Hello everyone, and especially the SurfHive Community! It's Jasper, the musical-surfer dad from Cape Town in South Africa.
Yes, I still exist!... but work has kept me really busy. My main excuse over the last few weeks has been the unusual lack of quality surf! Cape Town is usually blessed so we tend to get quite spoiled - with offshore winds on one side of the peninsula or the other, places exposed to small swell and other places a bit sheltered from swell that is too big and/or raw, we normally get somewhere to surf that's decent to good within 30-45 minutes of my house... on any given day.
It hasn't really felt like that over the last few weeks. The summer conditions are setting in... with a lack of real SW groundswell. The summer SE wind has been pumping, creating choppy SE windswell, but this has mostly been missing the west coast where the SE winds are offshore, and only filling the sheltered, South-facing False Bay with choppy, small, poor quality onshore windswell...
Eventually, last weekend the wind dropped to a softer South wind, and despite it still being onshore in False Bay, it simply wasn't AS bad as it had been, so I packed the car and found a gap during my toddler daughter's nap-time!
The waves were so small I felt like only my 7'6 mini-mal board would have any chance of catching the wave I chose. At first I surfed the right off a shallow reef where the wave would fade into deep water, so I'm glad I had the biggest board available to keep the momentum going!
I moved over onto the slightly longer, faster lefts... and it wasn't long before the wind picked up and thinks got even choppier...
It was better than nothing, I chose the right board to make it fun and challenging, my new wetsuit kept me warm and I had the spot all to myself! It just helped me to remember that I must take my little gaps in my schedule when I can, because they are so rare now that I am a dad working full time, with a big hobby in music... so I must just go when I can and enjoy what the conditions offer!
I have two months left of the year to fulfil my New Year's Resolution of surfing a new spot every month of 2023. I have been successful in this so far, although August and Octobers' new waves were pretty marginal! I did however, find some pretty good new waves as well that I am proud of trying! Hahaha!
Let's hope November has a good one!
BYE FOR NOW!