Canoe river skills: surfing

Surfing is not only plenty of fun, it's also a really valuable skill builder. You develop a good feel for your boat, for balance. You'll work out a great tilt, build good brace reflexes and most probably have plenty of chances to test your wet exit or bomb proof your roll.

Basically there are 2 types of surfing you can practice: the front/back surf and the side surf.

Front/Back surfing

Front or back surfing is a great skill tester for your steering strokes. If you do them improperly you create to much drag, and you'll be dragged of the wave. So the better your correction strokes the better you'll be at surfing.

One of the hard things with front surfing is to prevent your bow digging in too hard in the upcoming wave. Try leaning forward or backward, to slightly alter the behaviour of your boat.

Back surfing puts your bow correction strokes to the test. If you can do a back-surf you'll most probably also be able to do your backferries on that section of the river.

While surfing pay attention to your tilt, since surfing is much more then correction strokes only. It's loads of fun when paddling a river downstream searching for surf waves and playing around in it for a while!

Side surfing

Side surfing in an open canoe is harder and certainly wetter. But I think it's also more fun, and it's definetly a good skill builder. Here comes the boat feeling and tilt into practice, but also a good brace and the possibility to train your wet-exit or bomb-proof your roll.
The nice part of sidesurfing is that you'll also be less intimidated by waves, since you're used to a boat bouncing around in the river.

Side surfing you do by tilting your boat, open side downstream. It is important that you tilt your boat, keeping your upper body as upright as possible. If you lean your body out of the boat, you mostly can still brace on the wave, but you need your paddle to stay upright, you can't use your paddle anymore to work your boat in the wave. You should try to avoid the so called bell boye lean.
If your surf looks like this, you still have bell boye lean:

Getting that bell boye lean out is not easy, but it's crucial for a long surf. In the image to the left the bell boye lean is not that extreme, but it's still too much to surf and use the paddle blade freely.

You need the capacity to work your boat in the wave, so you do need your paddle for that.

In the following images you can see an upright body posture, allowing the blade to be worked. The head is kept low in this case, to avoid tipping over.

In the next image you can see another slight bel boye lean. But here I needed massive force to get the stern of the boat back in the wave.

If you are doing a proper J-lean, you won't actually need your paddle. You can show of lifting it in the air, and only bring it down to work your way around in the hole.

A good indication to verify yourself if you're doing a J-lean or a bel-boy lean is the following. If your grip hand is relative short to the center of the boat, you're probably doing a good j-lean or at least coming close to one. If youre grip hand is on the gunwale or even outside the boat, you're probably doing a body lean and you're not tilting the boat.

Make sure you pick a safe hole for side surfing. Search one that's not retaining paddlers or boats for too long and check that the river downstream is free of obstructions. Tipping over in a side surf can go lightening fast, and you can pop up surprisingly far downstream!

You can start with easy waves an holes, and stepping up as your skills progress. Btw, knowing how to surf and how to exit a hole is a very usefull skill for the time you end up by accident in a hole on the river.

Have fun surfing, it's fun and it's improving your paddling skills.