Skimboarding is a variation of surfing that involves starting from the sand, riding into the surf and, then, riding the surf back. Although it might be sufing’s lesser-known cousin, skimboarding is still great in its own right. Check out what the best skimboarders can do on a board smaller than a surfboard and without fins.

Introduction To Awesome

Here’s a good beginning example of skimboarding. As you can see, riders cut into the surf with an agility and sharpness that you can’t necessarily get on a surfboard, due to its much greater size; with a skimboard, however, you can turn on a dime and cut aggressively into the surf. There’s also the opportunity for some serious aerial maneuvers, including flips and spins, so long as you make sure to keep the board pinned to your feet with one of your free hands. Primarily, though, riders will go out into the waves and then break back with it — that’s the most basic, and common, technique in skimboarding, and the one that riders spend most of their time on, although they’ll also use waves like skateboarders use rails, grinding along the top of them parallel to the beach.

Hard Skimming

Skimboarding is a cousin of surfing, but they’re as different as they are similar. In a lot of ways, skimboarding is like wakeboarding except without the speedboat and the open water. Instead, skimboarders take advantage of the rough surf near the land as well as the tides and currents that affect the water greatly that far in. Plus, there’s the slick sand near the edge of the beach that helps them launch into the ocean. The key difference here, however, is that these boards are so much lighter. While you don’t have the capacity for huge air and stunts that you do wakeboarding, when you’re launching off of the intense swells that a speedboat creates, you can still get up pretty well.

Brandon Sears Dominates

With the possible air skimboarders can hit off speedboat swells comes the opportunity for board tricks. In this way, skimboarding sort of resembles skateboarding, another sport where you’re riding a board that isn’t attached to your feet  or too large to properly use for board tricks. You can spin the board in 360s below your feet or keep it attached for flips and the like. Either way, there’s some flexibility as long as it’s back and attached to your soles by the time you hit the waves again. Even though we did compare skimboarding to skateboarding, the waves definitely change the game a little bit. When you’re skateboarding, you know where that pavement will be when you come down. When you’re skimboarding, you have an idea, but water moves.

2012 Cabo Clasico Contest

One of the most interesting things about skimboarding is the way the boarders get started. Skimboarders fling themselves on to the wet part of the sand where it just meets the surf, sliding into the water with just enough velocity to get them started on the surface. Obviously, this is a rough and risky way to get moving, considering the unpredictability of where you’ll meet the water, what state the water will be in when it meets you and what kind of turbulence you’ll find. Usually, however, it’s worth enough speed and momentum to get you going, at which point the waves and tide should do the rest. Balance is immensely important for skimboarding, as is the ability to feel the terrain below you with intuitiveness, so you know how to respond.

Team Zap

At the end of the day, however, you can definitely see the similarities between skimboarding and surfing. Both sports appeal to similar sensibilities. Like surfers, skimboarders ride under the waves as though they’re in a tunnel, and then try to emerge before the waves come crashing down on their heads. Skimboarding is inherently dependent on the water as both partner and adversary, the same way surfing is. The waves and their unpredictability are constantly providing opportunities as well as obstacles, and they’ll take you under as soon as they’ll carry you to and from shore. Despite these similarities, there are plenty of specific virtues particular to skimboarding, and it seems like most water-sport practitioners are doing themselves a disservice if they don’t check it out.