Finishing a Quest for the Perfect Wave

The Brazilians are complaining of the cold. The lone Hawaiian is shivering in her wetsuit. Other surfers from America, Australia, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Russia are growing excited. The weather has turned nasty--a sure sign of bigger waves to come.

The visiting surfers do their best to shake off the windchill and the rain as they sit on their boards, bobbing among the swells.

The wind is blowing hard but straight offshore, sculpting the waves to perfection. There’s an added benefit to the surfers in the water. The wind drives the rain horizontally into the back of their heads. That way it does not obscure their vision as they gaze out from the southern tip of the African continent for the next set of waves on the horizon.

“Endless summer, ha!” said Andrew Deegenaars, a beefy Australian surfer from Sydney. “That’s a laugh.”

The inside joke about the weather here comes from the title of two movies that made this coast famous. Virtually everyone here was lured by Bruce Brown’s 1966 classic surf flick “The Endless Summer” or the remake 28 years later “The Endless Summer II.”

In both surf travelogues, the lighthearted Santa Barbara filmmaker tracks a pair of Californians as they prowl the globe in search of the perfect wave. Both films end here. Not for the weather, but for the waves.

Tom Mayer, 52, of Carpinteria said the first “Endless Summer” left a lasting impression on him as a teenager. He remembered his dad dropping him off at the theater to see the movie. When he emerged, he announced to his astonished father that he too was going to devote his life to the pursuit of perfect waves.

“Well, you did it,” his father said recently after Mayer’s return from another surf safari.

“Did what?” he asked.

“Devoted your life to chasing perfect waves.”

Mayer recounted this story from a bench overlooking “Supertubes,” a point break where the waves peel right in perfect cylindrical barrels along a volcanic rock reef. It is, as best as Mayer can count, his 10th trip to Jeffrey’s Bay. As a Delta flight attendant, he has flown standby, board under his arm, to premier surf spots all over the world.

“This is one of the dream places everyone always wants to go,” Mayer said.

That has certainly been true for me. I have longed to visit the South African coast since I first watched Robert August and Mike Hynson scramble down a large sand dune to discover the perfect wave at the conclusion of “The Endless Summer.” To this day, those waves at Cape St. Francis are called “Bruce’s Beauties,” after the filmmaker who presented them to the world.

My desire was stoked again by the 1994 sequel, when Robert “Wingnut” Weaver and Pat O’Connell surfed the waves in Jeffrey’s Bay with former world champion Shaun Tomson, a native South African. In that movie they surfed Supertubes, which was considered too fast to surf on the clunky boards of the 1960s.

Still, South Africa seemed hopelessly remote and out of reach because of the distance and the expensive air fare. It takes nearly 24 hours of flying (typically on three flights) to get here from California.

Tomson encouraged me to give it a try when I ran across him in Ventura. Although he immigrated to Santa Barbara, where he owns a surf wear company, he continues to promote Jeffrey’s Bay as his favorite surfing destination.

“Ken,” he said, “As a regular foot, you owe it to yourself to surf it at least once.”

Those words dogged me for a decade.

Many of the world’s great waves peel left. As a result, “regular foot” surfers, who stand on the board with their left foot forward and right foot back, surf with their backs to those left-breaking waves.

Blindsided, they have a hard time seeing the waves bearing down on them unless they crane their necks over their shoulder. “Goofy foot” surfers, left foot back, confront the problem in the other direction.

Jeffrey’s Bay waves peel right, a rare treat for regular foot surfers.

For any surf spot to work well, the key ingredient is a big swell. Jeffrey’s Bay breaks most consistently from June through August. Those are the winter months in the Southern Hemisphere when fierce storms off Antarctica send massive southern swells marching up the Atlantic and Indian oceans toward the Cape of Good Hope.

By the time I arrived in early September, spring was in the air and the famous surf break was, well, flat. The weather was too good. Or so I was told by nearly everyone in this tiny, one-robot town. A “robot” is the South African word for traffic light.

Then the clouds rolled in. It turned cold and rainy. Soon the waves started stacking up on the horizon. For two days, surfers braved the elements to launch themselves off 6- to 8-foot waves, racing down the line for nearly a quarter-mile or more.

The waves here are known for their speed, for holding their perfect shape as they increase in size, for the length of the ride. Some locals complained that the place barely showed its potential during those two days.

But it hardly mattered to the international crew of visitors. It was as good or even better than it ever gets back home in California, Israel, Ireland, Brazil or Australia.

Sam Yoon, 26, a self-described “surf bum and championship dishwasher,” could not bring himself to leave. He’d been here for months as part of his two-year odyssey of surfing and “washing dishes all over the world.”

Jordi Oliver, a 21-year-old Spaniard from Barcelona with bleached-blond hair, had been here a month. He too was living a childhood fantasy. “I’m a regular foot and I’ve always wanted to surf the best right [break] in the world. And here I am.”