Tabla de contenidos para Autumn 2022 - 46.2 en Zigzag

In my youth, for my friends and me at the Bay of Plenty in Durban, Hawaii was the red-hot centre of the surfing universe. Hawaii was our Valhalla, a mythic place where surfing gods actually lived and went to battle on the hallowed waves of Sunset Beach, Banzai Pipeline, Haleiwa and Waimea Bay. Our gods had the names of Barry Kanaiaupuni, Jeff Hakman, Reno Abellira, Eddie Aikau and Gerry Lopez. On my bedroom wall at Grosvenor Court, overlooking the Bay’s deep tubes, I had surf pictures of Hawaii; and my favourite was Californian John Peck, crouching and grabbing the rail of his 10-foot longboard at the Banzai Pipeline, the world’s deadliest wave. Pipeline filled me with anticipation – and dread, too; I had seen a photo of Peruvian surfer Joaquin…

The Banzai Pipeline is the yardstick by which we measure any hard, barrelling left. Through all the years in or out the water, how many times have you heard, “Yoh! That wave looks like Pipe!”? It’s been ingrained in us through years of seeing images splayed out in magazines like this one, and reinforced by watching your favourite surfer being blown out into flat water to hoots and hollers on social media. Kalk Bay, on its day, has often been held up and compared to Pipe. Yes, it’s a left. Yes, it is pretty perfect when the planets, kelp, tides, winds and atmospheric particles align. But to be honest… it’s nothing at all like Pipe. I will never forget taking a Pipe local to K-Bay – on a good day…

"We, the people, have a huge problem, if we love our coast." Let’s start with a hypothetical fish – say, a white steenbras. She pops out of an egg just offshore of the Groot Berg Estuary, on the Cape West Coast. Miraculously, she isn’t eaten during the few weeks until she tastes fresh water and heads for the mouth of the estuary, hard-wired to seek calmer waters with plenty of food. She’s beautiful; silvery-white, and she has large eyes, prominent lips and rakish, swept-back fins with fetching flecks of gold on their upper scales. In the estuary she grows, managing to avoid the hooks and nets that came down from above. After a few years, the sea calls. Following a winter storm the estuary opens, and she heads west through…

JORDY SMITH I bought a house in Hawaii for a few reasons. Firstly, the place is just incredible. There aren’t too many surf spots like this in the world, and it’s US soil so it’s a pretty safe investment. Secondly, I felt my weakness was backside heavy tube waves… lefts. Hollow left-handers were definitely something I could work on. It’s not to say I was bad at it, but I’m competing against guys who are the very best in the world at it. Guys who have grown up on the sand here. Just to get any sort of percentage better at it, that’s what I wanted to do. I think the back half of my career entails heavy waves. A lot more heavy waves. And learning the experiences out there at…

One sunny afternoon in Port Elizabeth in 1994, after a surf competition, I was travelling home with contest organiser Arno Lane when we got T-boned by a taxi which was moving at some serious speed. The taxi hit my side, smashing my door and me straight in the face. The bakkie spun off the street and up a grass embankment. That’s what I remember, and I always refer back to this moment as the "Big Bang”. The day everything changed. I was 18 years old. When I was finally cut out of the wreck by the firemen, not being able to move, my thoughts and emotions started running wild. I had lost all movement from the waist down, and every time they moved me I cried from the pain. With…

The Ohlanga is not a big river. It runs just 27km from its source to where it enters the Indian Ocean, at the nudie beach between the upmarket suburbs of Umdloti and Umhlanga – a stretch of beach the city’s surfers know well. The river does a 27km tour through Durban’s built environment: starting in the peri-urban rural township near Goqokazi, it runs through townships, informal settlements, suburbs, commercial and industrial areas, underneath two highways and a railway and through some sugarcane fields, before it reaches the sea. At a juncture before a small bridge in the sugar cane, the Litterboom Project have installed one of their booms to intercept plastic waste and remove it from the environment before it gets to the sea and disperses. On 11 January 2022…

I really dug the authenticity of the event. It wasn’t fake, it wasn’t forced, it just naturally fell into place, from the time the sun rose till we crawled into bed. We kicked off with a little beach clean-up. The sounds of African funk on an old turntable, vinyl grain, kids dancing, the smell of chicken and fish cooking on the open fire, fruit squeezing, coconut drinking, big smiles, awesome weather. I couldn’t stop wiggling the whole day. I’m sure I got a few out-of-focus pictures! Everything just felt right. Vibrant fishing boats, dwarfed by those big cotton trees. I reckon that wave could get super-good. It’s just peaks, A-frames, like Nicaragua, coffee-coloured water; but it was pretty small and the tides were springs, so it was hectic, the kids…

When I was a little kid, my dad took me to a bookstore during a family holiday in the south-west of France. In the corner of the shop I found my first surf and bodyboard mag. Once it was opened, I couldn't close it! I showed one image to my dad and told him that one day, my photos would be in a surf magazine too. That same day, he bought me a bodyboard. Surf photography was my dream job, but growing up in the downtown of Paris, far from the ocean, in a modest situation, photography school and the equipment were way beyond my budget. Everything changed when the boom of the digital era arrived. I bought my first DSLR camera in 2007. It was a SIGMA SD9, like…

SOZINHOS SURF LODGE Palau Asu If your dream is to surf solo on barrelling reef breaks looking out over a palm-tree-lined island, with the only transport being by foot, then you’ve found what you’re looking for. Sozinhos Surf Lodge, owned and run by a South African, is located on Palau Asu a few miles offshore from the main island of Nias, West Sumatra, and offers everything you dream of. Empty lineups are there for the taking on up to eight of the local breaks. Our private gazebo looks out over a long left that is the jewel in our crown. After your session, relax in either of our secluded bungalows or our main lodge, and be fed like a king. World-class fishing and snorkelling is a one-minute walk away, and…

Sad news from Hong Kong: relocated Kalk Bay local John Stephenson passed away recently. By all accounts he was a special kind of human. As his long-time friend and Hong Kong surf wingman Daniel Beatty said, “I will miss your eternal positivity that kept me surfing through the Hong Kong summers! Ride on.” The worst-kept secret in the SA surf industry is now fact. Son of the Weskus Eli Beukes has been signed by Monster Energy. Eli’s hard, fast and precise surfing has been turning heads for a while now; we look forward to seeing how far he goes. Semi-regular Zag contributor and sometime PE local Clayton Truscott has just published a new book. Called When the Phone Rings at Suppertime, it’s a collection of essays and short stories, including…