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Welcome to the 9th edition of The Bodyboard Report! 🤙

There was a time when surf spots were discovered slowly, almost organically, through conversations, rumours, half accurate directions, and pure luck.

A time long before TikTok clips, drone edits, geotags, and YouTube thumbnails screaming “SECRET SLAB EXPOSED” turned wave discovery into a form of online entertainment.

Back then, finding a new wave actually felt like an adventure because nobody was handing you GPS coordinates and parking instructions on a silver platter.

You heard about places through older surfers who trusted you enough to quietly point down some dusty road and say something vague like,

“Check around there when the wind swings west,”

and then you would spend half a day driving around not even knowing if the wave really existed.

Sometimes you found absolutely nothing except bad wind, a flat ocean, and wasted petrol / gas money.

Sometimes though, you found magic!

*One of the greatest discoveries in surfing history. The first surf camp at G-Land (Grajagan) in East Java, Indonesia, was established in 1977. Built by the American surfer Mike Boyum, back then it was known as the Blambangan Surfing Club and was widely recognized as the world's first-ever commercial surf camp.

👉 Perhaps check out Bobby’s G-Land Surf Camp

Because it took effort, because it took curiosity, patience, and a willingness to explore without guarantees.

Those mytical or secret places carried weight when you finally stumbled across them.

They felt earned in a way that is becoming increasingly rare now, almost like the ocean had allowed you access rather than the internet simply delivering another location into your feed.

Today, a ten second Instagram reel can permanently change an entire coastline.

One clean barrel filmed from a drone, one viral clip from a content creator chasing engagement, one recognizable headland in the background, and suddenly a wave that quietly operated for twenty years with a small group of dedicated locals turns into a seasonal content farm almost overnight.

Within weeks the parking lot is overflowing, beginners are paddling into heavy conditions they probably should not be surfing yet, photographers are standing shoulder to shoulder on the dunes, and everybody seems more interested in documenting the experience than actually sitting quietly and enjoying the ocean.

And strangely enough, despite more people than ever showing up at these spots, it often feels like there is less actual bodyboarding happening…

People naturally gather where the waves are good and that part of surf culture is nothing new at all.

Even decades ago, if there was a perfect point break or a consistent sandbank somewhere, word eventually got out and people showed up.

Good waves have always attracted attention because that is simply human nature. Bodyboarders chase quality and power, and they always will.

What changed was not the existence of crowds, but the speed at which they now form.

Information today moves faster than surf culture can emotionally process it. A wave can go from relatively unknown to internationally crowded in a single season because modern surfing no longer spreads through communities slowly, it spreads through algorithms instantly.

Just look at how Skeleton Bay in Namibia exploded. For years the longest barrel on the planet went unridden… because it was unknown.

👉 Is this the longest boogie barrel ever recorded?

Apps like Surfline, Windguru, Windy, social media platforms, YouTube channels, and forecasting tools transformed surfing into a kind of real time information economy where everything is measurable, searchable, optimized, and shared continuously.

Forecasts became frighteningly accurate. Wind became predictable down to the half hour. Tides, swell direction, wave periods, and camera feeds became available to anyone holding a smartphone.

And somewhere in the middle of all that convenience, bodyboarding itself quietly changed.

We stopped exploring and started optimizing.

Instead of hiking the hills, camping out, checking random corners of coastline and taking chances on what the ocean might deliver, everybody now targets the exact same conditions at the exact same time because the algorithm effectively tells them where to go.

Clean offshore morning. Mid tide push. Three foot at fourteen seconds. Good rating on the app. Suddenly hundreds of people make the exact same decision simultaneously.

That is why modern crowds feel different now. They do not build gradually over the course of a morning like they once did. They arrive all at once, almost like coordinated invasions, with parking lots filling up in twenty minutes because everyone received the same digital signal at the same time.

You can actually feel this shift before people even paddle out.

Cars pull into the lot while drivers are still staring at forecast apps. Riders stand on the beach refreshing wind updates instead of simply looking at the ocean in front of them.

Some idiot is sitting in his car, checking the wavecam feeds while parked next to the actual wave itself.

The entire experience has become strangely digital before anyone has even touched the water, almost as if the session now begins on a screen long before it begins in the ocean.

Not because secret waves no longer exist, but because secrecy itself has become almost incompatible with modern content culture.

The internet rewards exposure, not protection, and modern surf media especially seems built around constantly revealing, showcasing, documenting, and monetizing locations that previous generations would have guarded carefully for years.

The more dramatic the wave looks on camera, the more likely somebody is going to turn it into content because powerful waves now generate attention, and attention has become a form of currency online.

Views lead to followers.

Followers lead to sponsorships.

Sponsorships lead to brand deals, YouTube revenue, affiliate links, and entire careers built around documenting surf travel.

And somewhere in the middle of that system, coastlines quietly became collateral damage.

Even riders who genuinely believe they are respecting surf culture often contribute to the problem without fully realizing it.

One geotag. One recognizable mountain in the background. One drone angle showing a reef shape or a parking area. That is often all it takes now.

Within weeks Google pins start appearing, YouTube guides emerge explaining where to park and when to surf it, travel blogs start listing “hidden gems,” and then inevitably the crowds arrive soon after.

Once that process begins, etiquette usually collapses very quickly because the lineup expands faster than the culture surrounding it can survive.

Then locals get labelled aggressive, territorial, or unfriendly when tensions rise, but many of those frustrations are not really about ownership in the arrogant sense people often assume.

More often it is about watching places lose their identity almost in real time, watching fragile little surf communities become overwhelmed before they have any chance to adapt.

Because once a wave fully enters the algorithm, it rarely goes backwards. The internet almost never forgets a good surf spot once it decides that location generates engagement.

*Tand is one of SA’s greatest bodyboarding discoveries in recent eyars. A heavy reef break located on the rugged West Coast and widely considered one of the most dangerous and intense mutant slabs in the world.

First, a well-kept secret, and now a premier destination for extreme bodyboarding and the host of the Tand Invitational Bodyboarding Contest.

Oddly enough, bodyboarding now occupies a very interesting position inside all of this because while mainstream surf culture became increasingly commercialized, performative, and optimized for online attention, bodyboarding quietly remained more underground.

For years bodyboarders were mocked, sidelined, or treated like second class citizens in many lineups, but that outsider status suddenly feels strangely valuable now because bodyboarding never fully integrated itself into the influencer machine the same way mainstream surfing did.

I mean… Who’s the Jamie O’Brien of bodyboarding?

The average bodyboarder is still generally more interested in the wave itself than the content opportunity afterward. That does not mean bodyboarding is completely immune to modern surf culture of course.

There are still egos, still crowds, still social media clips, and still people chasing attention online, but overall the culture remains rougher around the edges, less polished, and less commercially optimized than mainstream surfing.

And honestly, that roughness may now be one of its greatest strengths.

Because once everything becomes content, authenticity becomes extremely rare.

At the same time, the pressure created by modern crowds is beginning to break down surf etiquette almost everywhere.

The old rules were never perfect and there has always been tension in crowded lineups, but most surfers at least understood the basic code.

Wait your turn. Do not snake people. Respect locals and the inside. Those unwritten rules used to pass naturally from older surfers to younger ones through time spent in the water.

Now many young riders arrive through algorithms before they arrive through culture.

They learn equipment before etiquette.

Surf schools exploded. Soft top participation exploded. Beginner numbers exploded. None of that is automatically negative because more people enjoying the ocean should theoretically be a good thing, but somewhere along the line the cultural transmission process broke down.

People can now access waves far faster than they can absorb the social dynamics that once kept lineups functioning relatively smoothly.

And under enough crowd pressure, even decent people start behaving badly. Older surfers become bitter because they feel like the culture they grew up with is disappearing.

New riders feel immediately unwelcome and defensive. Locals become hyper protective. Everybody starts blaming everybody else while the actual root problem keeps expanding quietly in the background.

Scale. ↗️ Too many people now chasing the exact same moments at the exact same time because the algorithm told all of them where to go.

Did you miss the last couple of publications? 👇

Disclaimer: The Bodyboard Report is published for informational and entertainment purposes only. All images, media, and referenced content remain the copyright of their respective owners and are used for editorial commentary and community sharing. The Bodyboard Report does not claim ownership of any third party content.