Highway Surfer

Although I roll by the alias of "Justasurferdude", I have to admit that I haven't been in the water for a while and can hardly call myself a hard-core surfer anymore. When I was a kid we always used to joke about guys riding with surfboards on their roof racks that never see the water. "Highway surfers" we called them. My surfboard is not on my car, mine is hanging on the wall in my garage most of the time, but then again if I allocate equal amount of time to all the other toys against my wall then I can hardly blame the surfboard for having collected some dust over the last couple of months. When I heard about the record attempt this weekend at Muizenburg to have the most surfers standing on one wave I thought this might be a good time to get the surfboard wet again. After all, I have a new GoPro camera and it was a good opportunity to try it out.

When I arrived at Muizenburg this morning I was excited like a kid in a toy shop about getting into the water again. At least the water on this side of the Peninsula is warmer than on the other side. This is probably one of the main reason my frequency of hitting the water has dwindled over the last few years. Two days ago when I attached the bracket of the GoPro camera to my board, getting the dust of was harder than getting the sand, salt and surf wax off. Today I was not only going to break a Guinness world record, but I was also testing out my new GoPro Camera and I was hoping for some good shots.

At 10 o'clock the registration started and I was about 7th in line. I was a bit worried that they were going to ask questions like "when last did you surf?" or "how fit are you?", but I guess fifty bucks is all they were after and anyone could enter. My biggest concern however was not my fitness but rather whether my GoPro was going to stay stuck to my board. I saw a couple of other guys with GoPros and asked them whether they had close calls before. I got some advice on how to tighten the small chord so that it does not come off, but I was still worried even though no-one has lost their cameras before. At 12:30 when we all lined up I was still trying to figure out how to set the camera to take intermittent pictures of 10 second intervals. In the rush to not to get left behind on the beach I set it on 20 seconds and would only later realize the consequences of my mistake. 

There were around 400 surfers ready to take on the challenge and even though the conditions looked good, it will never be possible for all 400 to take the same wave. With a combination of longs boards, shortboards and a few SUPs (stand-up paddle boards) the different positions to take off on a wave for these three types of boards meant that lying in a straight line would not work. Longboarders and SUP's have the ability to catch a wave much earlier than shortboards, and this left the line-up a bit messy. The last record was 110 surfers, but with 400 in the water just over 25% had to catch the wave to break the old record. Although instructions on which wave to catch were announced from the beach, some younger surfer with less patience didn't wait for the call and took whatever wave they thought was good enough to take. I have to admit that sitting in the water watching the prefect wave goes past is kind of hard to resist. When the actual wave came, the surfers who took the first wave was either missing in action or floating around in front of the line-up, leaving a difficult take-off for the others. The waves were good, but the sets also did not play along as well as the weather did. The rules state that 8 waves could be ridden in one hour, but the sets were so far apart from each other that their were only about 3 proper attempts made and each time on the third wave of the set. For some reason today the 3rd wave of the set was not the best one and after watching two perfect waves go past, it was a bit harder to catch a weaker third wave.

My eyes were on my camera most of the time, not to see myself in pictures afterwards, but to make sure that it was still attached to my board. I realised afterwards that because of the slow setting of 20 seconds, as well as the fact that not many waves were ridden, I could not get a nice picture were I was actually surfing. Just a bunch of paddling shots with lots of water in my face. I will definitely have to do a re-shoot on my surfboard in the near future, but all I know from today is that the angle of my camera needs to change and I have to find a way to prevent the condensation on my lens. The camera stayed put and the clarity of some of the shots were quite good. The setting unfortunately were too slow and 5 or 10 seconds should be better to get more action pics

The record was not broken today, the most surfers on one wave was 85. I doesn't really bother me because the day turned out to be very enjoyable. My camera works, I discovered a new beach break (although located 40 km form where I live), and the surfing vibe was absolutely great. Seeing 400 surfers in the water was spectacular and being able to take part was a real privilege. My board is clean today and summer is here. You will definitely see me more often on Muizenburg beach from now on and maybe I can keep the dust of my board this time. 

Day Trip Around the Peninsula - Part One

Cloud bank over Cape Town

After a discussion with friends from Bulgaria I realized that in the ten years that I have been living in Cape Town, I have never really gone to Cape Point. I have been there before, but that was even before we've moved to Cape Town. So, I took a day off and at 7 am I was ready for my day trip around the Peninsula. But, as fate would have it, after 3 weeks of solid sunshine my morning started out rather disappointing when I woke up and saw that it was totally overcast. I didn't want to go for a long bike ride, just a short one with my camera. According to WeatherSA there were only 3 towns with sunshine predicted for the day, and the closest one of them was Worcester. At 8:40 I made up my mind and decided that I would do a trip in that direction hoping to find sunshine. When I left the house the sun was winking at me through holes in the clouds, but I knew she was just flirting and had no intentions of going all the way with me today. But, my luck turned when I reached Durbanville and saw blue skies. I was already getting hot in my bike jacket. I looked around and saw the cloud bank that was rolling in from the Atlantic that was causing the overcast conditions in Cape Town. I was really not in the mood for a 300km trip and decided to turn around and go do the "Day trip around the Peninsula" as I had initially planned, whether there were sunshine for nice pictures or not.

After a detour of about 50 kilometres I reached the M5 again heading towards Muizenburg. That would be my first stop for the day.

MUIZENBERG

When I reached Muizenberg, I was basically back underneath the cloud cover. The sun was occasionally breaking through and I tried to get a few pictures of Surfer's Corner. I have never surfed at surfer's corner before, and even though I am pretty much aware of "the best surf spot in False Bay" for beginners and pros alike, I have never actually felt the need to drive this far to go surf there. The water was crowded, I counted over 70 surfers and was told that this was a "quiet" day. I was watching the guys and girls (mainly longboarders) doing there stuff and didn't see any interference by anyone on another's wave. There is just so much space. The waves were small, but what convinced me to come back was the awesome surfing vibe the place has. I think I saw about 7 surf shops in a radius of one kilometer. It reminded me so much of Durban. I think what Kite beach is for the kitesurfers, surfer's corner is for the surfers. The water here is slightly warmer than on the Atlantic, but they have one huge problem there. SHARKS!

Surfer's Corner in the background.

One of the many surf shops at Surfer's corner.

Crowded? You decide.

A longboarder getting ready to join his mates for a morning session. I have to admit, the waves seemed to favour longboard riding. Definitely the best place to learn to surf...if you are not afraid of sharks of course.

Another cosy restaurant with a surf theme. If I wasn't still stuffed from the previous night's braai, I would've stopped here for another breakfast review. It was still early do I decided to head further southwards. The sun was showing signs of conquering the fog, but at this stage I was still getting cold on the bike.

End of Part One......

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

You have reached your destination...NOT!

Koeberg Interchange BEFORE they started with construction

I read about this eldery German couple that drove 600km in the wrong direction because they misspelled their destination on their GPS. "Can things like this really happen?", I ask myself . I've had lots of fun already with my "make-believe" GPS on my Nokia XpressMusic. I would put in known destinations and see which route it takes me. Sometimes even addresses where I have never been before without consulting any directory or map first. I have learned quite a few things about the GPS, for instance that you cannot always believe the voice when he/she tells you that "you have reached your destination". I was on my way to a shop in Cape Town City Centre, but when I reached the Koeberg Interchange on the N1 the gentleman inside my GPS completely lost his bearings and instead of heading towards town I found myself guided onto the N2 heading towards the airport. After I was told to make a U-turn and go back into the direction of this horrible interchange that is currently under huge constructions and changes, I decided to follow the signs rather than the voice. One thing that I have to admit is that my friend inside my GPS is probably the most patient navigator I've ever had. At one spot I accidently turned right when he said left and ended up on the freeway going into the opposite direction with limited opportunity to turn around. Without showing any sign of frustration or anger he calmly altered my route for me and continued guiding me to a place where I could make yet another U-turn. Was it my wife playing navigator all hell would've broken loose at some point.

So we invited two friends from work over for dinner at 7 pm last night. Being work colleagues, one from Algeria and the other from Tunisia and not having been in the country very long, I obviously drew a very detailed map for them to find my house in TABLEVIEW. It is is only about 9 kilometres from where they stay to where I live. At 5 to 7 I had a call saying that they are close to my house and mentioned that they have accidently taken a wrong turn from the street that actually leads to my house. After explaining to them to go back to the same street and just drive 2 blocks further, I started getting worried after 15 minutes when there was still no sign of them. I phoned but no answer. Getting really worried now I got into my car and went searching for them. After about 30 minutes and various attempts to call them, I got hold of them on the phone again. They sheepishly admitted that they were lost.  I asked them to give me their location (street name) so that I could drive and meet them there, but for some reason my GPS could not find the street name. So much for that technology. One of the ladies suggested that we meet at a spot that is familiar to all of us I agreed, but was very surprized when they suggested that we meet at the office which is basically a stone's throw away from where they live. Quite a long way to drive if they had been only meters away from house 45 minutes earlier.

After meeting them at the office and reaching my house at 8.30 pm I managed to get the full story. After they phoned me the first time, they decided to make use of their GPS to find my adddress. Unfortunately for them and what they did not know was that the street where I live has the same name as a guesthouse in MUIZENBURG.  So they thought it best to follow the GPS which took them to about 45 kilometres in the opposite direction. Fortunately for them the guesthouse was only in Muizenburg and not in Plettenberg Bay which is about 600 kilometres further up the coast. I wonder if they would've driven all the way there before they would've realized that they might be heading for the wrong destination? Anyway, I promised them I won't mention their names or put pictures of them on my blog, but in their defense I can add that English is their third language, they are not used to driving on the left side of the road, they have only been in the country for a couple of months...and they are both female. We did however have a nice evening afterwards with obvioulsy lots of things to laugh about.