Alley Oop - Mix your Airs up

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35. Alley Oop

Alley Oops are a great way of mixing your up your airs. You don’t want to be known as the guy who can only do the same frontside air over and over, so you need to get a few different types in your bag of tricks.
Alley Oops are completely different to any other kind of air that you do on your frontside because you leave the wave on the opposite rail than you would if you were doing a standard frontside air (alley oops are done off your toeside rail).

So what is an Alley Oop? One things for sure its NOT a Chop Hop but you will be stoked if you learnt how to do chop hops in lesson 26. Oops do have some of the same motions that chop hops do so it will be to your benefit if you know how to do them. You can only do Alley Oops on your frontside, if you do them on your backside (a very difficult manoeuvre) then they are known as a Gorkin Flip.
With an Alley Oop you need to launch out the top of the wave as if you were trying a 360, the difference here is that you launch into the air and start to rotate around but you still enter back into the wave fins first going backwards, you then spin back round the correct way as you are going down the face, this completes the full 360 rotation.

So how do we do them? A key thing is the conditions, what you want is a light cross/onshore wind that is blowing into the wave. With the wind blowing into the wave it will make the board stick to your feet allowing you to do the air without the board flying away. This wind is especially helpful if you are doing Ally Oop’s with no grab. Adding a grab to the mix is all about adding control, and style, the easiest grabs to chuck into the mix are lien or slob grabs which are both done using your front hand. Check out lesson 34. To find out more about grabs.
So lets do one. You are flying down the line, as with all airs the more speed you have the better. The big noticeable difference with an Oop is that you want to do your bottom turn very high up the face of the wave, usually about ¾ the way up the wave. Its one of the very few manoeuvres that you don’t do your bottom turn at the bottom of the wave. Doing your bottom turn high is probably the most key factor to launching and pulling them.

As you turn into the lip you want to exit out the top of it at about a 70-degree angle, by doing this it’s the very start of your rotation. As you hit the lip you want to propel yourself out of it. Don’t try and do the same motion for this as if you were doing a 360 because if you do you will fly out the back of the wave. You need to use the lip like a springboard to launch you in the air but also push you back into the wave, so it is essential that there is a lip to spring off. If you launch when there isn’t enough of a lip then you will end up off the back of the wave and if you launch too late then you will land right out in the flats backwards which will only be bad news for your board and your ankles, so doing it in just the right spot where you launch and land back on top of the wave where the landing is soft and forgiving is essential.
As you air out the top of the lip what your going for is an up and down motion with a slight rotation in it. As you’re in the air you want to look down and spot your landing on top of the lip, this move is all about spotting your landing because you are going backwards which is very unnatural so you need to spot your landing to get a sense of where you are.
Just before you land back on the lip you need to transfer a lot of your weight onto your front foot, if you have too much weight on your back foot your tail will dig in and sling you off. By having weight on your front foot it will allow you to go backwards for a short amount of time before your fins catch. If you are fully centered, evenly over your board your chances of making the spin and riding out of the move increase dramatically.

alley oop sequence