With the county in lockdown and everyone being asked to stay home, it’s a good idea to find a few gems online to sate the appetite for stoke. Here are a few YouTube channels and a surfing movie I’ve enjoyed recently.

As the spread of the coronavirus continues to grip the United States and alter the landscape of professional and amateur sports, surfing competitions are among the latest to be put on hold.

The Texas Gulf Surfing Association’s competitive season kicked into high gear over the past month as the organization completed contests at Port Aransas and Matagorda.

We each have our own sets of skills and abilities that we’ve gleaned through years of water time that enable us to surf the way we do.

If you’re an upper coast surfer, chances are you’ve launched your internet browser in the last few weeks to take a look at one of the live web cameras that keep tabs on the surf spots up and down our little stretch of sand.

Most of the more popular and well-formed sandbar breaks, which just so happen to be near population centers, are located near piers and jetties.

No matter what the surf looks like from the beach, always paddle out.

Despite the growing global popularity of surfing and all things relating to surf culture, some of the largest brands catering to wave riders are having very bad years.

Once we’ve been surfing for a few years, surfers tend to develop an affinity for equipment that makes the wave-riding experience a better one.

Fifteen-year-old me, struggling to catch a wave on my friend’s painted and unwaxed shortboard in the West End shorebreak, could never have imagined the adventures that surfing would send my way over the next three decades.

I’m convinced there are two distinct types of surfers in this world: those who enjoy crowds and others who do everything they can to avoid them.

After a less than stellar fall surf season, wave activity along the Upper Texas Coast has picked up dramatically over the past several weeks.

Unfortunately, there aren’t a ton of options for wave-riding bookworms. But that doesn’t stop me from finding nearly every one of the newly released titles that are even tangentially related to riding waves.

It’s the end of another year—and a decade—and now seems to be as good a time as any to share my favorite things about surfing and being a surfer on the Texas coast.

The holidays are now in full swing, and some of us might have waited until the last minute to procure gifts for our fellow surfer friends and family members.

I started surfing in 1985, the same year that James Fulbright opened his surf shop in the garage under his home on 37th Street in Galveston.

While checking the surf the other day at the Pleasure Pier, I watched a lone figure guide his longboard into the small breaking waves, paddle furiously to catch one and then jump to his feet before falling almost immediately into the whitewater.

The Texas Gulf Surfing Association, the sanctioning body for competitive surfing in the Lone Star State, announced this week that it plans to hold its first wave pool competition on Dec. 7.

The last few days notwithstanding, this fall has been mostly a bust wave-wise for upper coast surfers.