Kei the Beloved Country

Trundling along a winding dust road, testimony to a dry winter, we topped the hill and stopped. The distant line-up had not fully imprinted the message on our brains before we began emitting a caterwauling cacophony of high-pitched hoots. A cow gazed stonily at us. It seemed to say ‘Naught bru! These Two-Legs are crazy.’ By Spike

As the visual information began to register, synapses overheating in a vain bid to stem the flow of adrenaline, the fit of whooping cough began to alternate with robust yells, chortles and snorts.

Line upon line of swell creased the seascape. A distant point, encased in blue, was going off its pip. Shaggy lumps slid along the spear of rock and greenery that thrust out into the sea. Spray spumes arched behind each watery bump. It was as though a procession of slow meteors was converging upon the shore. It was like that first across-the-bay view of J-Bay. You know, when you’re on the highway out of PE and you see distant blue bumps running shoreward and a sea laid out like ruffled silk.

We got back on the road, kombi revving, occupants babbling. My companion, Pete, hadn’t been in a hurry till then, but now we bounced and yawed at 60 km/h, close to top speed for that cabbie, over dongas, ruts and potholes.

The crew was small – me, head of ichthyology at Rhodes, Pete Britz, and his 12-year-old son Phillip. The walk to the point along a vast beach – split in two by slabs of volcanic rock – took aeons. It was hard not to burst into a full-tilt sprint, legs pumping and arms flailing. But the usual fears (Are cars with boards coming down the road? Anyone else walking to the spot? Is the onshore going to blow?) were totally ill-founded. Any residual urban plaks were subsumed by Pondoland fever, a mental blight that eats away at the brain, throttling it back, placing the conscious mind in idle mode.

There was no need for stress. We were on an empty beach on the Wild Coast. Not a soul in sight. The weather was crisp and clear. The surf was cooking.

A light northwest offshore – warm and dry – was feathering a perfect six to-eight-foot south swell into deep textured lines. It was a swell with meaning. The close-outs on the beach broke with barrelling intent. Each foreground curler was backed by swell grooves stretched taut to the horizon.

I surfed for four hours straight – wave after wave after wave. Ruler-edged walls, top parallel to bottom, rolled through, mind-bending around the peripheries of my vision, bombs blasting on the shallow section on the inside section of the outside section. The smaller, deep ones seemed to creep up more, suddenly sucking into a thick-lipped convulsion across the ledge, a vertical wall then winding down a deeper sandbank 25 metres in front of the metronomic curl.

The springish low tide meant the bigger ones stood up on the outside rim of the basin away from the shelf, reeling along for 400 metres, slowing down and backing off momentarily as each swell encountered a slightly deeper patch – a bathymetric no-man’s land between point and beach break. But after the slight pause, the wave would bowl at least three times more as it slid over a series of staggered sandbanks that took you sweeping towards the shore.

On my second wave, I rode as far as I could so that I could count the paddle strokes back, jumping off my board into knee-deep water just about on the shore. My arms stroked back 498 times before I sat back up on my board in the take-off zone.

After about an hour or so, the offshore began to die. The sea slowly became smooth like glass. Still the sea heaved, each set gradually getting a little ‘fatter’ as the tide filled our idyllic corner of the vast sandy bay.

After four hours, the paddle became burning pain. Spaghetti arms screamed for release. ‘Just one more, just like the last,’ said the mind, ever selfish in its insatiable quest to fill the video vaults with barrel clips.

Eventually, a building southeast wind and rapidly deepening tide was the mediator, and the decision was wrested from both entities. No-one complained. Both were sut.

Mouths caked numb by a throat-cracking berg wind, we lurched back along the beach, bumbling along the craggy rocks to rest beneath the overhang, surfed out strandlopers looking wild and red-eyed. Stoked.