The Spinny Gybe

It goes by many names, but the basic pivot gybe is not only a practical ‘get out of jail’ card, but also introduces technique elements that should take your regular carve gybing to another level. Harty elucidates.

- Peter Hart

I believe it’s called ‘skill asymmetry’ - the condition whereby an unusual level of brilliance in one area belies a total lack of it in another. It’s the astrophysicist who understands black holes and relativity but can’t tie his own shoelaces.

I’m trying to describe to Adam the concept of the ‘squirt’ turn. It’s a downwind wave riding technique where you pivot the board around at the top of the wave so you start the ride shooting high along the face, rather than dropping straight down it, turning too late and outrunning it. It’s a common problem especially in cross-on winds where your natural course is upwind the ‘wrong’ way. “How do you mean ‘pivot’ the board round?” He asked. “You know … spin it on the tail using the rig … like half a flare gybe…” “Flare gybe?”

It soon became clear that Adam, despite being a wave sailor with some history, had never learned to spin a board around in light winds, or any wind for that matter. After an all too brief non-planing apprenticeship, he’d moved straight onto planing and carving moves.

Thanks to the accessibility of early planing boards, the first gybe many attempt is the carve gybe. Speed and gusto can compensate for a lack of finesse. Having scrambled out of a few and ticked the ‘dry’ box, there’s little incentive to regress back to learning the slower, easier and surely inferior version favoured by non-planing beginners.

Well stop there. Not only is the pivot gybe tactically precious and technically harder, but also equips you with the skills to improve, intensify and vary your planing gybes.

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