I lived in Zim until about the age of 9. In those days "mush" was the Zim equivalent of "lekker". My older brother was nicknamed Mush, so I became known as "Little Mush." His nickname then changed to Halfmoon, so I just became "Mush".

We moved back down to PE when I was 9, came in by train. It came right past Brighton Beach, which in those days was pristine. It was the first time I'd seen the sea! We moved into a boarding house in Humewood. In those days there was no TV, so you had to create your own entertainment. I lived right over the road from the beach so it was natural I'd gravitate to it.

I joined the King's Beach lifesaving Club cos I'd seen they had lilo's and wooden boards that they were surfing on, and it looked like such a cool thing to do. We started off standing on the lilo's, then moved onto the wooden boards. Wooden boards meaning massive heavy 15ft  logs that were hollow and had plugs! They were held together with copper nails. Probably weighed about 70kg's. Took 4 of us to carry one down to the beach from the club!

The lifesaving club used to be where the old paddling pools are today, just below the grass embankment running down from the road. The sea was only about 50m from that - which would make the shoreline round about where the car park ends today, land side of the super tube. What happened was that they then built an extension to the harbour wall, and the sand built up incredibly - pushing the sea back to where it is today. I'd say the shorelines at least 700m further out today than it was then.

There were no ore dumps like there are today, just this fence that ran the length of King's Beach from the harbour to the lifesaving club. Which is obviously why Fence is called Fence! At spring highs you just saw the tops of the fence poles sticking out. The water even came up into the clubhouse at times.

Someone in the lifesaving club heard that you could make boards from foam, so it ended up with the first "proper" foam surfboard ever built in the Eastern Cape being built right there in the lifesaving club. They took a 2in wide and 3in thick 13ft meranti stringer, and stuck dowel sticks through it at right angles every foot. They sharpened the edges of these sticks and pushed blocks of foam onto them along the stringer, sticking them together with cold glue.

One of the guys went and got fibreglass cloth from Carbon Black (Ed - Algorax today, the factory out on the road to Bluewater Bay). They were using it as a dust filter in the factory. We had to wash it in the sea as it was pitch black. It was 10 ounce cloth (today we use 4-6 ounce). Once finished it was painted with gloss paint! But there we were, watching & helping the turn of the tide - the big evolution from wooden to foam boards. It made a huge difference to be surfing 35kg instead of 70 kg boards!

In those days you had to create your own entertainment, there was no TV, no money - it was up to you. My whole life revolved around surfing. I started at Summerwood but got bunted out due to a disagreement with a teacher and the fact that I refused to speak Afrikaans, which in those days was the national language.

We worked out that as long as you were at school in the morning when they took register that was fine, you could duck out after that. I still managed to get caned every day - just used to automatically go straight to the headmaster. I wasn't big on doing homework!

At 15 my folks moved to where I still am today - no 1 Fifth Avenue (many years later I bought no3 and joined the properties). We ended up storing everyone's boards at our house, as they were so heavy to move around and no-one had their own transport in those days - it was bike, bus and walk. We had no wetsuits, so it was just toughing it out in the cold water for as long as we could. 

Everything was drag orientated - the total opposite of today. Boards had these rounded bottoms and tended to nosedive or catch rail incredibly easy, which limited the types of waves we could ride. You had to get in early else there was no ways you'd make the take-off. We wore rugby jerseys to try keep warm, which obviously didn't work that well. Then some guys painted latex onto the inside of the jerseys which seemed to help a bit.

I got sponsored my first board by Bobby Joubert from East London, as until then I'd just chose from whatever boards were stored at our house. A board in those days cost about R25. Put into perspective an apprentice earned around R5 a WEEK!

Originally everyone was either at Kings Beach or Clubhouse as basically you surfed right in front of the lifesaving club cos the boards were too bliming heavy to carry anywhere. But as boards got lighter, and when we moved into Summerstand, so we started surfing the spots in between the 2 clubs.

The was a fierce rivalry between the Fence and Millers crews. In those days it was everything to get your picture in the paper. So if you managed that then everyone was incredibly jealous!

Definitely, it was just part of the deal....and part of the entertainment to I suppose. I remember Freddy Jansen getting hung over the rails at the clubhouse in a sack. We also used to get stuck in the fridge on a regular basis, or in one of the guys lockers.

In the old days we didn't have sex wax. You had to make your own wax by melting candles and then mixing in some paraffin, so that once it hardened up again at least you could spread it a bit so it wasn't rock hard. This was quite a process so the guys had a habit of scrummaging through everyone's stuff on the beach to find wax and then just use it (in those days it was safe to leave all your stuff on the beach whilst you surfed).

We got sick of the older guys taking our wax so decided to get back at them. The next bar of wax we made we melted in some soap as well! Unfortunately for us the first guy to take it out of our pile of stuff on the beach was Piet the Butcher. He was the meanest, nastiest, toughest guy there was. Off he went with our trick wax. He couldn't work out why he kept on slipping off his board. There was no ways any of us where going to tell him, unless we wanted a knuckle sandwich!

Yah, it was hard to get to. You came via the Oyster Bay road as there was no bridge over the Krom. The road was shocking, and the cars weren't so great back then. It was just a lighthouse and a few shacks out there. You walked into Bruce's via the beach, there were no roads near there. It was just these huge sand dunes running down into the Bruce's point, no rocks like there are today.

I used to go to JBay for the school holidays and kip in a tent where the Point car park is today. All I had was R25 for the whole holiday. I lived on water and pronutro and scavenged what I could. The ou's used to steal chickens from the farmers. One year someone slagged a sheep - there was huge k*k about that.

Full on rural trip up the coast. The EP team was going up there to surf against Muizenberg. Trials were at Fence and you weren't allowed to catch any rights seeing as the comp was going to be held in a left! We ended up in Elands and the shop keepers saw us coming and just closed up all their shops and refused to serve us! We looked like hippies to them and they weren't at all interested in this "Engelse Hippies ding". After much convincing we won them over and ended up lang-arming with them that night!

Surfing was everything, and I loved competition. I ended up with a 2nd at the first SA Champs held at JBay, and got invited to the Gunston 500 (the premier surfing competition in those days) - which I surfed in twice. I've won a number of competitions over the years. I came first in the junior section of the noseriding competition at Millers which the clipping above is a prelude to. (Ed - a total of 43 seconds on the nose from a total of 3 rides. Thanks to Barry Heasley who still has all the old newspaper clippings).

(Ed - Back in the day Happy Valley used to have this incredible set up of various illuminated nursey rhyme, book characters & Christmas scenes that ran down either side of the Valley from Humewood Beach over the Christmas period). I did my apprenticeship as a signwriter, and the opened my own signwriting business. I worked on all the figure carvings and 3D stuff for the Happy Valley display.

Hobie Alter had just brought the Hobie Cat out, and I got really into it, and spent less and less time surfing. I ended up going to the World Champs in the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. Whilst I was there I saw windsurfing for the first time, and tried it out and was hooked.

When I got back home the first windsurfers arrived in the country. I ended up getting Glen D'Arcy to shape me what was probably the first custom windsurfer board in the country at the time. We ended up experimenting with booms and making our own sails and stuff. I windsurfed competitively as well.

Then one day I saw a glider on display at Greenacres and decided surfing the sky seemed like a good option, so I started doing gliding. Got myself an instructors license. I had a pretty bad crash one day which I was lucky to walk away from, and there and then decided to go back to surfing.

I was put straight back into the EP team without having surfed trails, which put plenty people's noses out of joint. But I did really well at the champs so ended up pleasantly surprising everyone. I'd probably been out of surfing regularly for about 15 years by that stage.

Fitness is everything. I can out paddle most people in my age group (Ed - and probably most others as well!). Just keep the weight off and surf as much as you can. I've also always lived a healthy lifestyle, no drinking or smoking.

(Mush owns Fifth Avenue Beach House) It was by default actually. The house next door to where we lived (No5) came up for sale, so I bought that. I wanted to put down roots. The Jewish Nation is notorious for being wanderers and I wanted to have roots. The whole lead up to the 1994 elections was frought with propoganda, and a lot of people were leaving the country. The talk was of your homes been taken away to give to the previously disadvantaged. So I decided if I turned my house into a business it wouldn't be given away so easily!

I was the King of the Brown Eye. I remember this one time we were driving to JBay and in those days you had to go through Van Stadens Pass as there was no bridge. These 2 old ladies were in the car behind us and I decided to give them the brown eye - well, they got it in every shape and size I could manage until they couldn't handle it anymore and pulled off the road!!

My boss was a fisherman and always used to leave his smelly bait lying around so I decided to teach him a lesson. I took a fish and stapled it underneath the seat in his car. For weeks he couldn't work out where the terrible smell was coming from until the thing eventually vrotted completely and fell off the bottom of the seat!

I invented a plastic orange peeler 20 years ago. I still manufacture them today, and have just made a large order for Sweden. I hold the patent for the mold still. I remember seeing my dad peel an orange with a spoon as a lightie, and going "I'm going to make something to peel an orange!"

I was also the first guy in PE into epoxy surfboard technology - I'd learnt all the skills of working with extruded polystyrene and epoxy whilst making my glider, so made my own board.

Ed - and I discovered Mush has a twin sister!

 Mush has such a big quiver that he battles to keep track of all his boards. Just this w/end he was out at Seals with Dieter and Dieter pulled the board out of his boardbag to surf and went sheepishly to Mush "Sorry, I think this is one of your boards!" Bust!! It was a darn nice wood veneer super light performance board as well, not some dog, as I saw Mush out in the line-up on it and heard the tale! Mush may have to radiotag his boards from now on.