Kelly Slater Answers Surfing Questions From Twitter

Hi, I'm Kelly Slater. I'm a professional surfer

and I'm here to answer questions from Twitter.

This is Surfing Support.

[upbeat music]

All right.

First up, @ianATTACK 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, 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.

@jrodriguezfieno 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 timing 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 packing order gets kind of thrown off

and somebody's super aggressive and it'll just take a wave,

we call that snaking someone.

Or they'll drop it 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 anything.

You sit inside and catch the small waves.

@evanjconrad asks,

So, are surfing competitions like

who's having the best time or something?

There's not really a way to objectively judge surfing,

'cause 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.

@Kinontri asks,

How does surfer 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, 'cause 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, @oh_payasa asks,

I have a surfing question.

When the surf report says waist high waves,

whose waist are they talking about?

I'm 5'2, my waist is 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.

@missalexandria8 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 kind of need a board that has more flotation

and surface area for planting out.

The bigger the wave,

you actually need less surface area

but you need 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 whips, the curve.

It's an addiction. That's the answer.

@TheGoku57 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 'em.

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 want to 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.

Namibia,

there's a ton of waves there.

But good luck getting to 'em.

@titotiamarie asks,

How do surfers get hurt?

They just fall in the water.

Go try it.

There's a million waves 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 Lisfranc fracture

which is that this part of the foot.

A bunch of soft tissue damage too.

Two friends of mine 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.

@seandoherty asks,

Why do surfers always have long hair?

@kahalie 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 kind of lucky, I don't get burnt very often.

So, if I'm not gonna get really fried, I don't.

@seankennedy says,

What's the biggest wave you've ever seen?

I don't know.

On video, probably 90 feet.

In real life, probably 70 feet.

In front of me when I'm surfing, about 50 or 60 feet.

@Casualfennec say,

Where the [beep] am I supposed to put my car keys

if I go surfing by myself?

Mm.

I hide mine.

I won'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.

@edd_saunders asks,

When 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 are 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.

@JosiahLake4 says,

Why do surfers always look more buff than skaters?

Um 'cause 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 using the upper body a lot

so they probably look a little bigger

in the shoulders and lats and neck.

@anthonyda_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 'em.

A couple of my friends have had bad head injuries

in the last five years and they've started to wear them.

@DaveShuffles 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 Maverick's.

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 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 does surfers paddleboarderers, typo,

at all

put their boards on their cars thin forward?

There's 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.

@sikkinouza asks,

How does surfing competitions know

the ways will be good that day?

How do they plan in advane?

What if you were doing a comp

and the water was too calm to do anything?

I know a lot about this 'cause 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_tonyj 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 bunk 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,

8, 9, 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

that 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.

@ChrisGrace7 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,

9, 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.