The Banzai Blog by Jaz Kaner

2. The Wrong Place – Surfing is like real estate: Location, location, location. The ideal beginner wave offers a long, gently rolling break that crumbles, not crashes. It’s what surfers call (with some disdain) a mushy wave. Better still if there’s a sand bottom – that may save you some paddling. Huntington Beach can be […]

1. The Wrong Surfboard – I get a lot of students who call and tell me they ‘already have a surfboard’. Most of the time they’ll show up to their first surf lesson with a board that’s too small. A small board makes the most difficult part of surfing – the takeoff – even more […]

Did you know you can patch your soft board with a hot glue gun? This also works on fiberglass boards, but for now I’m talking about soft boards, like the ever-popular Costco WaveStorm surfboards. They’re also known as ‘soft tops’ (or derisively as ‘nurf boards’ : ). This is also a good fix for boogieboards […]

Published in “Surfer Magazine”, November 1997   THE MALIBU THEME PARK By Jaz Kaner   Twenty yards out a dark fin broke the surface.  I couldn’t see what it was, but it was moving some water and heading right for me. Then it submerged. It was bad enough that I had to resort to night […]

Here’s the collector’s edition of…. “Jaz Kaner’s Lightbulb jokes for Surfers” (Originally published in Surfer Magazine, 2001) Q: How many surfers does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Four. One climbs the ladder and the other three brag about all the great light bulbs they had yesterday.   Q: How many soul […]

If I had to distill years of teaching into a few seconds, those are the four biggest points. There are exceptions, and of course, there’s a ton of other safety issues, skills, and fine tuning that a good surf instructor will give you. Surfing can’t be learned from a book – there are too many variables.