SURFING - The Spirit of Adventure and Surf-Spot Discovery in the beautiful Garden Route, South Africa

Hello Everyone on HIVE and especially the Sports Talk Social Community!

A couple of days ago I posted a blog about my father, who in his day was one of the best mountaineers and rock-climbers South Africa has ever produced. You can read that one here: https://ecency.com/hive-101690/@jasperdick/an-ode-to-my-father

Now I like going climbing every now and then, but it is not my passion, and I will admit to having a healthy fear of heights, and so I never ever reached the skill level of my father.

I prefer surfing. Now you may say that this is a completely different sport to rock-climbing, but I think it has some similarities!

Longevity

My father climbed until he was over 70 years old. Yes, his body was getting older and weaker, but he was so fit and in tune with the technique of climbing that he was still having fun and putting plenty of stronger, younger men to shame! Surfing is similar – where I have seen 70-year-old men who have been surfing for so long, that they just seem so much more in tune with the ocean than us “youngsters” and seem to catch the best waves without paddling back and forth trying to hunt them down…

I think having a sport you can do until you are old, is the secret to staying young-at-heart! You must have a passion, and something to look forward to in life – going climbing, or surfing, or whatever it may be. Perhaps you won’t quite be able to surf or climb like you did when you were younger, but your friends will be getting older too, and you will simply adjust and maybe climb or surf in safer, easier places but still be enjoying the outdoors together… perhaps followed by a few beers and exaggerated stories about how much braver and better you all used to be!

One of the main sports in South Africa is rugby. It is a physically demanding contact sport played by big, strong men. A team is made up of 15 men, with 8 substitutes on the bench. By about 35 years old, all those pro-rugby players, or even amateur-club players, can’t make the team anymore and have to retire – all of their muscle turns to fat, and the thing they look forward to in life is watching rugby games on the television and yelling about how the referee is "clearly blind" – it is sad to see. Even worse are the dads yelling at the referee at their son’s high school rugby games, haha!

Try and find a sport you can play until you are old! I remember playing tennis as a teenager and getting thrashed by an old man who clearly still loved the game! It doesn’t have to be surfing or climbing!

The Spirit of Adventure

But I think this is definitely something that climbing and surfing have in common, and perhaps where I am a bit similar to my father after all – the Spirit of Adventure.

It wasn’t enough for my father to be recognized as a good climber – he had to be adventurous, travelling the country and even the world, looking for new routes to open and call his own.

When it comes to surfing – you get the kind of surfers who just enjoy surfing with everybody else at the popular beaches... and then you get somebody like me…

I live in Cape Town, South Africa. We have a lot of surf-spots here, but several of them happen to be a lot more popular than others – places like Muizenberg, Long Beach, Llandudno and Big Bay. Now surfers from Australia, Brazil or California might laugh at these places I call crowded, but I really don’t enjoy crowds at all. There is a code of honour in surfing that you don’t catch other peoples waves, and I am a really polite person – and so if there is any doubt, I will usually let the other surfer catch the wave instead of haggling over it – so it suits me much better to find somewhere to be by myself or with only a few other people, hopefully friends!

Perhaps it means just choosing a less crowded spot that is still well-known enough to be published on this list here: https://www.wavescape.co.za/spots/spots-by-region.html

Perhaps it means a friend letting you in on a secret, or at least describing the conditions for when a fickle spot works well…

But the ultimate dream for me, and for a lot of other surfers, is to explore new regions and assume you’re the first person to ever try and surf a spot, and perhaps even give it your own name! A couple of weeks ago, that dream came true for me.

Somewhere in the Garden Route

South Africa is a large country with many different environments/climates. The West Coast is almost like a desert, and the East Coast becomes more and more sub-tropical the further north you go up towards Mozambique. In between, is the Western Cape, where the climate is similar to the Mediterranean – we actually grow world class wine and olives here! About a 4-7 hour drive east of Cape Town, along the Southern Coast, is a region we call the Garden Route because of its beauty. I was lucky enough to go on holiday to a small coastal village there a couple of weeks ago.

I had surfed the beach adjacent to the village before on previous trips – but the conditions during this particular week in the middle of our (Southern Hemisphere) winter did not look good at all. I couldn’t see any place along the sandy beach where the waves broke in a consistent and surfable manner. To be honest, it looked really big and scary as well!

So, I took my wife for two beautiful hikes, which you can see here: https://ecency.com/hive-155530/@jasperdick/wednesday-walk-baby-madison-s

The first hike traversed across a very rocky coastline to reach a rocky river-mouth. I had done this hike before on previous trips to this village, but this time I looked at everything more closely… and there, nearly in the river mouth itself, was a lovely left breaking wave. It had lost a lot of size by wrapping around another section of reef first, and looked like it broke very close to exposed rocks, but looked potentially doable if the tide was just a little bit lower!

The next morning I woke up early to enjoy the softer winds, and slightly lower tide, and trotted off to repeat the hike with a surfboard and wetsuit bag!

Off I go, feeling like the only surfer in the world! (Is this what it felt like in the 60s? I wisely chose a short, fat, soft board, because the wave had looked more cruisy than juicy, but also there was a chance the board would bounce off the shallow rocks if I made mistakes!

And there it is, breaking along nicely at an even pace for quite some distance! I called it "Maddy's Left" after my baby daughter! (How gorgeous is this scenery?)

I wore booties on my feet to help with the rocky paddle-out, and here I am about to catch my first wave!

And it went pretty well! - it's a surfable wave that only gets too shallow just before the river mouth itself. Definitely worth the effort and I came back for another session two days later!

So... after years of surfing - my first real discovery! It's not a world class wave, but I get to feel like it is mine - and I had a real adventure to find it and make sure it was just far enough off the rocks to be relatively safe!

I can't wait to go back to this village - I could see other waves that looked potentially surfable and spoke to some locals I met about it - those waves look a bit more serious, and so I will need a bigger board and hopefully some friends with me to give them a try!

I guess I am adventurous, but not stupid! I have a wife and baby daughter after all! Haha

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