A local Cape Town ripper takes off, does a drawn-out bottom turn, into a searing cutback… and gives me a proper shower!
You can surf any time of the year in Cape Town, South Africa… Come whenever you can!
Summer: With that said, in summer you may get small swells where only the most exposed beaches will have a decent-sized wave. In addition, the summer South-Easter winds will often blow at a near gale, making it a bit unpleasant even at beaches where this is the offshore direction. The kite-surfers love summer. Cape Town is a world-famous kitesurfing and windsurfing destination and plays host to the Red Bull King of the Air kite-surfing contest, where I have seen the participants jump many stories into the air off the back of some small choppy wave and only come back down about a football field later.
The constant hard offshore also tends to blow the warmer surface water out to sea to be replaced by deeper water that feels like it just left Antarctica ten minutes ago and zipped over on the Benguela current. It’s quite a surprise for most people to hear that summer is when the water at most Cape Town surf spots is at its icy coldest, especially on the Western side of the peninsula, which is the colder side anyway! Down to 10-12°C (or 50-54°F) at the same time the air temperature can be 30°C (86°F) or more!
Winter: Then there’s winter, where you often get very big swells and stormy North-Wester winds. The city’s contingent of big wave surfers get excited, as Cape Town has several renowned big wave spots, including ‘Dungeons’ near Hout Bay where the Red Bull Big Wave Africa event used to be held. It’s not surprising that multiple big wave World Champion, Grant “Twiggy” Baker is from South Africa.
During these huge winter days, the more mortal surfer like me, with a healthy amount of fear and will-to-live, must find some shelter from the exposed ocean. Luckily, Cape Town has places like False Bay where Muizenberg beach is located. By the time most ocean swells have reached Muizenberg, after fighting their way through shallow False Bay, they have become small, slow and relatively weak, which is why Muizenberg is known as one of the best beaches in the world for learning how to surf. If you do come to Cape Town, be sure to come to Muizenberg for a surf lesson. It might just be a life-changer! Try to come in calms winds or when the offshore North-West wind is blowing, or the waves will be a choppy mess.
Autumn and Spring: And so… the best times to be a “normal” surfer, who doesn’t like gale force winds or monster triple-story waves, is usually Spring or Autumn. Often there are good quality medium-sized swells that have cleaned up during their journey from storms far to the South-West of South Africa. Even better, these far-away swell producing storms have no real impact on the weather back on land, so you can get good swells met by soft winds (which means the waves will be glassy like a rolling mirror), all in sunny, but not boiling, weather. It feels like these autumn days are starting now (Southern Hemisphere remember!), and I’m looking forward to it!
Unseasonal Forecast?
30 March 2022 didn’t obey the seasonal trend. “Big Wednesday” is actually the name of a famous film from 1978 (that ended with some stunning big wave footage for the time), but my friends and I have been talking about 30 March 2022 as “Big Wednesday” as a joking homage.
It should have been late summer, and so it was a real surprise to see a monster of a swell predicted on the charts, and to try and predict where we should go as a result. My plan was to work a normal workday, but then get a surf in before it got too dark that evening.
The Anticipation and Nerves
The WhatsApp messages started coming in the morning. My friend Justin is an excellent surfer and a surf coach. He had booked a surf lesson with another friend of mine for the morning. He said that Muizenberg was the biggest he’d ever seen. Apparently, there was no point for his student to try to get beyond the backline where the waves started to break, because this would be perhaps 700m of trying to duck-dive through the massive waves with no channel to assist you. So much for the world’s best beginner spot! My other friend Jono is a fantastic surfer too, and he is an incredibly fit paddling machine – he was describing his morning session at Muizenberg as “some good cardio”. It didn’t sound fun! What a day… Muizenberg was not a good enough place to hide from the swell!
To make matters worse, I was just starting to recover from a bout of bronchitis and was still hacking a wet cough. I was in no condition for paddling and duck-diving for 30 minutes just to get a chance at catching an unbroken wave…
Muizenberg is not the only surf spot in False Bay. As you head west towards a suburb called Fish Hoek, there are no other real sandy beaches until you reach Fish Hoek itself. Instead, there is a series of shallow rocky reefs covered in kelp (a thick strong floating seaweed), that get even more hidden from the main swell direction the further west you go. Fish Hoek beach itself is usually flat or has tiny waves.
One of these surf spots between Muizenberg and Fish Hoek is a world class shallow reef that would surely be churning out barrels on a day like this. I’m sure any Cape Town surfers out there know the place I’m talking about! Justin got called by a photographer that happens to run the local “Surfing in the South” Facebook page, asking him to come and be one of his subjects for some surf action photography at this world class spot, and I decided to try and ride on Justin’s coat tails again…
I was full of trepidation though. The world class reef is always crowded and localized, even on average days. The people who are good enough to surf it well (like Justin) know each other and basically sit tight on the craziest, shallowest part of the reef in a kind of pecking order of skill, reputation and madness. The few times I had tried to surf this place in the past, I had sat a little inside, and wide, of the main take-off spot to catch the smaller leftover waves. I didn’t think that strategy was going to work today…
The crowd at “World Class Reef” as viewed from where we eventually landed up in our effort to surf freely. It’s amazing how calm the ocean looked between the sets of waves!
The Scene
We arrived in the carpark at 16:30 with maybe two hours of light left. The “World Class Reef” was absolutely cooking… looking like a surf magazine centrefold… and crowded like Pipeline in Hawaii! It looked like every surfer, kneeboarder and bodyboarder from the entire area who was capable of trying to take-off and tuck into a tube, was sitting shoulder to shoulder, bobbing up and down, waiting for the sets to come. Even Justin couldn’t see the point of joining the throng…
Well, Justin knows surfing, and he knows the ins and outs of False Bay especially well. He has already introduced me to some of the other spots in False Bay that most other people seem to overlook. I had already looked down on those ones from a road up on the hill – they all looked too big to work.
But Justin had another trick up his sleeve. Only a couple of hundred metres from “World Class Reef”, he runs along a rock spit and jumps into the water. I watch from the car park, as he joins two other surfers sitting on their own. He and one other ripper proceed to catch waves that stand up tall before letting them drop down, race along doing drawn out turns, and then proceed to kick out off the wave just in time… as the wave would then crunch down onto a dry rock shelf a second later…
The Choice
Well, what was I supposed to do?
• Try to paddle out at Muizenberg? I’d be lucky to complete that kind of mission to the backline before it got dark, even if I was fit!
• Paddle out at “World Class Reef”? I’d just be another number getting in the way of the literal pro-surfers…
• Go home? And miss out on Big Wednesday entirely?
• Join Justin and the two or three other people taking on a spot that looked good at first… if I just remembered to get off the wave before things went “crunch”?
So, what did I choose?
I put on my wetsuit and booties and picked up my board. I tucked my cheap version of a Gopro camera, with its waterproof mouth-mount, into my wetsuit to come along for the adventure.
I gingerly walked along the rock spit as the waves surged over it up to my knees, trying to topple me over. I reached the end, waited for the last wave of a set, and jumped into the water and let the receding energy pull me out to sea.
I joined Justin at the take off spot with my hair dry. I watched with big eyes as Justin, the other ripper, and one or two others tackled the waves.
After missing a few, I eventually managed to catch a smaller wave, made the drop, trimmed high, did a little carving turn and then got off the wave well before any dry rocks… I turned to watch Justin catch the next wave, and casually make it through a barrel… Of course! 🙄😅
Riding my first little wave between the Monster Sets. You can see the kelp (tough floating seaweed) coming up, suggesting that things are about to get shallower. Usually, the wave rises over the kelp and you can keep going, but sometimes it can trip up your surfboard fins and send you flying!
I’d like to say that by the end of the session I was surfing like Justin, but that’s probably never going to happen!
The Smash
Soon after that first wave I was sitting out the back when a monster wave came. We all started paddling for the horizon like crazy, but I was never going to get over this monster before it broke. It stood up tall, and avalanched down loudly, and I knew there would be no way I was going to be able to duck-dive under it with my board either. I looked behind me to make sure my board wouldn’t hit anyone if I bailed, saw that was the case, and abandoned my board to swim underwater as calmly as I could… Every man for himself!
This wasn’t the Monster Wave… The Monster Wave was bigger than this! But I was trying to survive Monster Wave, not take footage of it with my mouth! I frantically spat my camera out to gasp big mouthfuls of air as that one was coming to mow us down!
Well, that was a wake-up call, not that I needed one! But I came to the surface unscathed. My board has survived, as well as the leash that attaches it to my leg. Once we had regathered ourselves, we looked over at “World Class Reef” a couple of hundred metres away, to see that half the crowd had been washed in by the same wave. After that, many of them decided to call it a day and it never seemed quite as crowded again 😂!
In fact, we were able to paddle over to “World Class Reef” a little later. I was able to catch a wave to the shore from there… yes, it was a smaller, wider one off the main pack! Haha! (The better surfers were the ones who had survived the Monster Wave, and so I was still at the bottom of the food chain! 😅)
We heard that a bodyboarder had broken his hand in an effort to avoid hitting his body and head on the “World Class Reef”. We also heard that a novelty spot on the other side of False Bay, near Gordon’s Bay Harbour, that usually only breaks at all in the biggest storm swells, was actually too big and the people on that side had found an even more sheltered novelty to enjoy!
The End!
All in all, Big Wednesday, 30 March 2022, was a pretty unusual day for late summer! I haven’t seen our special wave break again since… Maybe when winter really comes? 🤔