Out in deep water, a swell is mostly energy passing through. The water itself just bobs in circles. It's a very chill situation.
Once the water gets shallower than about half a wavelength, the wave starts feeling the bottom. The bottom drags on it, so it slows down and bunches up, and all that energy gets squeezed into less water. So it grows taller.
Eventually the crest is moving faster than the water underneath can keep up with. Once the wave is roughly 0.78 × as tall as the water is deep (the real number swings between about 0.6 and 1.2 depending on how steep the bottom is), the top outruns the bottom and falls over its own face. That's the wave breaking, and that's the bit you surf.
SPEED–
WAVELENGTH–
HEIGHT–
HEIGHT ÷ DEPTH–
Rolling swell
Model: linear wave theory, 8-second swell, 1 m tall in deep water, no wind. The vertical scale zooms to fit, but depth and wave height always share it, so the ratio you see is the real one.
Texas surf report
Is the Gulf on?
CHECKING THE GULF…
Summer Jun–Jul
Mostly lake-flat. The Gulf is a small, closed-in sea, so wind can't blow over enough water to build real swell. Longboard, or go skate.
Hurricane swell Aug–Oct
The main event. A storm way out in the Gulf sends in longer-period swell with real push. The catch: the good days come right before the storm, and some of them aren't safe. If the storm is coming at you, don't paddle out.
Cold fronts Nov–Mar
Strong south winds blow in ahead of a front and build short, choppy wind swell. Then the front passes, the wind swings north (offshore on the Texas coast), and for a morning or two it's clean. Wetsuit required. Probably.
Why jetties? all year
Texas beaches are long, straight sand. A jetty or pier traps sand on one side and builds a sandbar, which gives the waves somewhere to peak and peel instead of closing out. Downside: rip currents love jetties and piers too.
CHECKING NWS RIP CURRENT STATEMENTS…
Rip current alerts: National Weather Service (api.weather.gov), live. No alert doesn't mean no rips. If you're caught in one, swim parallel to the beach, not against it.
TEXASEDITIONNO SWELL REQ.
Page 4 · Surf, Texas edition
Surf the tankers.
Texas doesn't wait for swell. It waits for ships.
Galveston Bay is big and mostly shallow, but there's a trench dredged right through the middle: the Houston Ship Channel, about 45 feet deep and, after the Project 11 dredging, up to about 700 feet wide in the bay. Giant loaded ships run up and down it all day.
Short version: a giant ship's wake rolls out of the channel, hits a sandbar at an angle, and peels like a point break for minutes.
The nerdy part ↓
A tanker that size shoves an enormous amount of water out of the way. Its wake rolls out of the deep channel and onto the shallow flats and sandbars beside it, and then it does exactly what ocean swell does in the wave lab: slows down, stacks up, and breaks.
Here's the magic bit. The wake hits the sandbar at an angle, so it doesn't break all at once. It peels along the bar like a point break. The whole wake pattern travels with the ship, so the peel keeps pace with the tanker. Rides can go on for minutes (charter captains talk about 10+ minutes on a good one) and cover a mile or more, from a wave that started as a boat.
The best wave in Texas has a cargo manifest.
WAKE ANGLE–
DEPTH FROUDE–
PEEL SPEED–
WAVE ARRIVES–
BEHIND SHIP–
TIME-LAPSE×8
–
Model: classic Kelvin ship-wake theory with finite-depth correction (Havelock). The shape is real, and the size is drawn for vibes.
Is there a tanker schedule?
Sort of, and it's public. There's no surf forecast for ships, but there are two things people use:
Houston Pilots' PilotTracker: real-time scheduled ship moves in and out of the channel, with times and vessel details.
Live AIS maps (the radar below): every big ship's position and speed, right now.
What you're looking for is big and fast. The folklore number is ships around 100,000 tons doing 10+ knots. Loaded tankers sit deep and push more water.
Where to catch the wake
Out in Galveston Bay, on the shallow shoals beside the Houston Ship Channel. The original spots were around Redfish Island and Atkinson Island, the spoil islands along the channel. The exact sandbars are local knowledge, and they shift.
You need a boat. The move is to sit about half a mile to the side of the ship's path, wait, then jump in as the wave shows up. On a longboard. With strong swimming.
Easiest way in:Tanker Surf Charters (Capt. James Fulbright, who's spent years working out the formula). Best season is roughly summer into fall, when the wind is under about 8 knots.
Don't be a statistic
Stay out of the channel. A loaded tanker can't stop or swerve for you. The waves you want are on the flats, far off to the side.
Oyster reef + shallow water means cuts, groundings and stranded boats.
Barges, fishing boats and other traffic are all out there too.
Captains who do this for a living call it very dangerous. Believe them over any video.
The channel always wins. Stay on the flats.
Live · Galveston Bay
SHIP RADAR
CHECKING BAY WIND…
Loads a live AIS ship-tracking map from VesselFinder, a third-party site, centered on the Houston Ship Channel. It stays off until you press the button.
NEARESTOCEAN~200 MI
Page 5 · Surf, Texas edition part 2
Waco Surf.
The ocean, landlocked. Waves on a timer.
A few miles outside Waco, on a spot that started life as a barefoot waterski lake (BSR stood for Barefoot Ski Ranch), there's a pool that makes some of the most famous man-made waves on Earth. In 2018 it became North America's first full-size PerfectSwell surf pool (made by American Wave Machines), and clips of pros launching airs in Central Texas went everywhere.
Short version: 24 air cannons fire one after another, and their little bumps add up into one wave that peels down the reef. On a timer. Forever.
The nerdy part ↓
Here's how it works. A wall down the side of the pool hides a row of air chambers: 24 of them, each about 10 ft wide, 240 ft in total. Each one blasts air against the water and makes a bump. Fire them all at once and you get one flat wall of water. Fire them one after another and all those little bumps add up into a single angled wave that peels down the reef.
That's a phased array, the same trick radar and ultrasound use to steer a beam without moving anything. And it's secretly the tanker trick again: the break runs along the reef at the speed of whatever made the wave. For a tanker that's the ship's speed. Here it's how fast the chambers fire in sequence. Software picks the timing, so the same pool can make lefts, rights, A-frames or a beginner-friendly roller.
Surf report: 100% chance of waves. Every ~10 seconds. Forever.
Firing order
PEEL SPEED–
WAVE ANGLE–
RIDE TIME–
SEQUENCE–
–
Simplified model: 24 chambers × 10 ft, and waves moving at ~5 m/s (a guess at pool depth). Every chamber sends out a ripple and the page adds them all up. The real sequencing and reef shape are proprietary. Lefts and rights are from the surfer's point of view, facing the beach.
The numbers
120–160 waves an hour, in three-wave sets about 1:10–1:30 apart.
Waves run roughly 2–6 ft (they can go bigger), and a ride lasts about 10 seconds.
Sessions are split into beginner, intermediate and advanced waves.
New for 2026: America's first Shredmill, a stationary wave built for doing turn after turn.
Going
Book early. Sessions usually sell out about two months ahead, and walk-ins aren't guaranteed. Overnight guests get first dibs on booking.
Every surfer has to be a proficient swimmer. Boards should be under 8 ft because the pool is shallow, and rentals are available.
wacosurf.com → 5347 Old Mexia Rd, Waco. Details checked Sept 2026, so check the site for current hours and water-park status.
Texas surf, ranked by weirdness
The Gulf. Real ocean. Waits for a storm, then it's on.
Waco. Robot ocean. Waits for nothing.
Tankers. Accidental ocean. Waits for a boat full of oil.
Same physics in all three: shoal, steepen, break, peel. ← tankers
Page 6 · Skate, frame by frame
How does an ollie work?
An argument with gravity, explained.
SPEED40%SLO-MO
1
Crouch
Hang time: about half a second. Make it count.
The nerdy bit
The pop is a lever. The back truck is the pivot. Stomping the tail rotates the board nose-up, and when the tail hits the ground, the ground shoves back. That rebound is what throws the board into the air.
You jump; the board doesn't carry you. Your legs lift you. The pop lifts the board. An ollie is two separate objects agreeing to leave the ground together.
Grip tape does real work. Your front foot drags up toward the nose, and friction pulls the nose higher and levels the board.
Tucking makes room. Pulling your knees up gives the board space to rise. Height mostly comes from how high you get your feet, not from magic.
Land on the bolts. Feet over the trucks means the deck isn't bending in the middle, and bent knees spread the landing force out over more time. Your ankles send their thanks.
Page 7 · The Playground
The Playground
A simplified physics experiment. You pick a speed and a ramp angle, and the board gets launched as a single point: no friction, no wind, no rider. The dotted line is the prediction and the red one is what actually happened.
(it unfolds. trust me.)
LIP SPEED–
AIRTIME–
PEAK–
DISTANCE–
BEST LANDED–
What's being simulated
The board rolls up a 1.4 m ramp. Climbing costs it speed. Then it leaves the lip and falls in a parabola until it hits the ground.
v_lip² = v₀² − 2·g·hy(t) = h + v·sinθ·t − ½·g·t²
What's not
Friction, air drag, the rider, bearings full of sand, and fear. In real life you land shorter. Steeper ramps give you more height and less distance, and 45° only maximizes distance on flat ground, which a ramp isn't.
WARRANTYVOIDIF OPENED
Page 8 · The Garage
Tech, badly soldered.
Three machines. Zero warranties. Built from browser APIs and electrical tape.
Punk was DIY before DIY was a hashtag: borrowed photocopiers, four-tracks in the garage, flyers stapled to every telephone pole in town. Surfing and skating were the same, with boards shaped in backyards and ramps built from "found" plywood.
So here's that energy, plus a laptop. One machine listens to the actual ocean, one turns skateboard noises into a drum kit, and one prints flyers for a show that may or may not exist.
Machine 01 · Surf
SWELL-O-TRON 3000
Pick a break. The machine asks a real ocean model what the waves are doing right now, prints you a receipt, and uses the wave-lab physics to work out how shallow the water has to get before those waves break.
STANDING BY. PICK A SPOT.
Data: Open-Meteo Marine, a few km offshore. It's a model, not a lifeguard, so check local conditions before you paddle out.
THERMAL · 58MM
SWELL-O-TRON 3000
-----------------------
READY.
PICK A SPOT TO PRINT
TODAY'S OCEAN.
Machine 02 · Skate
SK8-808
A drum machine where every drum is a skateboard. The kick is a tail pop, the snare is a landing, and the hi-hat is your wheels over sidewalk cracks. Every sound is synthesized live from noise and oscillators, no samples. Press play and it makes noise, obviously.
SK8-808RHYTHM COMPOSER · GARAGE ED.
Tap the pads to build a beat (arrow keys work too). Headphones recommended. Neighbors not consulted.
Machine 03 · Punk
FLYER-O-MATIC
A photocopier that only makes gig flyers. Type a band name and every letter gets cut from a different magazine. The artwork is real halftone, with the dots worked out pixel by pixel, and the grit is on the house.
XEROGRAPHIC UNIT K-1COPIES: 001
Paper
Artwork
Every reprint re-cuts the letters. Copies are 10¢. (They're free.)
WATER~70°FALL YEAR
Page 9 · The chill page
Texas swimming holes.
After the wipeouts: cold spring water and cypress shade.
Central Texas sits on limestone full of holes, like a giant sponge made of rock. Rain soaks down into aquifers like the Edwards and the Trinity, then pops back out as springs. The water's been underground long enough that it comes out at roughly the same temperature all year, around 68–72°F. That's freezing in July and weirdly warm in January.
The catch is that springs are only as healthy as the aquifer behind them. In drought, or when too much groundwater gets pumped out, they slow down, and sometimes they stop completely.
So every card below has a live USGS gauge on the spring or river. Numbers go up, go swim. Number says 0.00, and you've just learned something about groundwater.
cfs = cubic feet per second. I converted it to bathtubs, you're welcome.
Roughly Texas-shaped. Tap a pin.
Turn around, don't drown
Hill Country rivers flash-flood fast, sometimes from rain miles upstream that you never saw. If the water's rising, muddy, or carrying debris, get out and get high. Never drive or wade through flooded crossings.
Check before you drive
Reservations, capacity caps, closures and bacteria advisories change all the time. Every card links to the official page, and those beat this zine. (Status notes here were checked Sept 2026.)
Be cool to the water
Pack out your trash. No glass. Some of these springs are the only home on Earth for things like the Barton Springs salamander and Texas wild-rice. Don't stomp the plants, and definitely don't stomp the salamanders.