sitting still for too long, wasting time, and slowing down your progression because you’re not repeating action. Hungry hunters improve faster because they put themselves in the mix more often and learn from their failures and successes.

Advanced Surfers: Become a Sniper

As your skills improve, you start building that memory bank and start knowing exactly what you want from a wave. This is when you shift into sniper mode. Instead of chasing every bit of movement out there, you start hunting for one target: the wave that lets you practice the exact thing you’re working on. Maybe you’re hunting:

A specific steep section for a snap
A longer wall to practice pumping
A left instead of a right
A hollow shape for a barrel section

If you paddle for everything, you end up out of position when the wave you actually want rolls through, and wasting energy on waves you don’t want. It’s like firing off rounds at rabbits and squirrels and then scaring the trophy buck walking right behind them. Snipers wait, choose, and conserve energy for the right moment.

Switching Modes: The Real Key

Here’s where it gets interesting: You’re never actually just one type of hunter for an entire session. In fact, the best surfers out there frequently switch modes on purpose.

Early in the session they are hungry hunters, they go for a bunch of waves, build rhythm, wake up the body, and get used to the wave and the lineup. Later in the session they shift into sniper mode. The rust has been shaken off, some momentum and familiarity is built, and now they can be selective and focus on quality instead of quantity.

BUT,

If you go too sniper too early, you run the risk of staying stiff, cold, and out of sync with the waves. And if you stay ravenous too long, you burn out quicker and end up missing the set waves or the ones that you would rather be catching. The balance changes daily and based on the session, but the principle generally stays the same:

Hunt wide when you’re warming up and hunt with precision when you’re tuned in.

The True Skill of Wave Selection

The process of wave selection isn’t a random act. It is a skill you build through reps and awareness. Thinking of yourself as a hunter gives you a simple way to understand how to approach different parts of a session and different stages of your surfing.

Sometimes you need repetition and other times you need precision. Surfers who improve the fastest are the ones who know when to switch.

Enter the Basis Paddle Trainer.

I've gone months without surfing and rolled up to pumping swell and surfed 3 hr sessions, multiple times a day, day after day after day, by using the Basis Paddle Trainer.

Train anytime, anywhere, so you can catch more waves and have more fun.

Unlike elastic resistance bands, swimming in the pool, or funky gym workouts these things actually work.

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