Hello everyone, and especially the SurfHive Community! It's Jasper, the musical-surfer dad from Cape Town in South Africa.
October has been a very busy month and I hadn't managed to get to the beach at all since my last adventure that saw us get stuck in a small coastal village due to roads/bridges getting damaged by the late Winter flooding! (@jasperdick/surfing-trapped-in-paradise-roads)
I have been thinking about surfing this month a lot, and even treated myself to a new wetsuit... but as this last weekend rolled in, I realized I was at risk of jeopardizing my New Year's Resolution to surf a new wave every month of 2023... because next weekend is also going to be very busy.
Yes, if I wanted to surf a new wave, it was probably going to have to be this past weekend:
Pros: I was spending the weekend in another small coastal town - I should be able to find a new wave somewhere.
Cons: The conditions were terrible. Rain all Saturday (can Summer please start now?), hard onshore winds and tiny, poor quality wind-swell.
Still, a New Year's Resolution is a commitment, so when the rain stopped on Sunday morning, I drove around looking for something vaguely surfable.
This village's beaches have also been damaged by recent flooding and huge storm surf: here you can see the debris left behind on the beach and the sea brown with river water...
The New Year's Resolution forced me to paddle out into the bumpy onshore, brown messy sea water and try to catch a couple of short waves after mentally mapping out where the obvious rocks were...
And I did the best I could with what I could get...
The wind was pumping, but my new wetsuit did a great job of keeping me warm!
Yes, it was better to go out and score my incredibly choppy #newwave of October... than not surfing at all! I probably also learnt something, and got to move my body, and bank in some muscle memory...
It got me thinking - Kelly Slater (and the Hobgood twins) grew up in Florida. They probably surfed a lot of tiny crap waves when they were growing up. The same can probably be said for many of the current Brazilian storm.
I've heard it been said that if you can surf crap waves you can surf good waves, but not necessarily the other way around. This makes some sense, as poor quality waves force you to look for the few pockets of power in the wave, and also to learn to use your own body mechanics like a spring to create your own power... while on a good wave you can just point and steer.
Perhaps that's the problem with the South African pro surfers at the moment? Our waves are too good? Hahaha! In my home town of Cape Town, if it is onshore on one side of the peninsula, you can just drive a bit further to the other side where it is offshore!
(I think the other problem with South African pro surfers is that there is not enough competition, and hunger, and sponsor support. The Rand is also very weak.)
But for my own amateur surfing - perhaps I would improve if I pretended I lived in Florida, and was happy with any surf that could keep me afloat? I think that kind of thing is already happening to me since I became a father - as I have less free time and have to simply surf when I can... as quickly as I can!
I think the New Year's Resolution is also helping with that mindset - reminding me I need to surf to tick off the #newwave challenge, even if the conditions are not perfect!
THE END