Life's a beach

Close your eyes, and whisper 'Surfing' - you are taken to a vast expanse of sand, with the azure waters quite easy to spot from the comfort of your hammock between all the palm trees. A rack of perfect lines are sweeping into the bay from afar and peeling over from left to right as you look. You can see Delgado cleaning tonight's fish on the beach with his knife, and are relieved to hear the thwack of ice cubes cascading into a glass behind you. Flavio, your Brazilian girlfriend (who moonlights as a part-time model), is preparing your first Rum and Coke for the afternoon. 'Hunnee' she chortles, 'triple or four?’ You lazily spin around, noticing that she's wearing the blue bikini made from dental floss, and blow her four kisses.


It is a little bit of a conundrum that a sport like surfing is actually more of a winter pastime in Cape Town. As much as I'd like to tell you otherwise, the corner at Muizenberg is not exactly this scene just described. Swap the Brazilian for a Nigerian crack wench, Faizel is not cleaning fish blood off his knife and Bostik quickset is preferred over Captain Morgan. But we do get waves, lots of them. The beloved South Easter even takes a well deserved break (along with the boardsailing gear that is now hibernating in the loft after a good rogering with soap, sponge and freshwater).
The weapon of choice in the ‘corner is of course a longboard, you don’t really want to be caught with anything under 8 feet around here. It does make life a whole lot easier, and when people ask, ‘do you surf?’ one can comfortably answer in the affirmative, even if you are totally clueless, as any idiot can stand up on a longboard.



Despite a lack of hard evidence to substantiate the claim, I am indeed a world record surfer. Last September saw a record breaking wave with 73 surfers all standing up together for five seconds……the picture is grainy, but if you look carefully, but I’m in there on a yellow board somewhere. Was a very cool day, you’ll hear all about it if they try it again.



Top right corner, yellow board with blue stripe.

Now onto something a little more important. The Red Bull Big Wave Africa has just started again. This competition is well known for never happening, as it requires the heavens to play ball off Hout Bay and for Dungeons to come alive below the sentinel. The window for action is now 3 months, where they give the invited dudes 48 hours notice to jump on a plane and get down here. Obviously there is a reserve list, and no I am not on it. The site is up and is pretty interactive.




Three days after the event last year produced some of the biggest surf ever seen, including this insane 70 footer that won biggest wave of the year. The way to do it is to drive to Hout Bay, hike round the mountain and park off with a chair and binocs when it’s going off. Watch the site for updates, early indications are that we are in for a monster winter.