Everybody who picks a board off the rack by looks takes something too small, and then blames themselves.
In ten years behind this counter the single most common conversation is with somebody who wants the shortboard and needs the soft top, and the reason is that surfing looks like it is done on small boards.
It is, by people who surf every day. A board floats you or it does not, and floating you is what lets you paddle fast enough to catch the wave in the first place. A visitor who has surfed eight times in their life on a board that barely floats them spends the week paddling, missing waves and concluding they have no talent for it. They had the wrong board.
So we ask three questions: how tall, how heavy, and how many days in the water have you genuinely had. Not how many years since the first lesson. Days. Somebody who has had twelve days over four years is a beginner, and there is nothing shameful in that.
Then we hand you something wide and thick. You will catch five or ten times as many waves on it, which is the only way anybody has ever improved, and by the end of a week you may well be asking for the funboard instead. That is the right order to do it in.
We will also swap your board midway through a week at no charge if the first one turns out to be wrong. It costs us nothing and it is the difference between a good holiday and a frustrating one.