Hello everyone, and especially the SurfHive Community! It's Jasper, the musical-surfer dad from Cape Town in South Africa.
The last few days have been stinking hot in Cape Town. Normally we have strong winds in summer to cool us down, but there has been a bit of a gap (I think it's finally going back to a more normal summer wind this evening and the world is cooling down to a bit more manageable!)
I was supposed to be busy by mid-morning on Saturday, but I was able to sneak to a shallow reef at 7am in the morning. It was looking small and very shallow, so I decided to practice my bodyboarding instead of surfing to see if I could squeeze into the small barrels... Perhaps the smaller board would keep my lower half of my body in the cool water to help me not overheat! Hahaha!
Water draining off the nearly dry reef as a small wave approaches - luckily I planned to paddle around to the other side of the reef!
...which looked much better!
While it looks good, it was small! I don't think I could fit in this tube standing up with my mediocre skills and my 1.88m height!
Hahaha!
The beach was already filling in, but the only other guy in the water was on a kind of electric motorized foil board - I think this is the first time I have seen one in real life? Looks cool enough because he was enjoying uncrowded unbroken waves and not getting in other people's way... Occasionally he got close enough that I could hear the faint whine of the motor... How stunning is this morning? I was burning through my zinc sunblock before 8am!
The water was clean enough for me to capture the shoal of tiny fish going by... It was also about 20 deg C which is practically bath-water by Cape Town standards!
The approaching little waves were nearly oily-glass! Ah!
Heading left for the kelp beds!
If you look to the bottom-right of these two shots of me catching a smaller wave, you can see through the water to the shallow reef below, mostly covered with squishy red-bait pods I think?
The shallow reef can create little warps in the wave...
I'm not that practiced at bodyboarding compared to surfing, but it did help me squeeze in for the odd view from inside the wave as it breaks over me - we call this the "barrel" or "tube", and a wave will only break in a hollow fashion if the bottom goes from deep to shallow quite rapidly.
On the way back home I caught a glimpse of the beginner beach Muizenberg that I wrote about last week (@jasperdick/surfing-tiny-surf-but-warm) - it seemed to be even more ridiculously crowded than usual! Hahaha! I suppose I am glad that I like looking just a little bit harder than all these guys... MOST of the time!
Hopefully we get more flashes of real swell and gaps in the wind soon! Right now I'd just be happy with cool weather! Hahaha!