I had not read this before and thought it was worth posting.
Lifted from The Surfer's Journal:

In 1866 Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) spent several months in Hawaii, writing on assignment for The Sacramento Union. The following excerpt from Roughing It emerged from his island stint…not bad for a haole:


In one place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf- bathing. Each heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea (taking a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell! It did not seem that a lightning express-train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed. I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself. The board struck the shore in three-quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me. None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.

I think I'll go surf-bathing tomorrow, with a wetsuit of course.