Eight-Week Programme Will Teach Students to Reference Surf Trips Credibly, Deploy Technical Vocabulary Appropriately, and Describe Their Board With Conviction Despite It Living in the Garage
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
ENCINITAS, CALIFORNIA — A surf school based in Encinitas has launched what its founder describes as “the most honest surf education programme in Southern California,” an eight-week course designed not to teach participants how to surf but to teach them how to talk about surfing convincingly at social occasions when the subject arises, as it inevitably does in coastal communities, and when participants have not actually been in the ocean in anywhere from one to five years, usually because of a combination of work, children, a tweaked shoulder, and what the course materials diplomatically describe as “a gradual recalibration of priorities that the participant has not yet fully discussed with their own identity.”
The Course: What You Learn and Why You Probably Need It
The programme, formally titled Surfing: The Conversational Dimension, was developed by founder and head instructor Cole Radfield, who surfed competitively into his mid-thirties, spent a decade raising two children and managing a landscape design business in North County, and emerged from that decade able to discuss surfing with extraordinary fluency and diminishing personal authority. “I realised I knew everything about surfing except whether I could still do it,” Radfield told reporters. “And I realised that in a dinner party context, in a beach town context, in a context where surfing is part of how you understand yourself and how other people understand you, the doing and the talking about the doing had become slightly separate skill sets. So I decided to teach the talking.”
Week one covers foundational vocabulary review, with particular attention to words and phrases that have shifted in meaning since 2019, when many of the course’s target participants last surfed regularly. Radfield confirmed that “stoked,” “firing,” and “gnarly” remain stable, but that several newer terms have entered circulation among current surfers that can betray a gap in active participation if deployed incorrectly. Week two addresses the art of referencing past surf trips in conversation, specifically how to describe a trip to Bali, Costa Rica, or the Mentawai Islands in a way that implies the trip was recent when it was in fact in 2017 and the participant spent most of it with food poisoning.
Board Storage and the Garage Problem
Week four, which Radfield says generates the most discussion among participants, is dedicated entirely to what the curriculum calls Board Presence Management, meaning the challenge of maintaining a credible surfing identity when your board has been stored in a residential garage for an extended period and has, at various points, been used as a shelf for paint cans. The course advises participants to perform what it calls a “casual retrieval” of the board from the garage approximately once a month, carry it to the driveway briefly, and return it, in order to create what Radfield calls “ambient board activity” that maintains social plausibility within the neighbourhood. “You are not deceiving anyone,” Radfield said. “You own a surfboard. You surf. You just surf less frequently than your identity currently implies. The board trip to the driveway is a form of maintenance. Like charging a battery.”
Week six covers the handling of direct questions, specifically “did you surf this weekend” and “have you been out lately,” two inquiries that Radfield says cause significant anxiety among his target demographic. The course offers several conversational strategies for redirecting these questions without lying, the most popular of which is what the curriculum calls the Swell Report Pivot, in which the participant responds with an informed comment about current or upcoming wave conditions that signals awareness without confirming recent participation. “You say ‘the forecast looks interesting next week, that south window could be good,’” Radfield explained. “You have not claimed to have surfed. You have demonstrated that you are paying attention to surfing. These are different things, and in a social context they are often sufficient.”
What Southern California Surf Culture Reveals About Identity
The course has attracted interest from sociologists and cultural geographers studying how coastal identity functions in communities where surfing carries significant social capital. According to research published by the UC San Diego Department of Sociology, coastal communities like those in North San Diego County exhibit unusually strong linkages between recreational activity participation and social identity, meaning that lapsed surfers experience a form of identity dissonance that active non-coastal dwellers typically do not when they stop playing golf or attending yoga classes. Surfing, the research notes, tends to function less like a hobby and more like a declared personal characteristic, which makes lapsing more socially complex than simply being busy.
The International Surfing Association was asked to comment on a programme that teaches surf conversation rather than surf technique and said it had no official position on the matter but found the concept “interesting from a participation culture standpoint” and noted that anything that keeps surfing culturally present was broadly aligned with its mission to grow the sport globally. This was a more positive response than Radfield expected and he confirmed he would be using it in his marketing materials.
Enrolment and What Graduates Say
The inaugural cohort of twenty-two participants completed the course in April and several agreed to speak with reporters, though most requested anonymity, which Radfield said was “completely understandable and honestly part of the point.” One graduate, identified only as Derek, said the course had “genuinely changed how comfortable I feel at beach barbecues” and that he had recently had a twenty-minute conversation about surfing at his daughter’s school fundraiser that he described as “my best performance in years.” Another graduate, who gave her name as Trish, said she had returned to actual surfing halfway through the course, which Radfield described as “the ideal outcome, honestly, and it happens more often than you would think. Sometimes talking about something is what reminds you that you miss doing it.”
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The garage board had no comment. Clickhole has already enrolled three editors.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/encinitas-surf-school-talking-about-surfing/