South Africa’s surfing paradise The first day of winter
One epic week in the South African "working man's Indo".
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It’s a Monday morning in Durban, South Africa. It’s the first day of a six-star prime WQS surfing event at New Pier, and heats are being vigorously contested by the visiting pros and their Saffa counterparts in knee-high waves.
Less than hundred miles away though, a fresh swell is building. Here, along the coast, it’s a balmy morning. Yet the cool bite of the offshore wind, dropping in from the already iced-up Drakensberg mountain range inland, indicates that the long, humid sub-tropical summer is passing.
By mid-morning, 10-footers are rolling into the scores of rock/sand points lining this stretch, and all tools are downed.
At one cove, around 9.30am, a local strokes into the set of the day. A diminutive natural-footer, no taller than Russell Winter in sandals, he gets to his feet, but hovers in the lip for a few seconds, as if a crouching native warrior going in for the strike.
The wave jacks up. He free-falls, with only his fins caressing the dredging, dirty-lime green face as he drops down it. He makes it into the trough, and draws a deep bottom turn as 15 feet or so of Indian Ocean foam detonates behind him. A dozen or so mates on the shoulder scream their stoked approval.
Later, the same guy tries to take off even later on another, bigger bomb, but gets eaten and snaps his board, the morning’s third. He leaves the beach and returns with a couple of tall Hansa Pilsner “quarts”. Smugly satisfied, wave-of-the-day man then lights a strong Stuyvesant “Red” cigarette, slugs his beer, starts to roll a joint as he observes those still attempting to negotiate the hairy paddle out from the sharp rocks.
A 12-foot (South African) clean-up set mows down these remaining few, and as the swell maxes, the crew retires with their attendant female posse under beach umbrellas. On the grassy knoll above the point, they drink and smoke it off in a haze of memories of the morning’s drops and maulings.
Someone claims the day as the first of winter, and brown bottles are clinked in celebration, until well after the sun sinks behind the hills.
Such is life down on the coast. It’s a place where once the seasons switch from the summer onshores to morning land breezes, and the winter groundswells begin to arrive, the quality of the surf is often so good and consistent it compares to any fabled surfing paradise. In fact, life is so affordable here, especially for exchange-rate hobbled South African surfers, it’s been jokingly called their “Poor Man’s Indo”.
Or at least “Working Man’s Indo”, as you’ll be corrected. The locals might not have much in these parts, but they’ve got their pride. Most drive battered pick-ups, wear black boardshorts and flannel shirts, and sport feral woodcutter’s beards, if not a few natty dreads. And they are all men’s men: plumbers, builders, bricklayers, mechanics, fishermen, surfboard builders or itinerants who will find any way to fund their surf addiction.
Those with the cushiest beach jobs, as lifeguards or with the shark authorities, fill the rest of the line up. Almost all of them rip. A talented few have achieved some competitive success and magazine ink, but the uncomplicated existence of home always draws them back, away from the perceived backstabbing and politics of the contest and industry scene in “Dirtbin” Surf City.
The mornings on the coast are usually best, winds and tide willing, so even the working stiffs can snag a few backlit pits, before they retreat grinning to the building site. But some days the waves are so good, they simply stay and spend the whole day getting shacked with a handful of their unemployed friends. No one bothers to drive and see what even the closest point or beachie is doing. Why would you, when you’ve got perfect reeling waves right out front?
That said, the sanctity of every break - especially the more remote, fickle or lesser-known ones - is fiercely guarded, to the point where signposts to them are obscured or ripped down. Pros who are bros are welcome, but professional camera crews are frowned upon, a rule that sometimes has to be vocally and occasionally physically enforced (just ask the emerging California pro who tried a few years back).
Indeed, pull up in your rental - complete with the “wrong” (read Durban) plates - and you’ll get a few dirty looks and muttered comments. Paddle out into the line up and you’ll get a few more. Like most places though, if you mind your manners and give the boys a few waves, and don’t blow your own, you should be okay.
Show respect, quaff a lunchtime beer with them and charge in the surf, and you’ll be in the loop. Suspicious of outsiders they may be, but unreasonable or unfriendly they ain’t - once you get to know them.
In many ways, this obscure part of the SA coastline remains part of frontier Africa, where small town familiarity can breed contempt, and racial tension between the blue-collar white folk and the dispossessed Zulu tribe still festers. Though blessed with beautiful scenery - undulating cane fields, wide rivers and sub-tropical beaches - it’s a tough, dirty-fingernailed region, reminiscent of small town Australia, but with the added edge that it’s in rough, rural South Africa.
It’s a hard-knock life for sure, but for the hardcore surfer here it can also be sublime, like the duration of the abovementioned surf comp, when a cut off low delivered a glut of swell and offshore winds down the coast. Whilst the WQS surfers hacked in two-foot “contestable” waves a few hours drive away, this stretch of seafront lit up with rolling walls of green and gold - and the lucky few ushered in winter with a week of overhead, funnelling righthanders.
As the proud news filters down into the carpark on the following Sunday that a Saffa had won the comp, one of the local underground kingpins turns and asks no one in particular, “There’s a contest on?” He then drains his beer, stubs out his smoke and pulls on his shorty for yet another sick session.
As they are apt to say in these parts: “Nothing wrong with that, bru.”
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South Africa’s surfing paradise (text) by Miles Masterson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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