Kelly Slater Answers Surfing Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

Hi, I'm Kelly Slater. I'm a professional surfer, and I'm here to answer questions from Twitter. This is Surfing Support. All right, first up, Ian Attack asks, how do wetsuits work? Does your whole body stay dry or what? Does it get a little bit wet? I need a scientist. Basically, it just keeps the water between the wetsuit and your body warm. You can actually last a long time. The wetsuits are really good now. The materials are good. It's actually remarkable how cold the water people can surf in. On the East Coast, people regularly surf in the wintertime in 30-something degree water, or almost freezing. So, I mean, you can surf right down to when it's ice, or you can just pee in it, and that makes you warm. Jay Rodriguez Piano asks, actually an absurd amount of surfers in the water. I don't know how they know whose turn it is to get the wave. Unspoken rules of surf. This is a complex equation. We have like a hierarchy at each break. If you've lived there for a long time, if you put your time in in the water, it's like your neighborhood. Knowledge of the wave, aggression, skill, all of those things kind of thrown in the mix. Occasionally, that pecking order gets kind of thrown off and somebody's super aggressive, and they'll just take a wave. We call that snaking someone, or they'll drop in in front of someone. We call it dropping in. If you're a grommet, a little kid, you basically gotta sit at the back of the line. You don't get much of anything. You sit inside and catch the small waves. Evan J. Conrad asks, so are surfing competitions like who's having the best time or something? There's not really a way to objectively judge surfing because waves are different heights, different lengths. There's different maneuvers you can do, different number of maneuvers you can do, different difficulty for each one. Your timing, the power, your technique, all these different things create like a dynamic sort of score in a judge's mind. Canone Tree asks, how do surfers stick to their boards like that? We have wax. We have a sticky wax that we put on our boards. In fact, the waxes now have gotten so sticky that some people, when they use them for the first time, say it's too sticky because their feet don't move, but that's what we like, especially when we're doing big maneuvers or airs or pushing really hard in carves. We're using all our power and weight. Next one, Opayasa asks, I have a surfing question. When the surf board says waist high waves, whose waist are they talking about? I'm 5'2", my waist's a lot lower than most people's. Just wondering, thanks. There's different scales of surfing. In Hawaii, if we say three feet, the waves are head high. In Florida, if it's head high, we say six to seven feet. I think the Hawaiian scale actually came from the size of the swells in the ocean. That's my best guess, because if you have a 10-foot swell in the ocean with a 15-second interval between the waves, the waves are gonna be about 20 feet on the big ones. Miss Alexandria 8 says, why does my stepdad insist on having so many surfboards? He's the only one in my house who surfs. Different boards for different waves. It's really like horses for courses. For a tiny wave, you kinda need a board that has more flotation and surface area for planing out. The bigger the wave, you actually need less surface area, but you need a bigger board that paddles faster to catch it, depending on how big it gets. There's a lot of intricate things about surfboards. Different numbers of fins, size of fins, the width, the curve. It's an addiction, that's the answer. The Goku 57 asks, why do surfers say hang 10? What did 10 ever do to you? That's actually funny. Oh, it's 10 toes. If you're naked, it's 11, but nevermind. Kevin Sawyer asks, searching for the best waves, do you have a secret surf spot? I have a lot of secret surf spots, I just don't talk about them. That's why they're called secret. For me, it's super fun to look at old satellite imagery and find secret spots, and I wanna be able to go back through different times of year and different images that were shot, because most waves are seasonal. There's gonna be different swell indicators, and if you go back through year after year after year on satellite imagery, you can start to find strange places in this world where waves break. I'll tell you a place where there's a lot of secret waves. There's a ton of waves there, but good luck getting to them. Tito Tia Marie asks, how do surfers get hurt? They just fall in the water. Go try it. There's a million ways you can get hurt. We could probably put up a montage of wipeouts where guys get injured. I actually have broken my feet four times on the board from the wave hitting the board back at me in a certain way. I broke all five metatarsals across the top of my foot, did a Liz Frank fracture, which is this part of the foot, a bunch of soft tissue damage too. Two friends of mine in the last two years have broken their pelvis, which is life-threatening. I've had a number of friends become paralyzed, breaking their neck in shallow water, hitting the bottom, that's just hitting sand. And I do think once you learn how to fall surfing, it's a lot better than being a skater, but there's a lot of potential injuries. Sean Doherty asks, why do surfers always have long hair? Kahali asks, do surfers wear sunscreen? Most do. I do sometimes, not all the time. If it's really sunny, I have dark skin, so I'm kinda lucky I don't get burnt very often. So if I'm not gonna get really fried, I don't. Sean Kennedy says, what's the biggest wave you've ever seen? I don't know. On video, probably 90 feet. On, in real life, probably 60, 70, 70 feet. In front of me when I'm surfing, about 50 or 60 feet. Casual Fennec says, where the f*** am I supposed to put my car keys if I go surfing by myself? Mm, I hide mine. I don't tell you where. Or if you have a wetsuit. Some wetsuits have a little pocket. You could put it in a little plastic bag and throw it inside your wetsuit. Ed Saunders asks, went surfing for the first time last weekend and it was awesome. Question for surfers, though. How do you manage in the sea without goggles? My eyes were stinging after an hour. There's very few people that wear goggles. Your eyes just get used to the salt after a while. I mean, I can swim in the ocean all day with my eyes open and it doesn't bother me anymore, but I know what you're saying about the salt. It's kind of annoying. Josiah Lake 4 says, why do surfers always look more buff than skaters? Because we are? I don't know. No, it's really because we're paddling. We're using a lot of upper body. I'm gonna guess that skaters have generally a lot stronger ankles and lower body, legs, knees, but surfers are using the upper body a lot, so they probably look a little bigger in the shoulders and lats and neck. Anthonita 7 asks, why don't surfers wear helmets? It was never sort of some kind of accepted cool thing, I think, growing up, and because of that, there weren't many helmets available and they didn't modify them to small enough and comfortable enough to be common use, but they're getting there now. They're getting better. I'm starting to see more guys wear them. A couple of my friends have had bad head injuries in the last five years and they've started to wear them. Dave Shuffles asks, to anyone that surfs, have you tried web gloves and do they work? As a kid, I tried them, yeah. They were actually kind of in fashion for a while in the late 80s. Peter Mel, one of the greatest, all-time greatest big wave surfers from Santa Cruz, last year he got probably what is the greatest big wave ride in the history of the world at Mavericks. He's been wearing web gloves when he surfs. Let's see if I can get this thing on. Yeah, so you can see all that space, all this extra space here is covered when you're paddling. They think there's something to it. They look a little goofy. I think people sort of make fun of you for it, but you can paddle faster. You have more surface area. I feel like they might come back around. They might come back into fashion. Manateemaxcom asks, surfing question. Why do surfers, paddled boarderers, typo, at all put their boards on their cars fin forward? This is actually a funny debate. In Australia, guys tend to put the nose forward. I think the answer is that you put the strap right behind the fin, you know, so you have your fin there and you put the strap right behind it so the board can't slide off backwards. Sikinosa asks, how do surfing competitions know the waves will be good that day? How do they plan in advance? What if you were doing a comp and the water was too calm to do anything? I know a lot about this because I'm from Florida and we have had a lot of competitions in my life where the waves were too small or arguably too small to have a contest. Nowadays, it's not super common because we run at the right season in the right place. So we go to Australia at a time of year or Hawaii or wherever it's gonna be at the right time of year, generally in wintertime where you have more surf. We try to plan around the historical data and the seasons where those places are good. 313 Tony J asks, can you go surfing with a life jacket? That's a good question and it's actually an interesting answer. You wouldn't go surfing with a normal life jacket. You might put a kid in one who's just learning how to surf who doesn't swim that well or just for safety reasons. You could bonk your head with the board or whatever and get knocked out. But we almost all wear an inflatable life vest in big surf now. And that was developed by a friend of mine named Shane Dorian eight, nine, 10 years ago now. And he caught probably the biggest wave he'd ever caught in his life. He fell going down the wave. He got held down for about close to a minute underwater almost blacked out. I think he started thinking about his family a little bit and thinking I shouldn't be in this situation. And he went straight from there and started developing this inflatable vest with CO2 cartridges. If you're say at 20 feet deep and you pull that that'll take you to the surface much faster than you could ever swim. You don't want to have to rely on that. So everyone trains themselves, breath holding and cardio and getting comfortable in scary situations. But that has definitely saved a number of people's lives and allowed big wave surfing to go way beyond what we thought it could do. Chris Grace Seven asks, I dream of the day when wave pools are as common as swimming pools and I have consistent surf in my backyard to ride my ski in. Well, I don't know about the ski, but maybe a surfboard. Yeah, I kind of dream about that too. In fact, I developed a wave pool and we opened that wave pool in 2015. We worked on the technology for 10 years, nine, 10 years prior to that. And surfing wave pools are quite common now. They're a little bit expensive right now and they're pricey to ride, but that's all being developed really quickly. And there's probably five different real solid technologies that you can go and surf anywhere around the world in multiple different pools. All right, that's it. That's all our questions for the day. I hope you learned something. I hope it was useful. See you next time.