They're dropping like flies. Just last year alone 3 surf mags I used to read bit the dust. They were great mags. Good editorial backed up with solid images. Yet they've folded. RIP Transworld Surf (USA), Surfers Path (UK) and Waves (Aus). Local mags The Bombsurf and African Soul Surfer suffered similar fates a few years earlier. The death of print media has been prophesied since the advent of online content. It's all about the here and now, no-one wants to wait a month to see stuff in print. But you should. It's better. So much better. Anyone can publish anything on the net anytime. But to make it into a mag images and stories have had to survive the editorial cut. Which means someone in a lil office somewhere has sweated away in an effort to sift through all the information overload to bring you something really unique and interesting - whether it be images that will blow your mind or stories that'll inspire you to travel.
At least Transworld Surf kept their wacky brand of humour right up til the end - here's the cover of the last mag they produced.
Ever wondering how fast you were going when you were flying down the line? Turns out you don't have to wonder no more. All you need is one of those GPS watches, and set it to record your session. Local surfer Anthony Adler tried it out during last Thursdays big swell at Jbay. Pity he didn't wear his heart rate monitor too, cos would be interesting to see how that spikes up during a big drop or a looming set! He recorded a 400 metre ride, which lasted 53 seconds, with an average speed of 27.7km and max speed 40.3km. Pretty neat! You can even go download your stats on a website like Strava, and then others can see how they stack up against your stats for that same section you surfed. Turns out professional surfing dabbled into GPS tracking for a brief moment back in 2011, but it quickly slipped back into obscurity. Competitors during the 2011 Quik Pro at Snapper were fitted with rash vests with embedded GPS trackers. There were a coupla interesting observations. The distances being covered by the surfers were pretty huge. Joel Parkinson covered nearly 4km in 25 minutes. I barely run 4k's in 25 minutes, let alone paddle that far in that time!
So to all those lighties training for competitive surfing - certainly proves that you need some serious paddling fitness - cos you paddle your mielie off in a heat. Speed was the big question everyone had - how fast do these guys go? The top speed achieved by Slater and Fanning actually happened mid turn. At Snapper Rocks, Mick Fanning was the fastest surfer. The Aussie recorded a maximum speed of 39,1 km/h. In second place, Joel Parkinson clocked 34,6 km/h, Bede Durbidge third at 33,6 km/h and 10-time world champion Kelly Slater places in fourth (32 km/h). Remember the guys were monitored during competition surfing - which means plenty of turns and pivots - not flat out speedlining - as would be the case at big JBay for example. Would be interesting to see what they'd clock if they were on a race-track like Jbay on a good day and they were purely surfing for speed. So for all those surfers out there who normally use their GPS watches for running or cycling, maybe take it out with you on your next surf just for fun and see what sort of speed you can clock. We paddle out to the backline, we paddle against rips, we paddle down the beach to the next peak, we paddle back up the point, we paddle to make it over a clean-up set, we paddle past other surfers, we paddle to catch waves, and some people even paddle in. Surfers are paddlers. Full stop. If you paddle like a poepal you’ll get less waves. Less waves means less surfing. So you’d be more “floater” than “surfer”. Here’s a quick look at to how to up your paddling game. Cos getting dragged over the falls backwards cos you haven't quite made it over the set - that sucks coconuts. So you spot that lump on the horizon that has your name on it, don't paddle after it like a wind-up toy on acid. Relax. Form is function. You gain more from doing less properly than expending a bucket-load of energy karate chopping the water. Learn from the master. Kelly will out-paddle pretty much anyone. Including guys who are 2 ft taller than him with arms that have wingspans like condors. Kelly will smoke them. All whilst looking cool as a cucumber. Let's start at the beginning - be in the sweet spot on your board. It's easy to spot a kook from a mile off as they tend to lie too far back as they paddle, lifting the boards nose out the water. Pretty impossible to get any momentum like that, and forget catching a wave. Lie too far forward, and nose-diving will be your friend. And keep those feet together. Don't go hyper-arching your back like a scorpion in attack mode. You'll often see the groms doing this weird paddling stroke. Maybe cos they're just so damn elastic and their backs bend that much, I dunno. But it isn't all that effective in the long run. They get away with it whilst they're still in the energiser bunny phase, but as you get older it's a bad habit to have developed. A highly arched back means you end up with a shorter reach on your paddling stroke and less of your arm in the water during the catch phase of the pull, so definitely not the best bang for your buck approach. If you check out Kelly, Parko & Mick - they all stay fairly low and centred on their boards. This allows you to reach further forward on your stroke, giving you a longer stroke overall, and hence a wider pulling arc during the catch phase of your stroke. Bigger pulling arc means more power, which means you go faster. Ok, so you're in the right spot on your board, and you aren't arching up like crazy. Now what? Keep that head still! Wiggle it about from side to side and your body"ll wiggle right along with it, using up valuable energy and slowly you down in the process. Keep that elbow up when you paddle - a higher elbow helps your arm clear the water properly and allows you a nice long reach forward. Keeping the elbow high also means your hand enters the water at a bit more of a downward angle and give you some more power during the catch phase of the stroke. Make sure you get a full arm extension with every stroke. You'll often see ou's, specially lighties, doing this weird chicken-wing paddle where their arms enter and exit the water prematurely. Your hand should be entering the water at the full extension of the elbow and not before then, says Mick Fanning. Now that your hands in the water keep it loosely cupped - most the pro's reckon this more relaxed approach is better than tightly gluing your fingers together. As you pull through your stroke, get that arm as deep as possible. Don't just tickle the surface of the water! Kelly's an advocate of the "S" stroke. Drawing a gentle S shape in the water whilst you'll pulling through it, which gets your arm slightly under your board. Long, powerful strokes, bring those lat's into the game - they're the biggest shoulder muscles you have so let 'em do the work. Concentrate on long pulls that use your whole body and create a constant speed. Pull through your stroke in one continuous motion until your arm is fully extended behind you. Yank it out the water too early and you lose power and your stroke, and look like a chicken. Double bad. If you're pretty jacked up you can even engage your core during the whole paddling process. Nice stable base from which to paddle more effectively. If you're over 30 your core has probably gone into retirement, so don't worry about this one. It's a nice theory though! The dudes who've studied paddling technique also speak about using a very subtle roll in your paddle as well. Imagine a rod drilled into the top of your pip and coming out your butt - very slightly rotate on this axis during the final phase of your stroke just before your hand enters the water. So if your right arms extended out front and about to enter the water add in a very subtle rotation to the left - which rotates your body ever so slightly and allows your right arm to get that little bit of an extra reach. Your waves arrived. Don't miss it! Cos firstly you'll be super annoyed with yourself for blowing the wave you've been waiting for wave AND (public service announcement) you have now lost your first place spot in the line-up, and the next wave most definitely ain't yours! Snooze you lose. Back in the queue buddy. So how to get that extra bit of vooma to make sure you catch that wave? The Great Bald One talks about bending your elbow a bit so that your forearm paddles right under your board, almost compressing water against the bottom of your board to create lift. Do NOT lift your head too far up at the last minute. So many guys do this - and all it does is shift your centre of gravity backwards at exactly the wrong instant, and acts like a handbrake, stopping your momentum dead and meaning you miss the wave. Quite the opposite is what you need. Luke Egan was one of the first ou's to popularize chin paddling. And if you check out Laird Hamilton's chin - yeah, looks like that thing has pushed down on a few boards in it's time! Think the waves about to slide by under you? Stick that chin of yours down onto the deck of your board and give it a push! This keeps more momentum and speed going and helps keep your centre of gravity forward - hopefully giving you that extra lil oomph to get over the lip. Putting this extra weight forward and consequently shifting your center of gravity forward helps to keep you and the board ahead of the wave as the push comes. Your board has its own center of buoyancy. When paddling your centre of gravity is near the board's centre of buoyancy. When the wave comes you gotto shift your centre of gravity forward to in front of the board's centre of buoyancy. This helps create the downward angle of the board to stay in front of the moving swell and catch the wave and give you crucial acceleration you need. Simple physics. Happy to say every single one of my boards has a lil pressure dent on the top deck from multiple chin paddles! It does work for sure. Most of us are guilty of doing the old butterfly stroke at the last minute, thinking it'll help us get that wave that's running away from us. The double armed paddle is unfortunately in most instances not the right thing to be doing. Normal paddling keeps our forward momentum smooth and consistent, the minute you start butterflying it's creating a stop/start effect on your motion which actually slows you down. Try hard to break the habit. What about kicking? Does it help? Seems so, according to a recent study at Griffith University, Australia. Researchers assessed maximal-paddling performance in surfers, and found that kicking while paddling gives the surfer a 9.2% increase in paddling speed over paddling with arms alone over a 5-10 second period. The study and physics suggest that if a surfer can kick hard while paddling he will gain an advantage however small it may be. Of course if the kicking destabilizes the surfer on the board or disturbs their arm paddling rhythm then it may in fact reduce paddling speed and make it hard to catch the wave. Last but not least - always take that extra paddle before standing up. When it's small, that last stroke might mean the difference between catching the wave or missing it. In big surf, failing to take an extra paddle may get pitched over the falls.
Besides trying out the techniques described, another thing which can really help your paddle power is to get those arms a bit stronger. To be honest, surfing is just about the only thing that keeps your paddling fitness up. But in PE, where you can go for almost a whole week and not have been able to get in the water once, helps to have a Plan P. Push-up's are your friend. Whack a few of these guys every morning when you wake up, and you'll be good to go when the next swell pulls in. Have fun catching more waves now that you know how to paddle like a pro! PE peeps Barry & Greg Heasley, Dieter Kuhn, Karl Walton, Peter May and Randle Davey made a mission over to the Maldives recently. We actually bumped into them for a day or so whilst we were over there too. The guys scored some perfect sessions at one of the best rights in the islands before the monsoon set in for the last few days of their trip.
The water was so glassy on this sesh that it was impossible to even read the curve of the wave - cos you couldn't see it. The wave starts out back on the reef, and then horse-shoes around a 90 degree bend in the reef - throwing up a big peaky barrel whilst it does so, and then barrels off at a 100 miles an hour down the rest of the reef. Lock in and just gun it. Shallow as shiz after the bend, but worth any scrapes you might pick up as a consequence. The Kappies are always on about Dungeons and Sunset and all these kiff big-wave spots they have. Well, guess what: PE has some slabs of it's own too. Maybe spots that only very few ou's have actually ridden, but they are there. You just have to be brave (or stupid) enough to take them on. The obvious one stares us right in the face. We've all seen the Bell Bouy throw some pretty massive peaks when the swell is running. I remember ex-PE charger Jason van Greunen paddling out there on a huge day. First he had to punch through some massive shore-pounds at Pollock, and then make the 2.4km paddle all the way out there in wild sea's. All this before even trying to hook a wave. Out there alone. In the middle of the ocean. No support craft, no buddies, no nothing. Crazy ou! The Bell Bouy marks a submerged reef north of Cape Recife that was originally named Dispatch Rock. NOt a bad name considering it could dispatch you to your maker if you got caught out there! It lies only 3m below the surface at low tide. In 1843 the buoy was placed on it, and the notice alerting mariners to it was placed in the Government Gazette naming it Roman Rock. This reef is also known as Roman Rocks due to the large number of red roman fish that are found here. But surfers have always just called it Bell Bouy. Duncan Scott and crew have towed into it a coupla times, but as far as I know there isn't any shots of anyone on a wave out there. Anyone volunteering? That huge WSW swell pulling past the bay on Sunday might just light it up!? The other slab will remain a lil more secretive. Not that there should be too much concern about exposing it. It's a bitch to get to, and the locals are kinda nasty. Pity - cos it's a really legit looking slab. It's on the opposite side of the bay to the Bell Bouy and prefers an easterly swell. Offering up clean left walls in a west wind that barrel off for 50-100m after the peak. The only barrel in Algoa Bay that spits.....properly. Swells come out of deep deep water and unload on a shallow rock shelf about 300m from shore. You're out there as part of the food chain, and there's plenty of water moving about due to some gnarly currents. But if you can dodge the locals, and scratch yourself into a peak....it's game on!
Has anyone surfed it yet? Not likely, although a coupla peeps have had the good fortune to sit on the shore and mind surf it. Let's hope some mad crew decide to have a stab at it some time in the future! Cool sh*t just turns up randomly sometimes. I'd bummed a board from Greg Smith a while ago when my electricity went out and I couldn't get into my garage. I dug the board so much I ordered one. Popped round last week to see how the shaping was coming on. Got chatting and ended up discovering Greg had a box full of Jonty Hansford's old surf photo's. Bingo. Another kiff walk down memory lane.....
Landed in the Maldives on Thursday. Nice to swap winter for 28C water and palm trees. Bit of pesky weird wind directions to start with, but more than happy to grab a few waves - albeit not perfect perfection quite yet. Hard to bemoan chilling on a boat with just the two of you and chugging between tropical islands. Did our usual hightail out of the crowded North Male surf zone. Nothing much appealing about having to share waves with frothing Brazzo's, crazed Israelis and clueless Euro's. Nup, much rather spend a few days on the boat heading out into the far quieter central atolls. My idea of the perfect surf trip is to surf with less people than I do at home. The weird winds have also seemed to scare the fish away, so at this stage it's fish 1, us 0. Despite a fresh new Shimano 30 just waiting for something to tug on it's line and pop it's cherry. I reckon we have enough fishing tackle with us to start a small fishing shop. I stopped counting at 40 rapala's and about 10 squid, and countless other small lures and jigs. Let's just say there isn't much space for clothes in the luggage bag... Gotto love the 21st century. Sitting in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and still managed to find an internet site broadcasting the Super 15 rugby. Settled in to watch the Kings vs Bulls game...and then promptly wished we hadn't found the website! Gored by the Bulls. Eish. We always travel on the same boat, and have become good mates with the crew over the years. This year we decided to get them into the water a bit to share in the stoke that is surfing. Popped a new bodyboard into the boardbag, and brought it over for them. Waited til it got fairly small this arvo to get them out on it. No good trying to drown the captain or the chef at the start of the trip! They had a blast, and are now fully fledged surf rats. Tomorrow we head off to a seldom surfed spot that requires a pretty rare set of wind/swell combinations to light up, and it looks like we might just be in some luck. Only challenge is it's a left, and I have a pretty horrendous backhand thanks to surfing right points all my life. It's known to throw up some picture perfect barrels on it's day....so not only will I be going the wrong way, I have a sneaking feeling I might have to avoid face-planting into the reef on my barrel avoidance maneuvers. Pig-dog into eat-shit in quick succession! Let's wait and see....
At last the longest flat spell in recent memory ended with some super fun waves in the bay. Everywhere from Rincon down through to Millers had line's pouring in non-stop from 1 - 3pm. Sheet glass, high tide overhead perfection, and hardly anyone out. Crowds filled in thick after school, and wave quality dropped as the tide dropped. But even then, there were some great waves to be had.
Some looooong rides went down at Millers. Most legendary was Greg Smith, who hooked not one, but two, waves from Chomp Rock all the way through to the sand at Hobie. On a shortboard! Respect. Much of the Pipe crew pulled into Millers for a visit, as apparently Pipe was a big washing machine with a horrendous rip. The guys report getting solid waves up at Rincon. Avo's started to light up late evening as the tide dropped, and some seriously solid sets pulled through. Quite a few ou's made JBay and Seals missions, and reckoned the surf was legit! Jorg says he had a few heavy wipes at Point - managing to air drop into a beating on a solid 8ft one. Reckons you couldn't duckdive the sets - too hectic. Says Tubes was outta control. Here's a few random shots from the day - check out the photo gallery <here> It's like Christmas in February. After a long haul of trying to track down vintage PE surf shots, and managing to find a couple here and there, I got given the name of Jonty Hansford. A big-time Avo's & Fence local from back in the day. Turns out he got bit hard by the photography bug, and had a bunch of killer shots from PE & Seals from the 70's and 80's, including loads of water shots. Thanks to Jonty Millerslocal now has a kiff collection of vintage shots from all the local spots. Will be launching a Vintage page for each PE surf spot over the next coupla weeks. But here's some just to wet your appetite.... These are just a fraction of the epic shots Jonty has. In the process of revamping the Vintage section so that each PE surf spot has it's own page, as well as Seals and Jbay. As each spot is finished I'll pop the link up on the home page so you can go check it out.
Cool, we're unearthing some old PE ballies with all this retro talk lately. Wayne Goschen sent in some kiff old shots from the 80's. Wayne surfed for EP in the Longboard division whilst he studied at UPE, and was the first EP Longboarding Secretary when it was first started by Martin Haines and Steve McKetchnie in about 86/87. He was in the first EP Longboard Team that travelled up to the first SA Longboard Champs held in Durban in 1988. EP went on to win the next SA Champs in 1989. He's currently based in CT, but is hoping to find a post as an oceanographer back here in PE. Let's hope so - we need some surfers who have the credentials to be able to look after our coast. Wayne remembers Steve McKechnie used to shoot a bit back then, so does anyone know where he's got to these days? Last I heard he'd left the country? Used to have very entertaining sessions at Millers with him listening to all his weird n wonderful inventions....from neck rashie scarves to mobile climbing walls. Was never a dull moment with Steve! |
AuthorMillerslocal Archives
July 2021
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