Waves: for surfers and ocean lovers

I don’t know about you, but I never learnt much at school. All I could think about was surfing. I couldn’t remember four lines of Shakespeare, but I could recite all the names of all the famous surf spots and all the famous surfers; and I could quote everything they said in all the latest magazines and surf movies.

A bit later, I became interested in the waves themselves. I started noticing that some waves were good for surfing and some weren’t. I wondered what made them different from one beach to another, and what made them change from one day to the next. I learnt that there were waves on rivers, waves under the water and waves in the sky, some of which could actually be surfed. And that there were invisible, underlying waves that could have good or bad effects on the waves we were surfing.

Later still, I found out what a feedback loop was, and realized I was in one. My fascination for the waves made surfing more fun, and being in the water helped me to understand the waves, which made surfing even more fun, which made my fascination grow, and so on.

And that’s what this book is all about. If you have ever had the slightest curiosity about the waves, where they come from and why they are the way they are, you’ll want to read this book. You don’t even need to be a surfer to read it. If you spend time on the coast or in the water; if you like being out in natural environments, or if you are simply interested in waves or anything else to do with Nature, you’ll enjoy this book. You don’t need to be an academic either. Even though some of the concepts in here can get fiendishly complicated, I’ve kept it really, really simple. You won’t find any equations or complicated graphs. Instead, you’ll find painless descriptions, everyday examples and easy-to-understand pictures.

It contains 34 short chapters, which you can read in any order you like. Each chapter stands on its own, so you can just dive in and dive out. Each one will take you between about five and 20 mins to read, and, since there is no thread to follow, you can put it down and come back to it later, without worrying about forgetting where you left off.

As well as different types of waves, there are different types of surf spot, which can arguably be called waves anyway. There are a couple of waves that travel through the air, and there are a few waves that you can’t surf. But they are all relevant. What I haven’t included are things like electromagnetic waves, sound waves, cosmic waves, Mexican waves or any of the hundreds of others that aren’t so relevant to us surfers and coastal lovers.