If there’s one thing I hate about surfing, it’s how much I suck at going left. I am, of course, a regular footer. As such, I’ve spent my entire surfing life riding almost exclusively right handers. Where I grew up, 90% of the waves are rights, so it wasn’t all that hard to do. But as I progressed, I developed a strange and unreasonable aversion to lefts because, in the words of Derek Zoolander, I am not an ambi-turner.
As time went on, it got worse. While I got better at surfing, I surfed lefts less and less, partly because it wasn’t as much fun, and partly because I was just flat out embarrassed at how one-sided my surfing was (and still is). And now, almost two decades later, I still surf on my backhand like a spastic, poo-stancing beginner–only one that realizes how shitty they look. It’s horrible.
It’s a very real, if very first-world, problem. So when a clip like the one above makes its way into the ether of the internet, it hurts me. I look at those perfect, barreling lefts, reeling off the point in all their watery glory. I look at the people inside those tubes, weaving their way through them, making those small adjustments to stay in the pit just a little bit longer. I look at the horizon, staring at all those perfect lines pouring through… and I know that I will never be able to surf them as well as I would like to. But hey, dreaming is nice, right?
