In my humble opinion, if you really want to learn the sport and the spirit of surfing, do the following, take 2 weeks off in early fall (kids back in school, water still relatively warm, wind is usually offshore or light all day) and travel the southern california coast, and spend some time learning about waves. Take someone who surfs already if you can. Given your starting skill level, you need to spend a week surfing pointbreaks like Carlsbad, San Onofre and the Seal Beach rivermouth, before even considering harder breaking spots. These are places where generations of surfers got their first waves - for a reason. The tend to break easy, break in the same spot (instead of shifting around like beachbreaks) and have easy paddle outs - you actually paddle out around the impact zone instead of through it. Texas is a very, very tough place to learn to surf. Swell period tends to be very short (6-8 seconds) and conditions are rarely good for very long. Texas is all beach break (altough some jetty spots can act like points) and with any solid swell size, paddling out can be a chore. You need to spend time surfing, not struggling in the impact zone. I have always said, if you can surf overhead Texas, you can surf anywhere. Trust me when I tell you there is a huge difference when you eat it on an overhead day on pointbreak vs. a beachbreak. The pointbreak might mean a hard 10 second paddle to clear the impact zone whereas at the beachbreak, you might get worked all the way in from 400 yards out.
The thing about surfing is that it is an "experience" sport. You need to "see" (experience) a lot of waves. Over time, you will then understand where you need to position yourself to start paddling, when to start paddling (am I in too far and wave is gonna roll over me? or am I out too far and I miss the wave?) it gets more complicated when other surfers are moving around in the lineup and the lineup itself is moving around. By going to a consistent, easy paddle out, learning spot (outside of Texas), you will significantly increase your understanding and abilities in a much shorter time period. Starting from scratch at your age in Texas will be a daunting challenge if you want to ever ride anything better than knee-high whitewater straight into the beach.
Consider this... if you surf a 2 hour session, and during that session you caught 12 good waves, and each of those rides was 5 secs long, you have had a really, really good session. The total time you actually spent standing up on a wave, really surfing, was 1 minute. By going to a place where you can focus on actually surfing and learning the mechanics of moving a board around on the face of a wave, you will get a jump start at this late age to learn this complex sport. You don't have the luxury of being 15, living within walking distance of the ocean and having 8 hours a day at the beach during summers and weekends during school to pick it up - not to mention living somewhere where it is not flat for months at a time. (God Bless my parents for raising us in Manhattan Beach California...) Surfing Texas means commitment at this age.
A final thought, the internet is blessing and a curse. Thanks to online forecasts, you don't need to be an amateur meteorologists or have on the beach connections to know when surf is building. There are also many excellent surf camps/schools around the world, just google it. If you have the financial means, a great place to start can be Costa Rica or Dominican Republic. My first CR trip, I hired a local to take me around to different spots. His insight was invaluable to understanding the different breaks, where to park, where to paddle out, how the wave will act on different swells directions and tides. Plus I had a local with me - although CR is about as friendly as Texas. Hawaii and Puerto Rico, not so much...
So a lot of thoughts here, I am sure others will give additional insight. Don't let this looong email discourage you. There is nothing I have found in life as rewarding as surfing. The feeling of kicking out of wave, you just carved up, to the hoots of your buddies and slipping back out to lineup and seeing a killer sunset or maybe a dolphin, well, the physical and spiritual "zen" of that moment will make all the hard work it took to get there worth it. Trust me.
Home 
