Surfing beach at Da Nang

I've been here a long time and I have never gone surfing here in Da Nang. It is advertised as being a surfing beach and there are tons of surf shops. I honestly don't think that the surf here is very good and that the notion of surfing here is merely just another thing to sell to tourists. Whatever though, maybe one day I will go ahead and give it a try anyway.

I don't know a great deal about surfing, but if you look into the background of this very picture you can see that a few people are having a go at doing it. This is something called "shorebreak" in that the waves are breaking right on the sand. It is generally considered the worst kind of surfing because there isn't much momentum behind the wave and the water is also extremely shallow so if you have fins or skegs on your board, you could potentially bottom them out and break them.

Here is one of the surfboard rental places and I see that they have a lot of SUP or stand-up-paddle surfboards for rent. I think that this would actually make a lot more sense here than the regular surfboards because with these you can just tool around and go back and forth beyond the break.

To me, I think the best kind of "surfing" that you could do here would be boogie-boarding because a lot of the times I see people on their stand up boards waiting for their wave and they are basically standing in knee to waist-deep water. I don't know a great deal about surfing, but this kind of seems contradictory to what surfing is all about.

I guess if it is fun to the person doing it, it doesn't really matter what anyone else thinks.

I will say this about these "surfing beaches" though. The lifeguards here are relentless. They have these cordoned off swimming areas and they will not allow anyone without a board to go swimming anywhere else. The other day I was down there and I simply put my feet in the water maybe just over my ankles and there was a dude in a yellow and red shirt that was whistling at me quite aggressively and he pointed at the red "no swimming" flag in an angry manner. Red means that there are very dangerous currents here but when you just look at the water I am thinking to myself that this is dangerous compared to what? I've seen shallow ends of swimming pools that were more treacherous than the waters here.

I reckon I'll give it a try one of these days anyway though because I need something to distract me from my recent relationship woes.