SUID AFRIKA: JEFFREY’S BAAI AS HOME



“It’s an indescribable sight,” South African pro surfer Marc Price said of Jeffreys Bay in 1982. “Watching from the beach, you start off facing right and end up facing left as the wave travels down the point. This 180-degree perspective is something no photograph can capture.” And seemingly, surfboards have forgotten how to as well. When high-performance shortboards became thinner and narrower and shorter, the speed and performance levels at J-Bay among pro surfers declined as their boards wouldn’t hold the kind of sustained turns and propulsion that proper J-Bay surfing demands.



Even Kelly Slater struggles to find the right lines these days. And making it through the “Impossibles” section”, once the golden ticket of the entire wave, is now almost unheard of. Exasperation could also be heard in the voice of the once supreme master of the wave, 1977 World Champion Shaun Tomson, as he helped out with a recent WSL broadcast there. At one point, after watching wave after wave pass the best surfers in the world like speeding freight trains, he muttered that he might paddle out on a proper board and show them how it is done.



Still, these new performances, which often treat the wave as beach break ramps, chopping it up into short sections than maintaining one long study in elegance, are amusing if nothing else. The all Brazilian final of last year’s WSL event seemed to illustrate at least some of the squandered potential of the wave. Which raises the question. Is the standardization of today’s pro boards standardizing the performances themselves? Each wave, each ocean, has a different electrical charge within it. Are today’s pro surfers plugging the same light bulbs into it?



Casting a common light, rather than the uncommon, “indescribable” experience that a wave like J-Bay can inspire? We are not facers of reality. We are creators of it. Individuality has always been the hallmark of surfing’s rebel soul. So where do we go from here? Refinement? Or revamping? After all, surfing is not a matter of who you want to watch. It’s what you want to watch.

Photography by Pete Frieden

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CAUGHT INSIDE # 128

Image
Sea Dreams. We all have them. And we are bringing some more to you in this new issue of Surftime Magazine. Consider the photo on the right. Can you see it? Really see it? The dreams that are scrawled on that dream machine? A child’s sea dreams for all the world to see. A homegrown machine hewn out of the scraps of a snapped board washed up on the beach. The homegrown logos, scrawled with such passion, misspellings and reversals and all. A physical manifestation of passion and desire. The passion for surfing and the desire to belong to the tribe. If this surfer couldn’t get his hands on a real dream board, then let the surf Gods be damned, he would make it himself. The real stuff of sea dreams in a single image. We have a lot of other images of dreams for you too. Take the cover with Tai Graham, once again in the center of perfection at some remote secret spot of his. As always making his sea dreams come true. And even more so as we let him pick the color scheme for the cover itself
Read more

CAUGHT INSIDE # 130

Image
The question is can we keep it up? The answer is yes, as long as, like a satellite in outer space, we can keep our orbit from decaying. Our orbit being the entire biomass system of tourists and waves that keep the island of Bali’s heart beating. Right now the best we can do is deal with it. But dealing with something means having it in hand. Which we barely do. What happens when we lose our grip? One need only look at the shortcut in Canggu to see what kind of inhuman chaos ensues. The answer? For everyone on earth to be thoughtful. Which millions of years on earth has proven impossible. It’s just not in our survival mode. So what’s next? Circle the wagons, I guess. Take our surfing world, observe our orbit’s momentum and health and keep it in hand. And we have such a wonderful orbit happening. But now, with the steamrolling effect of greed tourism and irresponsible development sounding like a death knell, it’s time to look at Bali’s surfing healthspan rather than its lifespan. Th
Read more

MEDEWI: Life by the side of the skeleton road

Image
It is late afternoon. That time of day on any west coast where the color of the sea and the land contract into vivid hues and shadows begin to crawl east like living things and a golden path rises from the sea and leads to the sun. You are at the surf break of Medewi Point on the island of Bali, far from the tourist madness to the south and you can see alpha local Muklis Anwar and his covey of wet, shiny, local kids crabbing their way toward shore over the slippery boulders on the inside of the surf break. A misstep here and any one of them will receive a spray of urchin spines deep into the front pads of their feet and nothing more than a sewing machine needle to dig them out with. Muklis has been teaching the village kids how to surf and the kids hold under their arms all manner of relic surfboards. Chunked, split and repaired, cast away like dolls without heads by the western visitors of this place over the decades. Yet these boards are gold to the humble, to be smelted and re-
Read more