From Wired How-To Wiki

You may have already played spectator to the latest trend that's gripped the internet, “tarp surfing.” The new sport puts participants on a tarpaulin wave, briefly allowing the regretfully landlocked masses to forget their skateboard isn’t a surfboard and ride the gnarly blue. It can be a lot harder to do than they make it look online, however, so we've compiled a handy guide for all of you wannabe tarp-surfer dudes and dudettes.

What You'll Need

• A Tarp: The bigger the better, and the more square the better. A tarp around 25 x 25 is usually ideal, but something like 15 x 30 will suffice too.

• A Board: You'll need either a skateboard or a longboard. Longboards tend to work better, as they have loose trucks for easy carving and large wheels for riding over a coarse tarp smoothly, but some may prefer a skateboard to lip over folds in the tarp.

• Two Friends: Two people are required to create a tubular wave with the tarp while you're surfing through it. They'll both stand on the same end of the tarp that you ride in on, each one holding a corner.

• Two Heavy Objects: You'll need two relatively heavy objects to ensure the other end of the tarp doesn't get picked up by the wind while your friends are pulling it from the opposite side. Around five pounds on each corner should be fine in most cases.

• An Open Space: This can be difficult to find, as you need a flat, smooth area that's substantially larger than the size of your monster tarp so that you can get up enough speed before hitting the wave. Look around your neighborhood for an empty parking lot or paved park.

Prep Your Wave

Lay down your tarp with your two heavy objects on the far corners. Have your two “runners” grab the other two corners, and place the board a good twenty feet from the tarp, so that you can get up enough speed. The rider is going to want to come in on the lengthwise edge of the tarp, right at the corner next to the near runner. The goal is to ride across the tarp diagonally, which is why a square tarp is ideal.

Hang 10

Push a couple of times while riding to have maximum speed when you hit the tarp just beyond the corner. The runner farthest from the rider should start running about a second before the rider hits the tarp, and the runner closest to the rider should run as soon as the rider passes them. Both runners should run towards the corner that the rider is pointed at, to ensure a funnel effect is created in the “wave.”

Practice, Practice, Practice

It will take a couple of tries to get the timing and direction absolutely perfect, but you'll know when you get the hang of it. If you follow our guidelines, and check out some of the many YouTube videos chronicling the epidemic sport that is tarp surfing, you'll be catching monster waves in no time.

Original article by Jack Donovan, Wired.com. Photos by Samantha Maslak, Wired.com.