I live in a little suburb called Meadowridge in the middle of the Cape Town peninsula. Honestly, I am about as landlocked as a surfer in Cape Town can be! The cool thing is that it means that instead of dedicating my life to surfing only one part of Cape Town, I tend to go wherever I feel like on the day… it’s all about 30-45 minutes away!
A surfer in Cape Town can burn a lot of petrol checking out the various surf spot options. Typically, on the day you pack your boards and head in a certain direction, you have to at least commit your search for waves to one of the four main zones:
Oh, the Options! (Thanks Google Earth Pro for the Satellite Imagery!)
North of the Peninsula
From Milnerton to Melkbosstrand: The popular Big Bay is one of only a few beaches that can handle strong wind, so I only head in this direction if it’s predicted to be incredibly calm, which is quite rare – usually only in Autumn. The rest of the time I leave it to the hundreds of kite-surfers who love this stretch! There is more surf north of Melkbosstrand, but you’re not really in Cape Town anymore.
When we head in this direction, we joke that we are crossing the “Boerewors curtain”, as we are likely to meet more Afrikaans-speaking surfers in the water. The stereotype is that Afrikaans people love to “braai” (barbecue), and “boerewors” is a type of South African sausage that is perfect for this.
The North-West Peninsula
The popular, consistent beach at up-market Llandudno is exposed to the main swell direction, and another popular spot is the Glen Beach corner of another fancy suburb called Camps Bay. This part of Cape Town is where you get massive houses located on steep slopes with stunning sea views! From there, the surf spots get more and more sheltered from the swell as you head North and around the corner into trendy Sea Point all the way to the first harbour wall.
The South-West Peninsula
Separated from the rest of the city by a little mountain pass, this is almost a different world! We often tease that we are crossing the “Lentil Curtain” to go and join the hippies that have chosen to live so far from the CBD on the northern part of the peninsula. The main surf suburbs down in the “Deep South” are Noordhoek, Kommetjie and Scarborough, with Kommetjie being particularly lucky in having a myriad of surf options, facing all sorts of directions. Those guys usually don’t have to drive more than 5 minutes on any given day, but somehow the surf scene is usually focused around crowded Long Beach, as it’s the most convenient consistent spot.
We could lump the Cape Point Nature Reserve, that covers the extreme Southern part of the Peninsula, in here as well… there is definitely surf there.
False Bay
I wrote quite a bit about False Bay in my previous post (@jasperdick/surfing-hiding-from-a-big ). It’s offshore in the winter North-West winds. It’s sheltered from the main South-West swell direction so usually doesn’t get massive. The incredibly popular Muizenberg is one of the world’s best places to learn to surf, but False Bay also has some tricky reef breaks, and is known to sometimes be bigger than the exposed Western peninsula when the swell comes more from the South! There are surf spots on the Eastern side of False Bay too, but again, you’re not really in Cape Town anymore!
Saturday 23 April 2022
Let’s use last Saturday as an example:
Wind: The wind was a pumping South-Easter that day: that meant I could eliminate False Bay and North of the Peninsula immediately.
Swell: The forecast was predicting a new, big, raw swell from the South-West. We’re talking about 3.5 - 4m before the swell has even stood up to break – I would definitely not be heading to spots facing directly into the oncoming swell! I would need to find somewhere sheltered!
Up until a couple of years ago that would be all I knew, and I would have to make my decision from there. Two things have changed recently:
Webcams: Yes, even in poor old South Africa, several popular beaches have web cameras of varying quality. I’m not going to tell you which ones! (I believe locals in those areas who are privileged enough to check out of the window instead of online, are convinced that the webcams add to the crowds, and it’s hard to argue with them.)
Friends: It’s not like I had NO friends a couple of years ago, it’s just that not many of them surfed and the few that did lived near me. Lately, my group of surfing buddies are more spread out over the 4 zones of Cape Town, and I promise this was not by some scheming design on my part! Justin and Jono are always checking False Bay, Schalk lives in Kommetjie and Gordon lives in Sea Point.
So, I checked in with Schalk from Kommetjie. Long Beach is located around a corner and swells that make it around there are usually the clean ones that have dropped a bit of size in the effort of wrapping around, while the raw junk just keeps going up the coast. No… Long Beach was a mess on Saturday morning. Well, what about that wave that’s always small even on the enormous days? No, that wave was a mess as well! Really?
Oh dear, well what did Gordon from Sea Point say? “You know that spot, the most sheltered part of Sea Point of all? If you are willing to wait for the real set waves – they look nice, but tricky to catch – bring a board with volume!”
Ah, that wave – it’s a rare pleasure for this one to break. Usually, the swell forecast must be even bigger! When it works, it starts breaking off a rusty old shipwreck, and then carries on along the rocky point, in two or three sections, pretty much all the way to the first Harbour wall.
The Surf Session:
I got in my car and drove past the Cape Town Stadium to the parking lot, suited up, paddled out and had some fun!
Did I mention Saturday morning was delightfully sunny?
A bit of a blurry image from my cheap version of a Go-Pro – that thing in the middle of the picture is the boiler of a shipwreck. Look closely at the wave, and you should see the white nose of a ripper’s surfboard in the barrel!
That same ripper throwing a radical manoeuvre, with the iconic flat Table Mountain, along with Devils Peak, Signal Hill and Lion’s Head, behind him. You can see the South-Easter wind is creating a layer of cloud on top of Table Mountain, that we locals call the “Tablecloth”.
Thanks to Gordon’s advice I picked a board that allowed me to catch several nice waves! Here you can see my shadow as I carve back and prepare to navigate the kelp (tough floating seaweed).
The Walk
After the surf, I thought it would be interesting to see how the conditions would change as I walked West towards where the spots might be slightly more exposed to the open ocean.
Five minutes later I was checking out the next known surf spot. It was not looking fun! Most of the waves were standing up and bottoming out so fast that the brave souls who were tackling it suddenly had no water under them just as they were trying to stand. Even if the surfer did make the drop, the wave would usually thunder on faster than they could surf…
Yup, the very next spot was like playing Russian Roulette – this guy takes an elevator ride to the bottom!
A good effort at catching the wave and getting to his feet, but the wave still shuts down too quickly to keep up with…
Out in the distance, the third-least exposed spot was looking like an actual big wave spot. Two brave chargers were tackling it on big wave “gun” surfboards rather than normal surfboards, in order to handle the size and power.
Spot number 3 starting to look pretty large, but still nothing like the open ocean!
Dropping Away…
I went to go watch these two brave chargers for a bit, but I noticed that they weren’t having as many waves as when I had watched from a distance 10 minutes before. It was as if the waves were no longer quite enormous enough to break properly where they were waiting for them… So I gave up watching.
As I walked back to my car, I passed the "Russian Roulette" wave. The waves were smaller now and it was starting to look more like fun and less like a guaranteed beating.
Five minutes later I was back at that wave reaching my car in the parking lot. That wave was gone. The much smaller swell couldn’t feel the bottom anymore and had no reason to break. There was nobody left in the water.
This was less than an hour since I’d been happily out there enjoying it. The tide had dropped and the swell had dropped along with it…
The Surfer's Life!
And that’s why I always laugh when somebody asks me if I can teach them to surf at a specific place, at a specific time on a specific day... 7 days or more in the future. This is surfing… you can’t plan these things! You must either:
• drop everything else when it’s good even if "everything else" is your job or your wedding (some people live like this!) or…
• go surfing when you can… but use forecasts, webcams and friends to help you choose wisely from the 50-odd Cape Town spots at your disposal!
The End!