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From the high-flying aerial assaults that grace the annual Vans Stab High contest, to the ankle-breaking acid-drops that Nate Fletcher and Noa Deane have launched and stomped off 10-15-foot cliffs, many of modern surfing’s most exciting and innovative manoeuvres take their cues from skateboarding. This high risk, wing-heeled above the lip approach is an adapted attitude from skating, said the late great surfer/skater Kalani David, “You have that style where you don’t really care and you’re going as fast as you can and trying to go as big as you can.” And this f**k-it, high-flying skate attitude has worked wonders for the surfers leaning into it. Just peep the last eight men’s World Surf League Champs – the Brazilian storm and John-John Florence who are all madmen above the lip. Not to mention they all skate.
So bollocks to the idea that the ‘best way to get better at surfing is to go surfing’. Sure, it’s true, but only when you are surfing. Factor in how many days a year your home break provides rideable waves, and the physical amount of time you spend riding them (as opposed to paddling) and you begin to realise that board time is a finite resource in surf-ing. Alternately skating pretty much allows you as much board time as you want, even if you’re a beginner. Christian Fletcher, a pioneering test-pilot, puts it into perspective.“If you were to surf Venice every single day for a year, three times a day, for two hours a day, how much time do you think you’d actually get standing on your board? An hour? How much time do you get standing on your skate-board when you go to the skatepark for two hours?”Without skateboarding, lofty surfing wouldn’t exist. Greyson Fletcher, son of Christian explains, “Skateboarding definitely influenced surfing by bringing more technical and advanced tricks to surfing….skateboarding is evolving surfing…. people weren’t doing airs on surfboards before people were skating.
Surfer/skater Eric Geiselman details how sending it on a four-wheeled wooden plank can directly improve your surfing. Firstly, skating can teach you how to stomp landings, which is important because, “In surfing, you might only get one shot a session if that”says Eric Geiselman. “You could always go to the skatepark and find some part of a ramp where you could just fly out to the flats – that was insane for building a base of the fundamentals.
When it comes to airs, skating helps you feel at home in the air with grabs, hang-time, as well as the rotations. The ability to repeat and tweak your airs on a ramp also cultivates patience for comp surfing, said David, “In skating, you know the bowl is not going to move. It’s going to be there. I think that’s how skating also helps with surfing. You’re not in that much of a hurry because you know it’s right there. I’ve seen guys go out in a heat and they start panicking. They’re panicking and pumping so hard and trying so hard.”
To ignore skating is to turn a blind eye to the progressive feedback loop that’s pushed both practices to new heights. Tony Alva, the pro-skater and lifelong surfer who pioneered the frontside air in a pool, says that surfing and skating have influenced each other for many decades. “It’s a complete circle of progression.Both compliment one another. Cross training is ideal,” says Alva in the Surfer’s Journal Podcast. Alva explains the lineage between his vert style of skating and surfing. “Once we got into vertical, that was total surf skating.All we wanted to do was just tap the lip and throw down kind of a Bertlemann style turn.”Skate legend, the late Jay Adams agreed, a limber-limbed surfing attack rolled right into a functional, concrete choreography. “Larry Bertlemann, Buttons, and Mike Ho were the hot new kids ruling the surfing world and we copied their surfing styles.”
Herbie Fletcher went so far as to say that,“Surfing started skating.” But Herbie also skated, and commonly used skating as a pre-surf warm up. Christian Fletcher claimed he could recreate the feeling of hucking a front-side off the lip by doing a frontside grind on a pool coping, “Barefoot, with some Astrodeck on your skateboard.” It’s this kind of borrowing and cross training that leads to innovation.
Slater skates or at least skated too. Anyone old enough to remember his mini-half-pipe performance in Sarge’s Surfing Scrap Book? Kelly slays it, but Tommy Carroll can’t quite make those thunderous quads look nimble on four wheels.
The picture’s crystal clear: Many of the best modern high-performance surfers also dabble with skate decks. Get out there and have some fun with it. Skate barefoot with some Astrodeck on your board. Grab a surf-skate and do a few Bert slides. Find a skate-park and launch yourself off a ramp section until you land a grab, then try tweaking it.Not only will you gain experience in the air, you’ll be able to go bigger and faster when you go surfing. Just remember concrete is harder than water, but from the streets to the surf, board time is board time.
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