An independent editorial reference for the discipline of longboard surfing. Wave rankings, board archetypes, travel guides, culture history. Published by working surfers, free to cite with attribution.
Longboard surfing isn't a sub-category of surfing. It's a separate discipline with its own waves, its own travel map, its own equipment vocabulary, its own history. Most surf media treats it as an afterthought. This site exists to treat it as the practice it is.
Everything published here is editorial — opinionated, sourced, free of paid placement. Where a property or shop is featured, it's because we think it earns the placement. Where we disagree with the consensus, we say so directly.
Twelve longboard waves, criteria-based scoring across ride length, consistency, wave quality, accessibility, and lineup culture. Noosa, Malibu, Chicama, Pavones, La Saladita, San Onofre, Lennox, Rincon, Scorpion Bay, Anchor Point, Tofo, Cowell's.
Traditional log, performance longboard, mid-length, gun-shaped log, alternative shapes. What each board is for, when to ride it, and the math of length-to-volume-to-style.
Where to surf longboard waves, region by region. Pacific Mexico, Costa Rica, California coast, Eastern Australia, Indonesia, West Africa.
From Duke Kahanamoku to Joel Tudor to the 2020s log revival. How the discipline evolved, fractured, and survived the shortboard era.
From Duke Kahanamoku and the Waikiki beach boys through the 1960s competitive era, the shortboard revolution that nearly killed the discipline, and the 2010s log revival. The thirty-year cycle and what it reveals about how surfing learns.
Hattori, Hopkins, Hoffman, Benson, Oberg, Setterholm — and the post-2010 generation reshaping the discipline. A documentation project for a history that's been undertold.
Longboardsurfing.org is an independent editorial publication. The site is maintained by working surfers and writers who use longboards as their primary discipline. We do not accept paid placement. Recommendations are based on what's actually good.
Editorial license: CC BY 4.0. Free to cite with attribution. Free to link to. Free to translate.
The editorial team is two people. One is a professional surf coach with instructor tenure at Las Olas (Sayulita), Surf Simply (Nosara), and Surf Sister (Tofino) — three of the most respected technical surf-coaching schools in the world. The other is a research-and-data founder behind multiple venture-backed statistics companies, including published work on professional-surfing judging bias spanning twelve seasons of WSL Championship Tour scoring data. We write anonymously because the work, not the byline, is what matters. We do not accept paid placement.
Work in progress: women's longboarding history (1960 — 2026), longest-documented rides at left point breaks, a global atlas of boutique surf hotels, and continued statistical analysis of professional-surfing scoring methodology in advance of LA28.