I vividly remember the day I fell in love with bodysurfing. I was on vacation in Hawaii and the weather was perfect—hot, sunny, dry, clear skies. As I headed out to hike a rugged stretch of coastline, I noticed a beautiful, empty wave not far from the trailhead. With swim fins and trunks in the backseat of the rental car, I decided to skip the hike and go bodysurfing instead.
I couldn’t believe my luck. I had stumbled upon an empty beach break with perfect waves for bodysurfing: steep, hollow, and fast. Best of all, I had them all to myself. After thirty minutes of non-stop wave riding nirvana, I decided to float on my back for a while and take in my surroundings.
Steep, verdant cliffs stood tall in the background. The ocean water was crystal-clear and sparkling in the midday sun, a beautiful shade of dappled blue. I closed my eyes and breathed in the sweet scent of plumeria. Suddenly, a tingling rush of gratitude came over me. I felt at home in my weightless body—untethered—completely present and open to life. This was as good as I’d ever felt in 25 years on our blue planet.
As I lay there floating, I pondered one of my favorite quotes by philosopher Joseph Campbell. “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are, if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”
I had found my bliss, and was determined to follow it.
Wave Riding Art
Years later, I heard legendary bodysurfer Mark Cunningham describe a similar revelation he had about bodysurfing. “As a teenager,” he said in an interview, “I remember very clearly sitting on the beach thinking this is as clean and beautiful and real and meaningful to me as anything in the world, and if it’s giving me pleasure and making me happy, why shouldn’t I continue to do this as long as I can?”
Cunningham, now in his late 60s, is one of few icons in the sport of bodysurfing, and remains one of the best bodysurfers in the world today. Cunningham had followed his bliss for most of his life, and it worked out pretty well for him—so why shouldn’t I?
After returning home to California, I began to wonder if it was possible to make a living as a bodysurfer, so I devoured as much information about the sport as I could find. The only problem was there wasn’t much information to begin with. A simple Google search of the term surfing turned up over a billion results, while bodysurfing turned up less than ten million. Board-surfing had hundreds of books, magazines, films, and websites dedicated to the sport, but bodysurfing had next to nothing.
That said, I kept reading about a rare book titled The Art of Wave Riding, a bodysurfing “how-to” manual from the 1930s. Written by California lifeguard and waterman Ron Drummond, this manual had an initial print run of just 500 copies. Interestingly, it was the first published work on surfing of any kind, making it both valuable and hard to find. I initially tried buying the book, but the cheapest version I could find cost $5,000. In the end, I settled for a private reading of an original copy at UCLA’s special collections library.
From the moment I sat down to read The Art of Wave Riding, I knew I was on to something special.
A great deal of publicity has been given the Hawaiian swimmers on riding waves with surfboards. Without a doubt it is great sport, but in my estimation it cannot compare with the thrills, pleasure, and exercise of body surfing.
Drummond continued:
One has only to watch a swarm of bathers at any crowded beach in order to see that thousands of people are interested in the sport. Whenever a good wave for riding comes in, about half the people make an attempt to ride it, and only about one-tenth of one per cent of them even get started on it. It is this pitiful sight of thousands of swimmers, young and old, men and women, always trying and never succeeding, that has urged me to put into print a few hints that I hope will be of some help in teaching the enthusiastic beach-goers the art of body surfing, and thus increase a thousand fold the pleasure derived from ocean bathing.
Drummond’s Bodysurfing Methodology
In The Art of Wave Riding, Drummond offered a step-by-step methodology for bodysurfing white water waves without swim fins. According to Drummond, it was possible for beginners to practice bodysurfing in shallow water by pushing off the seafloor at the opportune moment and riding a white water surge straight to shore in the streamline position.
It never occurred to me to teach others how to bodysurf. But after reading The Art of Wave Riding, I set out to share Drummond’s techniques with other “enthusiastic beach-goers.”
After nearly five years of teaching hundreds of beginners how to bodysurf, I am now a firm believer in the importance of disseminating this simple wave-riding skill. What I’ve come to believe is that bodysurfing is a vital prerequisite for anyone spending time in the ocean, especially surfers and lifeguards.
Thankfully, bodysurfing is fairly easy to learn, feels good for most people, and has the power to improve our health, wellbeing, and outlook toward the natural world. I hope this blog convinces you of that, and sets you on a path to discover the thrill of bodysurfing for yourself.
