Best surfboard for beginners: which first board to buy

A soft top first, or a big funboard or a longboard, carrying close to your bodyweight in litres. Float is what lets you catch waves while you are still learning to stand up, and every one of those boards has plenty of it.

This page names types and sizes rather than models. What makes a board easy to learn on is its float and its shape, whatever is printed on the deck, so that is what to choose by.

Your own figure, for your weight and your level, is one step in the volume calculator.

A longboard is 9'0" and up, wide, thick, and it paddles into almost anything. A shortboard is roughly 5'6" to 6'4", thin through the rails, and it is built to turn once you are already up and moving. Between them there is more difference in what they ask of you than in what they look like.

A shortboard is not a smaller version of a longboard. It carries so little foam that it will not paddle you into a wave until you can already read where the wave will break and put yourself there. That skill takes months of standing up, which is the thing the board is preventing you from practising.

So the honest answer to longboard or shortboard is usually a third board. Most people asking want to stand up on a lot of waves this month, and a soft top or a funboard does that as well as a longboard and fits in a taxi. A longboard is a genuinely good first board too, but it is 9 feet of board to carry down a path and onto a bemo. The nine types of surfboard, side by side and to scale, have a guide of their own.

Soft top

A foam deck and soft rails. It is the safest board to fall off and to fall near, which matters more than it sounds when you are still learning to hold on to it in whitewater. Cheap used, holds almost no resale value, and that is the trade. Buy one, use it hard for a season, do not expect to sell it well.

Funboard

Roughly 6'6" to 8'0", with real rails and a hard deck. A big one paddles nearly as well as a longboard and it fits in a taxi. It is the usual next step after a soft top, and it comes up second hand here from people who have moved on.

Longboard

9'0" and up. Catches the most waves of anything on this list and is the only one of them you can still be improving on in ten years. Heavy, awkward to travel with, and at a crowded beach break it takes a lot of space you have to be able to control.

Midlength

Around 7'0" to 8'0", narrower and cleaner through the tail than a funboard. It rewards you for standing in the right place. Buy this second, not first, unless you have surfed before in another form.

Choose the litres, then the length that carries them. Two boards of the same length can be twenty per cent apart in float, so a length in a listing tells you much less than a volume does. That is also the order the filters on this site are in.

Within one model, length is how a maker adds float. Firewire's Special T longboard is 56.4 L at 8'0", 64.1 L at 8'6" and 71.3 L at 9'0", by Firewire's own size table. Set those against the table above: the 8'0" floats a beginner of about 60 kg, and someone of 75 kg wants the 9'0".

A 7 foot board works for a light beginner only if it is wide and thick, which means a funboard. A narrow 7'0" carries far less and belongs to the people who already stand up on every wave.

• Boards turn over fast here, so the used market is deep in exactly the beginner and intermediate sizes that are thin at home.
• Warm water and no wetsuit means you float slightly less than you do in 4 mm of neoprene. Do not size down on arrival.
• If you are here for two weeks, a rental is probably cheaper than buying and reselling. Past about three weeks the arithmetic flips.
• Buy for the wave you will actually surf most, not the one you photographed. For most visitors that is a beach break, not a reef.

On a used soft top, peel back a corner of the deck skin at the rails, where it lifts first, and look for a chalky, faded deck, which means the sun has had most of its life. The rest is the same as on any board, and checking a used board before you pay goes through it. Used soft tops for sale in Bali have a page of their own.