Set up might help a bit, try moving your mast track fwd, raise your boom hieght, and get your harness lines balanced

I try and absorb as much as possible with my legs but a lot of the larger chop has pretty prominant lips so the board gets airbourne even when I've absorbed as much as i can. What position should i take up once the board does leave the water?

i go into scared mode when the chop gets too bad.

i find heading higher spills some speed and makes thing more controllable.

maybe an idea.

Sail around the biggest, soft legs and point high

It really depends on the conditions how high you have your boom.
It does help in short chop but in open swell and rought stuff you might tend to get lifted to much and the board gets out of control. better to have the boom lower and stay in control. Move your body weight foward helps too.
But really if ya hitting vertical weist hight stuff there nothing really thats going to help except to jump it
ta vando

I get this as well. Thou I have a dedicated freestyle board so it doesn't handle the chop as well as a lot of other boards. I have sailed a few other narrower boards and found them to go over the chop a lot better. So I guess equipment comes into the equation a bit as well.

I find that sometimes going faster helps, like just blasting over the chop, but a few times this has ended in some pretty big stacks, so safe way i find usually is to head upwind a bit more to lose some speed and to have some more control. Either way i think theres like a bad spot in relation to speed where you end up slaming into the face of the next piece of chop, so either you go slower then that speed, or faster? But yeah I'm really only a beginner but thats the feeling I get from it.

Nic01 said...

Cheers for the tips, the one I'm most keen to try is this "pre-jump" concept. Seems to make sense as the board wont get loaded up on the lip and should...in theory...go over it without getting boosted.

I prejump and land on the downside of jumps a lot on my mountain bike, it makes going over jumps that would otherwise boost you into the air much faster and smoother. I'm sure the same concept would apply to swell, as it's only really a moving ramp.

Lock you knees and point into the wind as hard and fast as you can,keeping your body as stiff as an ironing board.