He began building 10-foot surfboards weighing 25 kg in his garage. The boards were used to surf around the Cape Peninsula. News of these ‘lightweight’ boards spread to Durban, and Whitmore started supplying people like Barry Edwards and Baron Stander.
Deliveries to Durban led to Whitmore pioneering surfing in Mossel Bay, Port Elizabeth, East London, Buffalo Bay, Jongensfontein and the beach break at Cape St Francis. He also discovered the break at Elands Bay on the West Coast, first ridden in 1957.
The arrival of epoxy resin – compatible with styrene foam – made glassing easier. According to Harry Bold, he brought the very first polyurethane surfboard to South Africa in 1961. ‘It was a beaut nine-foot six inch OLE board by Bob Olson of Seal Beach California. John Whitmore met my ship in Cape Town and invited me to his place, where he made templates. Later the Cape Town boys came to Durban with some pretty close copies.’
A fortuitous encounter with a Californian hitchhiker was to have a profound effect on our history. American surfer Dick Metz arrived after a marathon four-day hitch-hiking trip from Zimbabwe. The driver needed to see his sick mother in Camps Bay, so Metz was dropped him off at Glen Beach. He noticed a lone surfer in the water who had lost his board. Metz retrieved it from the rocks, and the lone surfer, John Whitmore, invited him to stay at their Bakoven cottage. He lived with the Whitmore clan for several months, and they became close friends.
Returning home, Metz worked with school friend ‘Grubby’ Clark, who was moulding surfboard blanks from polyurethane foam. Denser than styrene, they were easier to shape and could be glassed using lighter polyester resin. Metz introduced Whitmore to Clark and by the 1960s, Whitmore was importing Clark foam blanks from California for his thriving Whitmore Surfboards business.
Metz also put him in contact with John Severson, who sent him Surfer magazines that were sold in South Africa by subscription. The trippy era of the 1960s signalled a boom in the surf cult, although it was mostly confined to Australia, California and Hawaii. A perk of Whitmore’s job as a Volkswagen salesman was the use of a VW Kombi, and lots of driving along the coast looking for waves. Whitmore owned the first Kombi made in South Africa, and he invented the first roof racks.
He would drive past Jeffreys Bay to the VW factory in Port Elizabeth and see that classic line- up from the road. His tales of perfect waves led Capetonians Gerald ‘Gus’ Gobel and Brian ‘Block’ McClarty to the Point, and they became the first humans to surf there. Of course, the real pioneers are the dolphins that have been riding Jeffreys Bay for thousands of years.
Back in Durban, popout foam boards began to appear, based partly on boards brought in from overseas. In the early to mid 1960s, Max Wetteland, George Thomopolous (later Thompson), Ant van den Heuvel and Robert McWade were shaping and surfing. The technology of board riding, tested by the act itself, began to gain momentum. In Cape Town, Whitmore gave up his VW job and started blowing Clark foam blanks.
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