“Surfing isn’t just an activity or a sport, it’s a way of life” is a well-known phrase but one that really translates what it means to me and many other surfers.
In every surfer’s imagination, lives an endless search for the perfect wave, and those perfect waves might be located in distant and foreign lands.
It’s this quest for those waves that drives surfers to drop everything and go on incredible adventures that often transcend the act of merely riding waves.
I grew up surfing in Portugal traveling up and down this fantastic coast and as such the taste for surf traveling grew in me not only to search the close shores but also to seek faraway lands that often in my mind seemed to me more like imaginary Shangri-La’s of surfing than real places on earth.
I spent hours reading tales about these lands and staring at the very few photos available of those places while daydreaming of how it would be if I could travel there to surf.
When I grew older, those imprints in my mind drove me to seek those images in real life, leading me to some amazing adventures.
I believe that deep down in everyone that picks up surfing, lives this quest for imaginary lands of adventure, perfect waves, incredible sceneries, new friendships, and epic journey tales.
I also believe that the same quest lives in the hearts of many people who have not picked up surf yet and who sometimes aren’t even aware they are searching for these promised lands nor do they know of the “vehicle” that can take them there.
How about people who do know about all this but don’t know how to ride the “vehicle”?
… so a thought crossed my mind ….
What would a surf school geared toward teaching people how to ride this cherished “vehicle” toward the land of joy look like?
To answer this question it was obvious to me that a few of the following points should be part of it:
- Teaching people from beginners to autonomy in the water must be a core value of the surf school.
- Programs should be established on how to go from an evolution stage to the next.
- The taste for meaningful traveling experiences must be part of the school and everybody in it, well, at least almost everybody as many might actually be traveling.
- People taking surf lessons with us should feel that they learned something new with each lesson and are one step closer to reaching those magical shores.
Also, surf schools teach people how to stand on the surfboard and then the techniques of how to maneuver on the face of the wave, which is good because it’s the purpose of a surf school, but, surfing is so much more than that, and being inside the water on a surf break by yourself without a surf school adds even more challenges to every person surfing, from the more experienced to the new surfers.
There are for instance the unspoken surfing “etiquette” rules, localism, rip tides, and so on.
So the question was, can a surf school start introducing some of these subjects to the students, even at the beginner stage, so as they progress and are ready to try on their own they will know how to handle the surf and the crowd by themselves?
Well, I place my bets on yes!
You can count on some of these subjects to be introduced during the lessons.
So I put pen to paper taking the existing surf travel and guided tour context of Breakthrough Surf and supplementing it with a new offer called Breakthrough Surf School located in Costa da Caparica, Portugal, just outside Lisbon.
We will now be able to, not only, offer you guided surf trips to those idyllic surf lands but also to help you learn how to surf and how to progress your surfing. And yes, we also do surf rentals for when you feel ready to try surfing on your own in Caparica!
So come and give us a chance to help you on your surfing journey.
See you at the beach!
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