If a wave is a squashed A, low like Chinese hat, it's uncatchable. When a wave starts to steepen, inclined like a small stepladder, then you can catch it. If it's a C shape, getting ready to fall over, you can catch it. After the wave breaks into an on-rush of white water, you can also catch it. In fact, as a beginner, you'll want to start out standing hip-deep and going chest-down on your board to catch white water coming in. The broken waves still have plenty of power and provide a good opportunity for learning the motion of the board on the wave. As a wing of white water comes up behind you, belly onto your board, and just let the board ride in. Don't even try to get up, Just learn how your board sleds.
Wave Positioning
Experienced surfers don't surf the white water. They paddle out just beyond where the waves are breaking and wait. You'll notice that they all paddle out to roughly the same spot, longboarders a little further out, because the waves tend to break at the same area. Surfers stay out beyond this area, then paddle into it when they see a wave they want to ride. They paddle in so that the wave catches up with them just at the place where the wave is getting steeper, rising into a rideable shape. With experience, you'll get to recognize the position where waves from. You'll see a wave approaching and get an intuition that it's big enough to take you with it. You'll decide if you want to go with it, and if you do, you'll paddle in just far enough to catch the wave as it builds, but not so far that it's already falling over in a throwing C shape.
Wave Catching Secret #1: As a beginner, it's difficult to recognize the proper wave position. Look at the experienced surfers, it's where they are.
When Not To Catch A Wave
Generally this is when a wave has formed into a C and is throwing water forward at high speed. If you catch the wave at this point, you'll be treated to a new experience : Going Over the Falls.
There are three main flavors to going over the falls. First, you can catch a wave too late, just as it is pitching over, and fall with it into the abyss. Just you and several hundred tons of water falling in a graceful arch to the sea bed. It's a very jarring experience. Because once you hit, then the whole wave dog-piles onto you. You'll likely do a little tumbling and rolling under the water. Maybe a flip or two.
the second flavor of going over the falls happens when you fall in front of an arching wave. You hit the bottom, or bowl, just as the wave is throwing a lot of water up. Of course, you take the up elevator too, then are thrown forward to continue the normal over the falls crash and bubble experience.
The last over the falls flavor happens to ''he who hesitates''. Bigger waves stand up and crash over in roughly the same spot. Sometimes waves just form a mushy slush of moving white water, other times they pick up and drop sledge-hammering tons of water in a hard curtain drop
Rule #3: When practising as a beginner, stay safely inside where the waves break or paddle all the way out beyond where they breal, don't dally in between.
Board Positioning
When you lie on your board, you want to be in the center. As you paddle, the nose should be a bout an inch or two above the water surface. Being in the middle of your board is critical to catching waves. Here's why.
If you're too far back on your board and the tail is sunk in the water, it's like putting on the brakes. When the wave comes up under you, it can push you forward, it just rolls on under you.
You must be in the middle of your board, so that when a wave comes up from behind, it'll threaten to tip the nose down under the water. But when the wave tips the tail of the board up, you can use your board a bit like a sail to catch the passing energy of the wave. It's at that point that you paddle hard, hitting with both arms, to keep the nose out of water. If you keep the nose out, the board will catch the wave energy and slide forward, and then you're in for a ride.
You'll have to experiment a bit to find the middle of your board. Note where your chin is when you lay down. If the nose was too far up when a wave went under you, move forward a bit. If the nose sank under the water when you try to catch the wave, back up a bit, an inch or two. Find the spot where you in the middle of your board and control the tilt when a wave picks you up. You always lie down in that same spot. Big wave or small.