To avoid the most aptly named (by a good friend) ‘aggressive tack’, achieved when you carve hard upwind, come to a stand still and try to style it out with a tack, here’s my tips:

1. Speed and power are really important for the Shaka, especially when you first start. Allow yourself to sail slightly downwind of a beam reach to get tonnes of speed and less pressure in the sail.

2. Find a good bit of chop. I learnt in Dahab where the chop comes from dead upwind; wherever its’ coming from my advice would be don’t go for a really steep bit, this tends to cause your body weight to fall back and in the Shaka we are always trying to go forward. Also, try to find a piece with a good wide trough, close chop is horrid and will just slow you down as you bounce over the piece in front.

3. Unhook, keep the sail open and forward and carve with your body. This is key, as soon as you try to carve with the sail back and sheeted in like in a tack that is exactly what you will do; the sail will have too much power and pull you back making it impossible to launch yourself onto the sail. The carve must come from your body only; as you unhook and allow the sail to open keep your front hand in front of you (I bend my front arm to add mast foot pressure and also help with the punching down bit later), bend your knees, stick your bottom out and carve hard on your heels.

4. Carve quite far. When you see people who are good at Shakas it looks as though they hardly carve the board, as you get better you don’t need to carve as much and also the movement becomes a lot more natural so it happens quicker. But to start with you have to learn to get power in the sail when you throw onto it, so a bigger carve will help. If you don’t carve enough you will just float along sideways with nothing in the sail until you hit the water like a sack of you know what. I experienced this a lot, apparently I looked like I was trying to cheese roll; it was not pleasant. Another thing that causes the across the wind drift is sail placement and that’s all about getting…