The Physics of Waves

I’ve always felt most comfortable in the water. I grew up splashing around in the ocean off Rehoboth Beach, a mid-Atlantic resort town on the Delaware coast, and I swam and dove competitively throughout my childhood and teenage years. When surfing came into my life, it felt like the next logical level of a natural desire to spend all day in the water.

But it was more than that too. Surfing was a welcome escape from the culture I’d grown up in. Being raised in the DC suburbs meant coming of age in a place where country clubs dictated the social scene, where the men talked and the women laughed. I never felt like I quite fit in. When I moved across the country to Southern California for grad school, I felt something that had eluded me my entire life: I belong here.

My initiation to surfing was at First Point, an iconic surf break near the Malibu Pier, known for crowds and near-perfect waves. It was nothing short of revelatory. I immediately thought, “I’ve found my thing.” After catching that first wave, I went every day at least once for an entire year. If good waves were expected at 6:00 a.m., I was there. If good waves were expected at 6:00 p.m., I was there. I started sleeping in my car to go out first thing in the morning, before a ton of other people got there. I’d park on the cliff near Leo Carillo State Beach in Malibu, futon mattress stuffed in the back of my tan Jeep Cherokee. My parents would have been horrified, but I knew I was safe because there were other surfers doing the same thing.

There was a lot of riding around in trucks with boys during that time. Just as surfing had been a way to break free from DC culture, the surfers themselves felt wildly different from the boys I’d grown up around. They were two totally different brands of masculinity: the West Coast surfers strong and self-possessed, the East Coast prep school guys performatively misogynistic. Instead of the nervousness I’d always experienced around boys in high school, I felt safe walking into the water with my surfing buddies. They got me.

They also knew where all the good spots were. We’d paddle out, and there would be fifty guys. But where I would have felt intimidated as the only girl at a frat party, being the only girl at a surf spot made me feel cared for. I’d grown up with a forced, formal chivalry, but with the surfers I was the recipient of true gentlemanly behavior, as they let me drop in on waves and let it slide when I inadvertently cut them off. There was a confidence and slight cockiness behind the gestures since they knew they could get any other wave that came along. Might as well give an easy one to the girl, right? It never felt patronizing; it felt like an older sibling giving a younger one the bigger piece of pie. Pure. Honest. Unforced. I loved surfing—and the guys I surfed with—with my entire being.

Every day, when not studying incessantly for my master’s in psychology, I paddled out, putting in about a year before I felt like I really knew the scene. I learned by listening to the chatter around me, deciphering quick quips like “That looks like a good break” or “You can’t surf at Oxnard Shores; it’s heavy local with a steep drop.”

However, by the sixth or seventh time you go surfing, you already begin to get a feel for the waves. It starts by knowing the tides. They shift by about forty minutes every day, so you know that if it’s low tide at 7:00 a.m. one day, it’ll be 7:40ish the next. There are multiple variables at work—in statistics, this is called an interaction effect—so depending on wind speed and duration, some spots work best at mid-tide, while others can be great at high tide. For the most part, though, low tide is key at many surf breaks because when waves come in toward the shore, they have to hit something to break. If there’s nothing to stop the energy of the wave—say, the water is too deep—it won’t break until it hits the shore. No surf.

The other thing you need for good surf is a swell—a storm, usually thousands of miles away, that sends sets of waves, pushed by the wind, across the ocean. In California, they’re coming from either Alaska or the Southern Hemisphere, depending on the season. In the winter, storms coming off the Gulf of Alaska are almost constant, creating daily surf on any part of the coastline facing north from November until March or April.

Nowadays all surf conditions are easily found on the internet. But back in the 1980s and ’90s, we just had to watch the waves to scout it out. There were tide calendars too, but part of the fun was going to each spot to check out the tide, see where the waves were breaking. You want to calculate the sweet spot when the waves are best but not too crowded with other surfers. Most of the time, the wind picks up around noon, so you want to go early in the morning or right before dark. Wind is the enemy of surf. It makes the wave crumbly instead of glassy and smooth.

When you’re ready, you zip up your wet suit, put the leash around your ankle. You carry your board into the water and wait for a lull in the set. You don’t want to paddle right out just to have waves break on top of you. You watch for a little pause in the action, or even a riptide that can help pull you out. This is the hardest part. Sometimes you’ll take ten waves on the head, just constant pummeling, until you finally get to a safe spot where you’re not going to get pulled back onto shore. You rest for a couple of seconds, take a few breaths. You might have to duck dive under a few more waves, which takes some power. Eventually you turn your board and wait.

How do you decide which wave to take? It’s like knowing when to sneeze—it’s more about letting it come to you so that by the time it arrives, inertia takes care of the rest. The main thing is to commit. If you try to halfway pull out, you’re going to have a worse wipeout than if you had given it your all. So you commit. You start paddling toward the beach as the wave builds behind you. You may have to turn around a little bit to see if you need to speed up or slow down your paddling or adjust your position on the board, but you don’t want to overthink it. None of this “Wow, this is a really big wave” or “I don’t know if I can do it.” You paddle, paddle, paddle and then wait to feel the power of it catch up to you. It’s better to pop up too late than too early. If you pop up late, riding most of the wave on your stomach and standing up at the end, you’ll still get the wave. That works fine for beginners. But if you pop up too early, you put too much weight on the back of the board. The wave will pass you by.

When you time it right and catch a wave, it’s like suddenly having the ability to fly. You’re stoked. You don’t hear anything, except for maybe a “Whoop!” from another surfer who’s psyched for you. Mostly it’s the definition of white noise—the ocean literally saying, “Shhhhh.”

What you’re seeing, on the other hand, is much more chaotic. It’s tricky because wherever you look is where your board is going to go, so if you make eye contact with someone, you’re probably going to hit them. You want to look at people out of the corner of your eye while focusing on an empty spot in the ocean. It’s somewhere between a rush of pure adrenaline and sensory deprivation. You are not of land or air, you are one with the sea, and you don’t have the space in your mind to think of anything else.

There’s this saying among surfers, “One wave.” Meaning that one wave wipes out everything you were worried about before you hit the sand. Renewing your car registration, revising your syllabus, answering emails—all gone. It has a way of transforming fear into a calculated risk, one that you can face with courage or sheer stupidity.

You start with the paddle out, which is often scary, especially on a big day, where a lot of luck is involved in even making it out before a huge wave sends you back to the beach. Once you drop in, though, the fear goes away. Even if you wipe out, as long as you’ve committed, you might be held down for a bit, but the ocean will push you back up. It’s not really scary; it’s just tiring. I used to do it on purpose when I was a kid, because the waves on the East Coast are usually only a foot tall. I’d open my eyes and see all the different colors from the sunlight hitting the water and the sand running through the currents. I’d spin and spin, pretending I was in a washing machine. It’s oddly beautiful. But not frightening. The paddle out is the scariest part.