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Getting my FCS fins fixed

So there’s no doubt that my love of the ocean has been rekindled over the last year or so. It’s a truly wonderful beast. It covers 70 percent of the surface of our planet, it was where life as we know it began and it’s really where the last true unexplored wilderness remains. It scares a lot of people and rightly so, for its power is immense. It’s got the power to turn rocks into sand and sink 70,000 tonne ocean liners.  But my rekindled passion for the ocean hasn’t just come from watching episodes of the Blue Planet.  I’ve started relearning to surf. Because before all this diving malarkey, for me was surfing.

I’ll tell you a bit of that story now, as I intend to turn this blog into a bit of a hybrid surf and dive blog, so I guess the beginning is a good as any place to start.  Seeing as I started life a boy raised in a land locked farming community on the greenbelt of London, the ocean was something that I only saw when I went to visit my grandparents in Bournemouth on summer holidays. No-one surfs in Bournemouth, nor did I see scuba divers walking back out onto the shore whilst eating my icecream behind the windbreaks lovingly hammered in to the sand by my grandfather, so as I kid I thought that windsurfing and sailing was the only thing that happened in the ocean. Sothe sea, as I remember it as a kid, was all about washing the sand out of my hair after one of my little brothers had buried me in the faceup in the sand. So it wasnt until much later that my real love of the ocean developed. This arrived a decade and a half later when I had fled Europe, and more importantly at the time, anymore education, for Africa. Although my plan for the escaping education entirely was inherently flawed as I found myself back within the walls of school in a job in a suburb of  Cape Town. But for the first time in my life I was living within an hour’s drive of the ocean. Me and some buddies decided it’d be a laugh to start surfing. So we did. My first board was ridiculously too small for me and my wetsuit was old and basically no longer really effective at keeping me warm. The waters were infested with the natures top predator, the White Shark, which would have been fine, well, reasonably fine as Great Whites don’t normally get too close to the shore for fear of beaching themselves, however around that time some bright spark had set up a business offering cage diving experiences locations far too close to the beach as it saved them in boat fuel, the sharks were all too close, due to the large  hunks of raw steak thrown in the water. You’d think this would be stopped by the authorities as rediculous but as South Africa was a country where the petrol pump attendants filled your car whilst smoking cigarettes and paying cards what can you do To be honest, in the 90′s  I guess they were  dealing with some rather bigger issues and hey it was Africa right? so fuckit…  We didnt care though really, I was 18 and had bought all my surf gear from Cash Converters and I figured that my wetsuit smelled so bad that any sensible shark would pick one of my mates instead of me anyhow. I remember it – we went into some of the real surf shops, saw the prices and quickly realised that a trip to Cash Converters was in order for us. They only had 4 boards, and one was about 5 foot 8, large enough for a big child or light girl. That left three other boards, which considering we were three friends was kind of convenient. The guy in cash converters pretty much told us that the boards were all too small for all of us and not to waste or money. “well unless you have any bigger ones then its gonna have to be those as we don’t have enough money to go anywhere else” was our reply. haha. rediculous.

So over the next 3 months we ventured to Muzenburg in our old VW beetle and froze our tits off in with all the wrong gear and more often than not very big hangovers. Not ideal. I’ll save you the details of losing teeth whilst surfing (or more accurately nearly drowning) on a road trip / emergency passport run in Durban, surfing on a beach closed for shark attacks with what we later realised were dolphins, nearly drowning up the coast from Supertubes at Jefferys Bay and the rest of the story for another time, but needless to say when I was sat on my new longboard out in the ocean last week with the sun shining on my face I remembered mostly what I love about being out in the water is just sitting on a board waiting for some sets and having a laugh with your mates. It’s beautiful just looking back at the land from the sea, or out at the sun and the horizon with the wind in your face. There’s a stillness inside that comes at those times, and it’s addictive. I got a little taste of it again last weekend and I need more already. Much much more

Tags: blue planet, bournemouth, cage diving, Cape Town, cape town south africa, childhood eczema, eczema, first board, grandparents, Jeffery's Bay, longboard, muizenberg, new board, no doubt, paddling out, rocks, sailing, salt water, shark, supertubes, surf, Surf Road Trip, surfing, true wilderness, waiting for sets, wetsuit, windbreaks, windsurfing