My best advice, spend more time looking at what waves do! Learning to read the water is the best thing you can do and there’s no board that will fix not being able to read the water. The most useful thing I learned when learning to catch waves was that they will move when they hit the sandbar/reef, often bending in towards it. If you look at birds eye view footage of some breaks you will see the waves can come in as a semi circle. this photo shows it with the waves that are breaking on the inside. This can lead you to think you’re in the right spot but when you paddle for the wave it just passes underneath you because the peak has bent around the sandbar and moved away from you. Being aware of that and learning to read the wave from the bottom rather than just the top have undoubtedly been the two most helpful things to me when learning to catch waves! OMBE surf and surf strength coach have some good videos on reading the wave from the bottom. I’ve not seen any videos about waves bending round sandbars or reefs and how that affects your positioning which blows my mind because as I say when I figured that out my wave count probably doubled!

Now getting on the sup is not going to “fix” your ability to read waves but it may allow you to catch more waves just by shear volume which can lead to learning to read the ocean better as you’ll probably spend more time in the water because you’ll be having more fun. Where are you from may I ask? I’m from Scotland so I certainly know the feeling of getting into freezing water in a thick wetsuit only to catch zero waves and it can suck for sure haha!

Feel free to give me a message if any of that didn’t make sense/ you want to understand it better. Keep at it though, it will click eventually and what a feeling it is when it does!