SURFING: The Calm After the Storm - Surfing into the Dusk

Hello everyone, and especially the SurfHive Community! It's Jasper, the musical-surfer dad from Cape Town in South Africa.

This weekend we had proper winter storms! Hard winds, torrential winds, and more snow on the mountains just inland of Cape Town. Apparently it's going to be a cold winter and this is just the start... this news is made even worse by the rolling electricity blackouts we have been experiencing for a few months now, so we can't always count on our electric kettles and heaters!... needless to say I didn't surf on the weekend.

I worked from home on Tuesday. The house was absolutely freezing. It seems like South African homes are designed to keep us cool, not warm! The storm had broken, and the sky was actually blue... to my great surprise, when I went outside to eat my lunch, I realised that being outside in the sun was significantly warmer than freezing to death indoors!

I decided to make the most of the blue sky and the gap in the storms, and head to the closest beach to me after work and before the sun went down. Muizenberg is probably one of the few beaches I will actually name in my posts... it is well known as the best beginner surf spot in Cape Town!

It is the hub of Cape Town surfing. Everyone surfs here. Young and old. Male and female. Every racial group. Shortboards, longboards, SUPs and even wing-foils. Quite a vibe!! It is the best beginner beach because the bottom is very flat and so the waves break slowly and softly.

In fact, some of the factors that make it great for beginners can make it less than ideal for intermediate surfers...

1. It is very crowded whenever it is offshore. A lot of surfers stick to Muizenberg and don't venture anywhere more difficult. To be honest, even the second easiest beach in Cape Town is quite a bit faster and more powerful. The crowds got worse during Covid - I think when people weren't allowed at indoor gyms, some of them tried surfing... and it seems that a lot of them got hooked on surfing, which is fair enough! Hahaha!
2. Because the bottom is so flat, a set wave will start breaking quite a bit further out than an ordinary medium sized wave. This isn't scary or anything - the waves are soft and easy to duck under or often just bash through, but it means you tend to paddle around a lot more as the take-off zone is completely different with each coming wave, instead of sitting around in one place like you can do at a reef or other kinds of more defined set ups. This can also be a good thing because the crowd can spread out and eventually a wave will come right to you and won't be stolen by somebody a little bit better than you... if you're patient enough to wait for that one particular wave! Hahaha!
3. Because the waves are so soft and slow - if you want to rip on a shortboard, you have to be good enough to add a lot of your own energy, using your body like a spring, similar to pumping a skateboard up a mini-ramp. The rest of us more mortal intermediate point-and-steer kind of surfers tend to use boards with more volume to keep us afloat and sliding along the gutless, powerless waves. Fishes, soft-tops or even more volume like longboards are perfect here... I used a 7'6 mini-mal that I pretty much own for this spot alone!

If Muizenberg is decent and you arrive just after the sun comes up, or in this case, just before the sun goes down, you will find my friend Jono. He seems to have a dedicated parking spot in front of the Lifestyle Surf Shop! This definitely was the case again on Tuesday. Jono is a good surfer... good enough to rip a shortboard on these soft waves, but even he seems to be going through the current mid-length surfboard trend at the moment! Those things are everywhere! Are they really that nice to ride?

Perhaps the storm was over, but the clues of it remained! There was a weird sidewash and rawness to the small waves at a spot that is usually very clean and lined up when offshore. The other clue was the water temperature - an icy 11 degrees Celsius made it feel like we were surfing on the more Atlantic side of the peninsula that is more exposed to the Benguela current from Antartica!! Brrrr!!!

Watching my friend Jono up and riding (the further of the two surfers) - there is often space to share swells with multiple peaks at this beach...

Later in the session, the lights are starting to flicker back on land...

This is considered a crowd in South Africa - I am sitting quite far off the pack and waiting patiently rather than sitting in the throng... the night sky is starting to get beautiful and I am starting to get really cold!

Beautiful hues of yellow and pink... and frigid green water!

Last wave in the failing light...

Let's call it a night!!

Time to get dry, pump the car heater, and have a few swigs of warming cheap Old Brown Sherry!!

As I write this post one day later, the wind is pumping and the rain is falling again! As cold as the water was last night, I'm glad I took the gap when it was there!

THE END