Table of contents for Summer 2021 - 46.1 in Zigzag

IN A TIME OF COVID DISRUPTIONS, LIKE EVERY OTHER SURFRR WITH A PASSPORT AND A SURF ITCH TO SCRATCH, AN INTREPID ZAG CREW STRIKES DOWN THE WEEL-WORN SURFING PATH OF THE MALDIVES-AND MANAGES TO SCORE, BIG TIME! "THINGS HAVE CHANGED A LOT IN THE MALDIVES SINCE TONY HINDE HUSSEIN SHIPWRECKED HIMSELF AT PASTA POINT IN THE 1970S" “So, where you from?” asks the middle-aged Israeli guy from under his white Florence Marine hooded rash vest, his face a mask of matching white zinc, his brown eyes two dots of colour. A human igloo. “Uh… South Africa,” I say, looking up the point as the oncoming set undulates through the crowded lineup, lifting us up and letting us fall together, like rhythmic dominoes. Three or four surfers take off, and pump…

This was taken at Belharra during the Hercules storm of 2014, when Jamie Mitchell caught this gigantic wave. It's still the biggest storm I think Europe has seen in a hundred years or so. Luckily for us, the swell actually peaked the night before. I'm pretty sure there were 100-foot waves breaking out there in the dark. There were only five or six of us paddling this session and a few guys trying to tow, but the lineup out there is huge. It's so big it can break a kilometre out from where you're sitting. We were stretched across the lineup when this wave came through and I just managed to scratch over the lip as Jamie took off [look closely and you can see Twig scratching through the offshore…

Tom Curren's first session at Jeffreys Bay was the meeting of two legends. Curren had boycotted South Africa during the 1980s in protest against apartheid; and for years, pundits had speculated about what the finest surfer in the world would look like paired with the finest right-hand point break. His first ride, captured on film by the late Sonny Miller, defied all expectations. Riding a 6'11 McKee quad, Curren took off deep at Boneyards and proceeded to draw lines out there nobody had witnessed before - at least, not on a single wave. Up until that point, Curren's freesurfing appearances had become increasingly elusive. After quitting the world tour, he'd hunkered down in his adopted hometown of Biarritz in France, far from the media limelight. Derek Hynd, however, knew how…

Directly in front of the Chatham Hotel pub is a little curve in the shoreline that produces a perfect, peeling right. It’s not a real wave, as in rideable – it’s barely ankle high, and breaks right on shore – but if you were a GI Joe action figure it’d be six-foot Superbank. On a sunny Friday afternoon I worked my way through a bottle of Gunn Estate Pinot Noir and mindsurfed it, bashing lips on my Al Merrick Flyer, swooping high and mighty on my Skip Frye fish, sliding sideways and backwards and twirling a 360 or two on my finless Derek Hynd F-F-F. It was an exhilarating surf, growing more and more real with every sip. During my week-long visit to the Chatham Islands I saw lots of…

When I was about three years old, a new kid arrived on the scene. His name was Daniel. Like Daniel and the Lion’s Den… but nobody would ever call him that. He was small, skraal, pale and often sick. Our old man is a wordsmith – so names, stories, myths and legends have always been a golden thread in our family, the stories often outgrowing life itself. Here’s the story of Mook Lion, as best as I can tell it. Long ago, our ballie was writing a book. It was a fable of sorts, and the main protagonist was a bedraggled hyena. The underdog of the jungle, always going on some adventure to prove himself, or win a place among the pack of revered African beasts. This hyena was called…

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It’s a well-known fact that many more people are surfing since the pandemic. There have been healthy rebounds in most core surf businesses, both locally and internationally. Shapers are busy. Stock is moving off the shelves. Lineups are bustling. This all bodes well for the surf industry. The fly in the ointment is that a lot of surf gear is imported and the whole global shipping network has been severely disrupted, which means a lot of brands that would otherwise be enjoying the ka-ching of the cash register are working the phone and shouting at their freight agents instead. Those who manufacture locally, however, are smiling ear to ear and talking of expansion. It’s good for jobs, good for the local economy and good for surf! But more than surging…

My story starts back in July 2013. The Sampson family left Cape Town in our Big Green Truck to travel Africa clockwise, through 47 000km of bush, desert, rainforest and mountain, using only waste vegetable oil as fuel. One of the main inspirations for the journey is the fact that my Dad always aimed to sail the boat he built himself across the Atlantic with his sons, but aged 60 had the first of a series of debilitating strokes that put paid to that dream. So we didn’t wait for retirement to pursue ours. Fast forward to Cape Town, June 2020: peak First Wave Covid. The Sampson family is trapped in an apartment block, marooned in a vast concrete carpark in the already psychologically locked-down suburb of Fish Hoek. After…

The lights from Maputo flicker in the distance, broken by the flaps of the jib as the yacht bucks gently against the rising swell. The light strumming and plucking of a guitar floats on the evening breeze. On board the 45-foot vessel are surfing's new-age luminaries, the grooviest ensemble of Zen masters to grace the pages of magazines and flicker across video screens since the 70s. Tom Curren, Shane Beschen and a local kid from Durban called Frankie Oberholzer are spearheading ‘The Search' - part hardcore surf expedition, part marketing genius to discover and draw lines across untapped destinations. It's the 90s, the new age of discovery, but the key is to keep everyone guessing and never say where. The point is rather just to remind us that it's still…

After coming off what some regarded as KZN's best winter in 20 years, surfers' expectations ran high for 2021. Alas, KwaZulu-Natal's coastline was not blessed with the same quality and quantity of waves as the previous year. Some would go so far as to say we were 'skunked'. However, Durban's central beaches were the exception. For almost two weeks Durban's finest were treated to standup tubes running from pier to pier, due to a prolonged and totally out-of-season succession of easterly groundswells. It was otherwise known as the 'Jordy Swell', in which SA's perennial world title and Olympic gold-medal hope ended his run by rupturing his ACL on one of the more innocuous-looking tubes he rode. “About 10am was prime time,” he says. “I'd give that day an 8, maybe…

Peeling back the layers and legends of this fickle piece of reef will take you back to the early 2000s, when a motley crew of underground bodyboarders followed a lead from a fisherman who waxed lyrical about a slab he'd watched while enthusiastically feeding the local fish population. Many missions and months later, they finally managed to crack the code of wind and swell needed to unlock the reef's glorious caves. Turns out not much of either made for the perfect combination. An old jungle gym nearby gifted the wave its original name: 'The Playground', which was coined by Bruce Hersleman and Shane Reilly. But were they the first to ride it? In the years that followed, while keeping their strike missions under wraps, they met a small crew of…

This is the view from the bottom of the point at Skeleton Bay. In the distance, in among all that sand and water, you can see a slightly hunched figure wrapped in four millimetres of rubber, board under arm, making the long walk back up the point. That’s me – buckled from a day of relentlessly pushing against the elements (futile), but determined to try and get one more. It was my first trip to the edge of the Namib Desert. And it’s the kind of image that evokes an immediate yearning to be there, a conjuring of all the endless possibilities the ocean offers us. Yet now, this photo evokes a bittersweet melancholy every time I look at it. I spent my formative surfing years at a small patch…