Hello everyone, and especially the SurfHive Community! It's Jasper, the musical-surfer dad from Cape Town in South Africa.
Just two days ago I shared that I was with my family and friends enjoying a long weekend away in a small coastal village about a 90 minute drive from my home in Cape Town. In that post I did say we were expecting a "Black South-Easter", which is what we call a storm from the direction that usually summer winds come from (Winter storms are usually from the West)! (@jasperdick/surfing-sandy-shorebreaks-on-a)
Well that storm is more of less over now, and it was beyond anything we could have imagined! There has been flooding and disaster all over the Western Cape! The worst of it happened on Sunday night, and we woke up today to reports that the road back to Cape Town along the coast was closed because of a mudslide. The alternative "long way back" road back to Cape Town apparently was also closed for a variety of reasons from a bridge being underwater, to fallen trees over the road, to more rockfalls and mudslides on the mountain passes...
So for now, we are trapped in a small zone that encompasses this village, and the one that is just around the corner (usually so convenient as its beach is offshore when this one is onshore!).
When the rain had subsided a bit this morning, I decided to go and look and see the damage. I also had a crazy idea to go and check a bay in the next village that is usually sheltered from swell, but might be breaking in the SE wind-swell that this storm had created!
This was typical - water trapped by saturated soils with nowhere to go...
At least my car has slightly high clearance for driving through muddy puddles!
These penguins are looking a bit lost and confused! This pond is supposed to be a car-park for people who want to come and see their colony.
My crazy idea was not so crazy! Some swell was getting into a bay that is usually as flat as a pancake!
Despite the poor quality of the wind-swell, and the onshore winds, it seemed like the bay protected the waves which recovered a bit of form and then the reef was creating a consistent left hander! I decided it looked a bit bouncy for surfing but might be fun to try on my bodyboard!
I got some weird looks as I changed into my wetsuit in the rain, with the penguins in the car-park, from the odd bird-lover who had braved the weather to come and see all the lovely African penguins in their thick rain-gear!
The waves turned out to be easy to catch on a bodyboard, with surprisingly little current to take me away from the take-off zone!
The kelp on the reef also told me where to be to line up the relatively long lefts!
Even in the bumpy, stormy, wind-swell onshore conditions, there were still signs that this wave could have been quality if the wind had switched offshore!
But I'm struggling to imagine a situation where you'd get an ordinary winter NW wind just after the black SE storm you'd need to get wind-swell into this sheltered bay like today!
Perhaps I should have been further out to catch this one...
But it still had plenty of life left in it when I did catch it!
Here's one last wave to end the short session before I go in to warm up with a nip of Old Brown Sherry...
And I rode it all the way to the way to the boat slipway where I had paddled out from...
So I'm stoked - I think I just managed to catch a surf-spot that maybe breaks once a year and maybe even the locals don't know much about! Hahaha!
In all seriousness though, this storm has been terrible. Some people have lost their lives and many others have lost their cars, or livestock, or have had terrible flood damage to their houses! My heart goes out to all of them!
I came out of the water to realize that the electricity had not come back on all morning, apparently due to a substation failure back closer to Cape Town. While I was bodyboarding the novelty wave, the cell towers for my network provider (Vodacom) must have lost their battery back-up and I no longer had signal to let my wife and friend Rhonwyn know I was safe out of the water. A little bit later, the other main network provider (MTN) that my friend Rhonwyn uses, failed as well!
From about 11am to 4pm today, we were well and truly isolated! Eventually the electricity and MTN signal came back! Imagine if I had been stuck in a current or hurt while bodyboarding - how would anyone have been able to call for help? How would an ambulance or sea rescue have got here? It all feels a bit like a mini-Apocalypse!
As I write this, Vodacom is still not back online. My wife @juliadick and I are hot-spotting from Rhonwyn's MTN phone! The main way back to Cape Town will probably be closed for over a week, but we do think that they should be able to clear the long way around! Let's see if we will be able to get home tomorrow!
BYE FOR NOW!