Hello everyone, and especially the SurfHive Community! It's Jasper, the musical-surfer dad from Cape Town in South Africa.
The winter storms have got even worse here in Cape Town. Gale force winds and apparently the hardest rains in about 45 years!! There are trees falling over and flooding of roads and houses...
Here's a photo my friend Bob Hughes shared on Facebook. The Liesbeek canal is usually about a foot deep or less in a deeper canal on the left, and there's supposed to be a pedestrian walkway on the right about at least a meter above the actual canal... Now it looks like something to kayak on and have some fun!! On a less funny note, unfortunately, a lot of people are suffering with flooded houses, especially in our poorer townships!!
Here's a large pine tree that lost the battle to the storm just down the road from me...
I had to go to the airport last week for a work trip. Driving to the airport through the storms and flooded roads in the dark before dawn was quite gripping, followed by wet shoes in the flooded subway linking the parking to the check-in area!
The storms come in from the West, and the surf zones around Cape Town indicated in red, green and blue were being battered by big, unruly and raw swell yesterday... luckily we also have the much more sheltered yellow zone!
I landed up at a very confined shallow reef... it looked less crowded than usual when I arrived, but a pack of kids joined us soon after and formed a crowd of about 11-12 people all sitting in the same spot... here I am paddling for a wave...
The waves were surprisingly small and clean compared to the carnage on the exposed side of the peninsula. However, the water was still very cold! Doesn't it just look cold? Hahaha!
Despite the small pack all huddled together, it was often clear whose turn it was to catch the next wave...
The wave steepens quickly on the shallow reef...
The surfer used his hands to stall, and the wave gave us a little clue as to why this spot is considered to be quite world-class when bigger, as he managed to pull in, and then exit, a tight little tube...
By my last wave it was getting dark... you can see the street-lights are now shining over the high level road above the houses...
So, it's wonderful that Cape Town has places to hide from stormy carnage. Hopefully, we get some storms from far out to sea to create some more groomed groundswells on the exposed side... Hopefully then, I won't have to hide!! Hahaha!
(And yes, some warming Old Brown Sherry was swigged before blasting the car heater on the way home!)
THE END
And Zak and I were just talking about loonies that go surfing in this weather 🤣🤣 tbh, winter swimming was one of my favorite things to do. There's nothing like being in the water and then coming up to the surface and being rained on. It is quite the experience!