You see this finger right here? I want to tell you the story of how this got so jacked up.
Because it's relevant to our topic at hand of how to safely ride down a hill on a surfskate.
So you might have already heard my story that I started long boarding in march of 2020 when COVID
hit and it shut our family business down. And so me and my family just longboarded all summer long. And
I did with longboarding exactly what I did with surfskating, where I got hooked on it and then I
just started researching a bunch and I started buying up a bunch of longboards all over town,
every one I could find. So I was experimenting with a bunch of boards, and about two months into
starting to learn, in about May of 2020, I picked up a new board that I was unfamiliar with, and it had
very fast wheels and bearings. And I didn't know what I was doing on it and I never bombed hills
because I wanted to be safe. But I did like to carve them, I was starting to get into carving
hills. Well, I got on this new longboard and I started carving a pretty steep hill
and it started getting a little out of control on me. And I would have been just fine, except
then a car started coming. So then I got totally out of control had to bail on a side street,
ended up wiping out, and basically just kind of broke this finger off right above that knuckle
and had to get two pins in it, one going this way and one going that way, for six weeks.
And as you can see, my finger and my hand will never be the same. I don't have that grip.
Now that's a long story to say, one of the really huge benefits that I found
immediately when I got into surfskating was that I could very safely navigate hills because of the
carving functionality. And so I'm making this video because I've been seeing a lot of things
online. I've seen guys post things on facebook groups, videos of themselves where they're trying
to go, like basically bomb hills on a surfskate, they're getting speed wobbles, and I've even seen
guys wipe out on them. And guys are asking, "How do you go down on a hill on a surfskate?" And honestly,
that's a very confusing question to me because it came so intuitive to me given my experience.
That's the whole benefit for me. I was able to now have control on these hills, which opened up a
whole new world of possibility for me. So I'm going to show you in a few different environments how
I navigate hills so that you can safely navigate hills, which as it did for me, will open up a whole
new world of skating for you. But let me just first quickly explain. To me, it's just very obvious. The
bottom line is, how do you navigate a hill on a surfskate? Tou carve it out. And so to be able
to carve it out, obviously the steeper it is the wider you need it to be to have room to carve it
out. And so that also means that if you're going down something steep and pretty narrow, if you
don't have the space to be able to carve back and forth very, very tightly, then you're going to lose
control and you shouldn't be taking that hill. But if you have the width like you see I have on this
street, this is amazing. It's very steep, you can't really honestly see it visually, it doesn't kind of
come through film how quite steep this top section is. But because it's so wide, this is actually very
very easy for me to skate. So let's jump on and go for a ride and I'll demonstrate this real quick.
So the key principle when you are carving out a hill is to get your knees low.
The deeper your knee bend, the more control you have.
So you can see how I can very tightly and safely carve this out. And again, it's my knee bends.
And you're also going to have to learn balance on a board and things like that, but you can see.
I can also do this, by the way, just standing up like this very
easily. I don't even have to to get my knee bends. And that's just a matter of
doing weight shifts, right? You can stand completely straight up and just
lean into it with my weight shifts. And I'm going slow and managing my speed, right? Super easy.
Or I can kind of keep my upper body up while just bending my knees a little bit like this.
All right? Super simple.
This is how you navigate a hill on a surfskate. You carve it out. You don't bomb it, you carve it.
And then, once you, this is starting to even out a little bit,
well now I can start picking up my speed just a little bit more.
Now I'm getting to a point on this hill where it's still a pretty good decline and I can get some,
I can get some speed on it if I want to open it up, but I still have to maintain control.
But I can start generating some speed now with some control.
Now I've got another small little hill here where I want to show you how you can open it up on a
surfskate and get some speed. But the secret to that is, you either have to have a place where
you're either going to just glide out naturally at the end or you have to have some bailouts if
you're going to get going too fast, get out of control, or if there's going to be cars coming
and you have to really quickly find an escape route. So when you're going to really let loose
on a hill on a surfskate, just make sure that you have an exit strategy. Now I'm going to demonstrate
this, but I actually have two exit strategies. This one's not too bad of a hill so I can actually
just glide this and carve this out at the end if I want. But there's a driveway at the end that I
like to use where I'm just going to show you how it's a really great way to use a bailout.
Keep coming with me,
I got a couple other sections to show you.
Now we've got a steep and narrow trail and I want to show you what we're going to do with
this. The bottom line with this is, because it's so narrow, you just don't have the space to carve
it out. Now in this particular case, if you look down here you can see how that hill actually
kind of comes up at the bottom. So I actually could skate this if I wanted to. But assuming that that
didn't come up at the end there, let me show you what I would do with something steep and narrow.
Another thing I wanted to show you is that you can do really really steep hills like this, but
they're not really fun to do because you have to carve it out so tightly that it's just a really
slow, almost like a walk down the hill, which i'll show you. And again, I also want to mention
that when you're doing stuff like this on streets where you have cars coming, remember that if a car comes,
just use the hill in your favor. You just carve up the hill, and just you can stop at any time
you need to just by doing a little carve up the hill. So just don't lose control of your speed,
keep it in a tight carve, and then if you see a car coming, just pull up the hill just like so.
A final thing i wanted to note about this is that how much speed you can handle on a hill
very much depends on your surfskate truck.Because some surfskate trucks are much looser than others,
and those looser surfskate trucks are going to be much more inclined to speed wobbles than the
more stable ones. Now for me, I hink the two most unstable ones for getting a lot of speed on hills
are going to be the SwellTech and the Smoothstar. Unfortunately, I don't have those with me because
Mark the Landlocked Surfer has those up in Canada right now doing reviews of them, so I can't show
you those. But for example, if you look at a couple of these, let's take this SpiceSkate, for example.
And you can see this is a fairly loose truck, right? And so obviously, when you're going down a hill
and if you hit bumps or pebbles, this is just very naturally going to be a lot more inclined
to speed wobble. Same thing with the YOW Meraki. I don't actually get a lot of speed wobbles on
the Meraki, I can actually get a lot of speed on the Meraki. But you can see how that looseness
is going to lead to some speed wobble when you get to a certain speed. I wanted to show you the
Curfboard because the Curfboard is a really interesting design. You can see how it really
has no spring to it whatsoever. And you would think that you would get quite a bit of speed wobble out
of this. But because of how this is engineered, when the Curfboard wheels are making contact with the
ground, you actually get no speed wobbles out of this truck at all. So interestingly enough, you can
go pretty fast downhills on the Curfboard. So for me, I'm not going to get a lot of speed on hills
unless I'm using some of the more stable surfskate trucks, which to me basically
comes down to the Carver CX, the carver C7 as long as it's adjusted more tightly,
and the Slide. These I think are kind of the most stable for beginners and the most stable for
bombing hills. And my favorite for that is going to be the Carver CX. So you can just see how with the
bushing-based system, that's just going to give you a lot more stability and it's going to be
a lot less inclined to speed wobbles. And that is how you safely navigate hills on the surfskate. As
I said at the beginning, this is one of the aspects of a surfskate truck that I just fell in love with
because the ability to carve out on hills eliminated risk for me, it made it safer for me,
which then meant I have a whole new world of skating available to me. Things that I
just never could skate on a longboard, now I can very safely skate and with a whole lot of control,
and a lot of fun. So I hope you find this helpful as you're surfskating hills.