If you were to get your hair done on a Sunday, there might be a sigh which reads: Drop-ins Welcome. If you're surfing, however, dropping in is a no-no. Dropping in on a wave is one thing but dropping in on someone else on a wave is uncool, rude and sometimes dangerous.
On Sunday, there are usually more people out in the lineup and many of them don't even know what a lineup is. The lineup is a group of surfers sitting waiting for a wave to break. One by one, they take turns taking waves. Like an assembly line all nice and easy.
Surf etiquette is something that is handed down, sometimes rudely, from surfer to surfer. So few people take the time to educate others and just yell at them. Or, like me, they let the dangerous surfers -- the worst ones are the ones with new longboards they can't control out surfing with the big boys -- get away with dropping in.
It's like playing Frogger or Whack-a-Mole riding a large wave in on Amateur Day (Sunday). First, there is a person who doesn't know you have priority and drops in like the fellow on the right in the picture. On the next wave, you almost run over a kid on a shortboard (and it's a longboard day!) who never sees you as you almost paddle into his head. On the third wave is a girl on a Bic board (these surfboards, like their namesake pens, are made of plastic) saying, "sorry" as she doesn't pull up but rather gets blasted into the way of an oncoming surfer.
Here's the way it should be: People should know the rules when they go out; and, people who don't know the rules should be politely informed of them.
The rules are simple, too: don't go out if you can't handle it, surfers already standing up on a wave have priority, the person deepest in gets priority when two or more people are going for a wave. In the above photo, the surfer deepest in is on the left. The wave is a left in that it's breaking to the left of both surfers, so the person furthest in (to the surfer's right and the viewer's left) has priority.
So to the people I surfed around last Sunday, I say this: please learn the rules; please look both ways (and behind you) before going; and please don't drop in.
The best way is to be in communication with the others in the line up, i.e. "you going left?" That tells the surfer to your left that you're going right even though you have priority on his/her left. Some times they'll say, "go" meaning you get the left but always they are happier for you having spoken up.
The worst case scenario is a person who drops in on someone who can't manage his/her board and then there's a bad crash. Boards break, people get cut and bruised and tempers flare. I guess that's why I'm going to speak up next time and educate the people who are doing these things.
Peace, Mahalo and be safe on the waves.
