COLUMN ONE : Riding S. Africa’s New Wave : As apartheid ebbs and sanctions lift, surfers return to the perfect shores made famous in ‘The Endless Summer.’ But some die-hards never left.

Darren Peens, the 19-year-old son of a fisherman, felt it in the air the night before. A stiff easterly wind was blowing in over the sea, bringing in a choppy swell. And the temperature was dropping.

He set his alarm clock. Tomorrow, he knew, would be the day. The wind would reverse, smoothing out that Indian Ocean swell. And Bruce’s Beauty, the world’s “perfect wave,” would be working its magic again.

Sure enough, at dawn, Bruce’s Beauty was peeling off the point, its cotton fringe moving right to left with steady perfection. Peens and a few friends paddled out on their surfboards, hopped onto exquisite five-foot waves and rode them 30 seconds and longer.

“Really good,” Peens said when he emerged from the surf two hours later as the rising tide began to rob the jazz from Bruce’s Beauty. “It’ll be back this afternoon, when the tide is low again.”

And so it was that day and the next, before the wave quietly went into hiding again.

It’s been more than 25 years since a California surfer-filmmaker named Bruce Brown and two friends discovered the “perfect wave” here at Cape St. Francis, on the southern coast of South Africa near Port Elizabeth, and shared it with millions of viewers in Brown’s classic documentary, “The Endless Summer.”

For most of those years, South Africa has been better known as the birthplace of apartheid and the scene of guerrilla warfare and township riots than the home of fabulous surfing.

But through all the years of upheaval inland, the waves have continued to beat against the 2,700-mile coastline. A few surfers have ignored the international sports boycott of South Africa and arrived here with their backpacks and surfboards, hitchhiking along the coastal roads and cooking on open fires.

Now the boycott has ended. South Africa is preparing to enter the Olympics. Its cricket team is playing in the World Cup. And the doors are open to the intrepid boys and girls of summer. Sanctions are gone, the surf is up, and the surfers are beginning to return.

All along, though, a South African subculture, oblivious to the political turmoil on terra firma, has flourished in the chilly swells where the Indian and Atlantic oceans meet on the southern tip of Africa.

On quiet days, these men and women--but mostly men--shape surfboards, cast nets for calamari or sell real estate. But they always keep an eye on the weather, attuned to the signs of an approaching swell.

The most famous wave of them all is the one they now call “Bruce’s,” named for Brown, the David Livingstone of African surf. Brown and his colleagues discovered the wave when they stopped on a clear, sunny day to ask a farmer if there were any waves nearby.

“Them’s big waves over there,” the farmer said, signaling over towering beige sand dunes to the sea.

The waves weren’t really that big. But, as Brown explained in his documentary, “you don’t go looking for a really big wave. What every surfer dreams of finding is a small wave with perfect shape. The odds against finding that are 10 million to 1.”

The waves he found here, though, in water only about two feet deep, “look like they were made by some kind of machine,” Brown said.

The rides were so long that Brown couldn’t get them all on the same roll of film. And he and his friends sometimes spent 45 seconds in the curl, squatting so long that their legs cramped up.

When “Bruce’s” is working, it still is the best in the world, say those who surf it. But it works only about half a dozen times a year.

“It’s good when it works, but it’s not worth waiting for,” said Mark Jury, an American surfer and professor of meteorology at the University of Cape Town. “ ‘Bruce’s’ is an enigma.”

Like most surfers here, Jury prefers the more reliable waves of “Supertubes,” which pounds the coast a few miles north at Jeffrey’s Bay, a growing settlement that has become a surfing mecca for South Africans.

The curling white top of “Supers” begins at the point in Jeffrey’s Bay, peeling off right to left in a breaking wall of water that stretches nearly a mile down the coast.

“If you had a dream about waves, it would be waves like this that break in one direction and don’t break in front of you,” Mike Tabeling said as he sat on his balcony watching Supertubes. “It’s like a skateboard park for surfers.”

Tabeling, a tall, angular 43-year-old from Florida, first came to Cape St. Francis in 1972, drawn by “The Endless Summer.” A legend of American East Coast surfing, Tabeling was, in his younger days, “one of the most naturally talented athletes the surfing world has ever known,” according to Surfing Magazine.

When he first visited South Africa, Tabeling was a professional surfer, living a vagabond life traveling the world on the tab of a surfboard manufacturer. He had been to Australia, Peru, North Africa and Europe. But he’d never seen waves like the ones at Jeffrey’s Bay.

“These were the best small waves I’d ever ridden in my life,” he said.

Tabeling, his wife and their three sons, ages 4, 9 and 11, moved here to semi-retire three years ago, having made a tidy profit in the Florida real estate market. From their three-story white house, they can watch Supertubes turn the sea into a patch of corduroy all the way to the horizon.

“To have a place better than Malibu or Rincon (near Santa Barbara) and have it from every room in my house is such a dream,” he said. “It’s childhood forever.”

In the Southern Hemisphere winter, from April to September, a new swell feeds Supertubes every two weeks or so, producing two or three days of six- to eight-foot waves that can carry surfers for a kilometer--10 football fields--at speeds approaching 50 m.p.h.

The ideal conditions are a stiff wind blowing out to sea and a southwestern swell. Those swells are fed in winter by an army of low-pressure cells that march from west to east across the southern tip of Africa.

“You get to the end of riding Supertubes and your legs feel like rubber,” said Glen D’Arcy, an old-timer at 39 who shapes surfboards at Jeffrey’s Bay.

Added Tabeling: “There are longer waves in the world, but none with the juice of Supertubes. This is probably the best right-breaking wave in the world.”

Larry Levin, 42, a South African with sea-blue eyes and gray-flecked hair, moved to Jeffrey’s Bay 20 years ago to surf Supertubes and never left. Now he shapes surfboards and watches for the swell.

“When it’s really good, it’s unbelievable,” he said. “But even on a bad day you can surf it. It’s very consistent.”

These waves now are drawing the world’s best surfers, and the regulars say the number of immigrants has nearly doubled in the past 18 months. Tabeling has recently sold homes to Australians, Americans and Brazilians, and the mobile-home parks are full of surfing aficionados.

What they find is a peaceful world, far removed from the political violence and upheaval they have seen on television.

“You don’t feel the political pressure here,” D’Arcy said. “This is like another world. This is not the South Africa most people know.”

A few shark attacks have been reported in the area in recent years, but that hasn’t dissuaded the cognoscenti. Surfers say the risk is small compared to the thrill of riding perfect waves.

And when the surf’s up, South Africans come from as far as Cape Town, a nine-hour drive away, put on their wet suits and paddle their boards out into the cool water to ride the waves.

Some of the locals complain that Supertubes gets too crowded, with as many as 50 surfers in the water, but those crowds are small compared to the throngs who frequent America’s top surf spots.

The consensus among veterans in Jeffrey’s Bay is that Bruce’s Beauty is past its prime. An upper-income vacation community has risen on the tall sand dunes that Brown and his friends climbed more than two decades ago. That development, known as St. Francis Bay, has robbed Bruce’s of about two-thirds of its length, some surfers say.

And Bruce’s has never been a consistent performer. To be working well, it needs an easterly swell, something that happens only when there’s a cyclone in the Indian Ocean.

But Darren Peens and the other surfers who live near Bruce’s swear by it.

“Guys who live in Jeffrey’s Bay a lot of times miss out on the smaller days that are really perfect on Bruce’s,” Peens said. “Sometimes it’s only four feet tall, but it really gets ‘perfect.’ ”

“I could send them videotapes to prove them wrong,” Peens added. “But I’m glad they think like that. They can carry on thinking that way, because then we’ll have it all to ourselves.”