Skim Boarding

What in the world is a skim board? You may well ask. Briefly it is a small board which is ridden by skimming on a thin layer of water. A skim board looks like a small surf board with no fins on the bottom. To ride it you stand at the edge of the beach where the water thins out to about a half inch thick. You run along the beach, drop the board onto this thin layer of water, and then hop on the board and ride it like a bar of soap sliding across a wet floor. The best source of information about skim boarding is SkimOnline.

The photo on the left shows Kevin with a skim board at Leo Carillo Beach.

The photo on the right shows Kevin skimming out over the foam at Venice Beach.

At the left I am waiting for just the right moment to begin a speed run. I am wearing a full wetsuit because this photo was taken in December and water was in the mid fifties. Winter is actually the best time for skim boarding in Venice. The tides are more extreme and there are no waders to get in the way except for certain rare occassions. I went skim boarding on January 2nd, 1999 and there were a lot of people from Wisconsin at the beach and wading in the cold water. Apparently they were in Los Angeles for the Rose Bowl.

At the right I am about halfway into the ride. Both of these photos were taken from the Washington Blvd. pier. What I can do on a skim board is pretty tame compared to the tricks that professional skim boarders such as Bill Bryan can do. At Skim the World, a French Skim boarding web site, he is worshipped as a god. I met him on the beach a couple of years ago. He was making a video with some friends and was nice enough to give me a few pointers.

For me there is nothing like the adrenalin rush of speeding down the berm straight into an oncoming shorebreak wave. When you hit it, you either stick it or you eat it. Sometimes I hit these little waves and use them as a ramp to launch into the air. Once I actually stayed on the board for the landing, but usually we go our separate ways when we get into the air. And sometimes my board pearls under the wave and my body hits the wave with a THWACK. At the left is a photo of the moment of collision between wave and board.

Below is an animated gif that I made in Paint Shop Pro. The original 8 images were a sequence of jpegs taken with a digital camera. I resized them to 150 x 200 pixels and exported them as gifs. I set the rate at 20/100th sec per image in the Animation. This animation shows my niece during a recent visit. This was only her second day at skimboarding and she actually was doing extremely well. Unfortunately, I did not capture one of her better rides here. Maybe next summer.

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