Dan Scheffler's Blog

Come on, admit it. At some time or another you’ve used that phrase to describe that perfect wave you surfed, where you pulled into a deep barrel and you actually made it out. You had to tell somebody, but you couldn’t find the words to explain the feeling to a non-surfer, so you said it: “It was better than sex!” And then your friend looked at you with pity and an expression on his face that said, “You poor klutz, one day you will learn how to make love properly.” Because people who don’t surf will never understand how good it feels, no matter how hard they try.

But it’s true isn’t it? Sometimes surfing feels better than the four-legged frolic. (A note to virgins: sex is great and remains a wonderful, wholesome, god-given pastime. I don’t want to put you off having sex one day, don’t get me wrong.) It is just that sometimes surfing does in fact trump the horizontal hustle.

Picture this: You have saved yourself for that special person you still have to meet. You don’t know who it will be, but when you meet them, it will be clear that the two of you were made for each other and then one day, when you are both ready and the moment is right, with only the full moon looking on, with Celine Dion crooning in the background and just the right amount of pink bubbly to relax the two of you, you will give yourselves to each other and share the most wonderful, blissful experience. Except that you might think to yourself afterwards, while trying to banish the accompanying feelings of guilt from your mind, “That searing cutback I managed in July 2013, when I hit the whitewater so hard that the spray went higher than the cliffs and I came around and thumped the crap out of the oncoming section, that felt better than this.” Don’t feel bad. It can happen. Surfing is like that, it’s a spoiler. It can make almost anything else feel ordinary.

Of course it is all a matter of degree. Sometimes there is bad sex. Like on those occasions when your partner is not really that into it. Yawning, glancing at her watch or making a shopping list are all good indications that this time is not going to rank as one of your most awesome performances as a Casanova. And of course booze, that other cause of countless crap bonks, can result in impaired judgment and poor selection of partner, with disastrous effects on the libido once you sober up. In cases like these, almost any ride beats sex hands down.

Now good sex, that is hard to beat. You really have to catch a bomb, back-door the section, pull in and stay deep for so long that you start feeling you can’t hold out any longer and then get shot out in a gush of spray, ready for a cutback and then repeat the performance. And we all know that doesn’t happen very often.

Except if you are a top pro. The top performers have amazing, earth shattering tube-rides frequently, because they are that good and because they go on trips to places where the waves are exceptional. The rest of us stay at home, have mediocre surf sessions and thus have great sex, comparatively. I imagine that somebody like Slater must worry a lot while he is lying in bed exhausted, deep in post-coital reflection. He probably wonders why he is so useless in the sack: “Geez, I’ve been away for two weeks, we had a wonderful, passionate reunion and I gave it my all, but it still didn’t feel better than that last ride at Mundaka…” Hey, it’s not you, Slats, it’s the wave’s fault. If you weren’t such a good surfer, you would have felt much more fulfilled on the home front.

But wait, you say. You have to compare the best wave you ever had with the best time you ever had when you parked your Plymouth in the garage of love. And here it is hard to be honest. Do you really want to tell your wife she was beaten by a lukewarm lump of water that lurched over a reef somewhere in the Mentawais one morning? That wave you will never forget?

No way. You’re going to tell her that of course nothing in the world measures up to the moments you two have shared. And anyway, how can you compare surfing with taking old One-eye to the optometrist? It’s like comparing apples with pears.

Nah, surfing isn’t really better than sex. Cross my heart.

I’ve decided to tell everybody I can about a relatively secret, but world-class surf spot. Why would I do such a thing?

When do you expose a surf spot? The satisfaction of impressing your mates and re-living the epic sessions you had there by telling them all about it is quickly overshadowed by the angst of seeing crowds of  fellow wave riders descending on the beach and taking off on “your” waves. It only takes a few surfers to clog up a spot and just one guy without manners to spoil a session.

Now I am in the process of telling as many people as I can find about the place and I have written about it to Zigzag, South Africa’s largest surf magazine. Admittedly, stories about these waves have been leaking out for years now and the amount of people in the water on a good day have steadily increased to the point to where some weekends are really busy. But telling every surfer about it won’t help the crowd situation.

The problem is that if I don’t expose my favourite surf spot, the waves here will quite possibly cease to exist.

I was lucky enough to grow up going on holidays to Vleesbaai right from the start of my life. Everyone body-surfed the beach breaks during December holidays and from there it was a quick transition for me to start riding a Boogie board. Before long, I saw the light and joined the handful of “dropped-out, drug addicted low-life’s” who rode waves standing up. And when some of the more clued-up surfers spoke about epic secret waves while glancing towards the point, I put two and two together and headed off along the rocky shore the next time the waves on the beach got big. That was the start of my addiction to the waves on the point.

I was just lucky that my grandfather bought a piece of land at Vleesbaai in the 1950’s and built an asbestos shack on it. That put me right in front of one of the best waves anywhere for anybody who had the patience to wait for it.

 Most surfers are not so lucky. They have to be shown these places, or spend a lot of time searching. In Vleesbaai’s case you could visit a hundred times and never see waves on the point. You have to know when to go and that is what kept the place off the radar for so long. For years I tried not to change the status quo by keeping mum about it, not even my friends knew.

Over time the point gradually became known to more and more people, but in the late eighties and early nineties you were almost guaranteed to have the waves to yourself if you could get to Vleesbaai when the right swell was running. In the days before web forecasts, you often got skunked going to Vlees. How many times did I not drive there like a maniac during a winter storm, with white knuckles on the wheel, only to find a pond in the bay, while massive unsurfable sets pounded the wild side of the point. So on the occasions when everything came together and I scored it by myself, I felt like I deserved it.

Gradually more and more people started surfing  there and during holiday periods we had to spread ourselves out along the point, but that was still ok. Then Windguru came and things got a lot busier. On good swells the water got crowded and nowadays most dedicated Cape surfers know Vleesbaai well.

But still, I’m telling everybody who cares to listen about Vleesbaai now, so the place is sure to get even more crowded in the future. To a degree I’m destroying the wave for myself by telling the world.

Still, this has to be better than letting it all disappear behind a breakwater that would block the swell completely. This is exactly what Petro SA are proposing to do in the next few years and it would mean complete destruction of the perfect waves along that point. The few people who visit Vleesbaai and the handful of permanent residents in the village are powerless to fight the development by a large organisation like PetroSA. We need more support. So, as far as surfing is concerned, we’re damned if I do and damned if I don’t. I’m trying to make the best of a desperate situation.

If enough people protest, we could at least postpone this development by a few years. Maybe we could even stop it.

I am so grateful for all the empty line-ups I have been privileged to surf at Vleesbaai over the years. The emptiness was good while it lasted. In the interest of saving the place, maybe it’s time to learn to share now.

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Somewhere on a remote island in the vicinity of Nias a crazy Belgian opened a bar and strung up a few hammocks to sleep in. Occasionally a few surfers would brave the swarms of malarial mosquitoes and stay in his camp, drink his beer and surf themselves silly on the incredible waves at Asu. This Belgian did not surf or dive or fish. Nobody knows why he ended up on his island in the middle of nowhere. Of course there are the stories about drug smuggling, running from Interpol and more, but we never found out who he really was and why he chose to stay on Asu. I can’t remember his name any more. Something like Vincent. He was gregarious and interesting to talk to, but he had strong opinions about most things and eventually he always fell out with whomever it was that he was talking to. He wasn’t very diplomatic. It must get lonely on this island during the off-season, especially if you piss off the few visitors who do come by. I wonder whether he is still there …

After our ship had been anchored off the island for a some days and we had ridden the lefthanders that wind their way along it’s razor-like reef, we started to settle into the laid back pattern of slow time on Asu. The swell had moved on again and normally we would have sailed for the next group of islands, but we decided to stay a while. Islands have a way of drawing you into their interiors, like spiders do with flies. To pass the time we lounged under the palms, snorkeled the reefs and drank the beer at Vincent’s. We had long since lost track of time. One afternoon a few of us were on the beach, tossing a Frisbee around, when someone asked what the time was. Francois squinted into the sun, thought for a while and as he carelessly flicked the Frisbee back he replied, “July …”

His laconic answer summed up our priorities pretty well. We knew that there were many people in grey suits around the world who were desperately watching the clock, working against deadlines and worrying about time and money, but it was a different world from ours. Where we were, money could buy you a beer or two, but little else. The ocean encompassed our world and waves were our currency. We avoided talking about work and of going back to our previous lives. The subject would have been distasteful; we just weren’t interested in the kind of places where things like shoes, underwear and shampoo were considered necessary. But we all knew that our eventual return to the real world was unavoidable. In the meantime, we drank a toast there on the beach, to all those people to whom it mattered that it was Monday.

 

I usually write about travelling, adventure and surfing and this piece is not about that. But there is a link: there is some travelling involved, the kind of travelling I really don’t like, but which I do the most of: commuting to work.

When I look at the cars around me here in Cape Town, a city like so many the world over where poverty is visible almost everywhere, I am struck by the numerous expensive vehicles on the road. Most of these cars know only one route: to the office and back. I doubt that the drivers get much satisfaction from their driving experience, because they have very little driving freedom. They can’t go fast because of the congestion and the roads are not exactly challenging thoroughfares either. Yet every second car is some kind of performance machine designed to beat vast fields of competitors.

Nowadays it is no longer enough to drive a luxury car either, you have to have some kind of SUV. Not that you are planning to go anywhere wild where you need a rugged vehicle, you just need to impress or intimidate other road users. The new gas guzzling SUV’s that we see these days are clearly not designed to go off-road. The expensive paint jobs, artfully contoured bodywork and plush interiors don’t give the impression that these roadsters would tolerate a country track very well.

So why do people drive these expensive cars when all they really need is a bog standard sedan? To me, all you are doing when you drive around in one of these huge cars is to say, “Look at me! I have lots of money! I don’t need this car, it’s helluva expensive and it continues to cost me huge amounts of money in insurance, tax and maintenance, but hey, I’ve got the dosh! I could have given some of the money I so needlessly spend on this piece of bragging material to help somebody to improve his life, but I’d rather waste it. Fuck the poor.”

If somebody would walk around at a party shouting about how much money he has, we’d say he’s a wanker. But if he effectively does the same thing by showing off the unnecessarily expensive car he has, it is acceptable. I don’t understand this way of thinking.

I know, I also don’t drive the cheapest car available. I could have gone for a model from a less reputable manufacturer, something smaller and then donated the difference in price to charity. We can always improve on our ethics. So, in a sense I have to include myself with the wankers in the luxury SUV’s. But it’s a matter of degree. Spending the kind of money that would feed a family on car installments every month just seems wrong to me when you don’t need that car. If you are going to be throwing away money, why not rather give it to someone who could really do with a little extra?

You might ask, where will it end? Why am I not donating all my spare cash to charity? And yes, I do feel guilty about living well while others are starving. All I can say is that I think that wasting money just to impress others is taking it too far for me.

Is keeping up appearances really worth that much?

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Travelling through Indonesia’s mountainous interior

With some apprehension after my previous journey, I went in search of a good bus to take me down the escarpment to the coastal city of Padang in Sumatra.

Breakfast was a large ripe papaya that I still had left over from a visit to the market two days before and then it was time to carry my bags around the block to the bus station.

Compared to my previous bus ride on the Trans Sumatran Highway, this looked like it was going to be a piece of cake. The coach was not overloaded and everyone had his or her own assigned place. I got a window seat and I settled in to take in the scenery as the driver pulled out of the bus station at exactly the right time. I was impressed. We moved slowly with the morning traffic until we came to the outskirts of Bukittinggi. In the distance, Mount Marapi was looming over the paddy fields, its summit enveloped in cloud as usual. Just when I expected the bus to start moving faster, we slowed down and turned off onto a gravel road leading up the mountain slopes. Soon it became a narrow track and we started bouncing over bumps and through potholes until we arrived at a little house where a woman collected some cash from the driver. I suppose he used part of the morning’s fare to pay for something. Now that his personal affairs had been taken care of, I looked forward to the journey to Padang. But the bus did not turn back to the coast road. First we carried on up the muddy track to another house where a bag of carrots and some onions were handed to the driver. Next stop was at what looked suspiciously like a Muslim shebeen, where some boxes with bottles were loaded onto the seat next to the driver. After some inventive manoeuvring on the steep slope, with spinning wheels and lots of blue smoke, the coach was turned around and we headed back to the main route, stopping along the way to pick up some more groceries and a few plastic dolls. An hour after our departure time we were at last on our way again, the bus thoroughly covered in mud. It was around this time that I started feeling the effects of the papaya.

My digestive system made it clear to me that it was not happy with my choice of breakfast and that it was going to expel it shortly. Some nasty cramps started to take hold of my lower abdomen. Thankfully, I was on board a luxury coach and it had a toilet. I squeezed past the two other passengers in my row and hurried to the front of the bus, asking the driver’s permission to use the loo (he had the key to the door). He wasn’t happy to oblige, indicating that I would make a mess, ignorant Westerner that I was. But I knew that there was no way I could hold out until we reached Padang and I suppose he saw it in my eyes, because he gave me the key reluctantly.

Toilet cubicles on a bus are always cramped, but this being Indonesia, there had to be adequate washing facilities and so a large plastic container (almost a meter in diameter and filled to the brim with water) was placed in the only space available: right in front of the toilet where your legs normally go. If you wanted to sit down, you had to squeeze in next to the bucket, contort yourself to close the door behind your back and then climb over the sloshing water to get onto the seat, sitting with your legs in the air, as if you are at the gynaecologist. This is most undignified, especially when you have to do it all at very high speed because of the urgency of the situation. I made it just in time and as the relief of not having to clench for all I was worth came over me, I let my legs drop down ever so slightly. Just then the bus turned a corner and the water in the bucket splashed upwards, soaking my trousers completely. I sat there on the loo, leaning back with my legs in the air, dripping water everywhere and I wondered how far we still had to go and whether I could just stay in that cubicle until we arrived. The thought of squeezing past everybody with wet trousers was just too much for me. But there was no choice; someone was already knocking on the door. Now that the driver had allowed me in, everybody wanted to go.

The walk down the centre isle of the bus was awkward, to put it mildly. As I have said before, Indonesians are the most curious people that I have met and they all craned their necks to see exactly what was wrong with me, inspecting me critically and then having a general discussion about the state of my wet trousers and the possible causes. I sat down on my velvet seat without making eye contact with anybody and I watched the water soaking slowly into the plush cushioning. Not for long though. The papaya had not finished with me yet and soon I was squeezing past my fellow passengers again, on my way to the front of the bus, my ears blood red and my stomach contracting with an urgency that made me push to the front of the queue at the loo without even considering the outraged looks that I was getting. This time I didn’t have to dip my legs to wet my trousers. The bus had started its descent of the mountain slopes and we were going through some tight switchbacks. The driver was not slowing down; he had a new coach and he was pushing it as fast as it could go around those bends, leaning on the hooter every time he neared one. As I sat on the loo, the water splashed onto my lap, over my shirt and ran down my legs. I emerged even wetter than before. The lady in the seat next to me looked at me as if to ask whether I was all right, but luckily she spoke no English and I just gave her a stupid smile and stared out of the window without noticing the scenery.

A few more visits to the toilet later we arrived in Padang. I never got off a bus so fast!

This is another extract from Island Explorer.

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Consciousness came to me slowly and painfully. My head was hurting; I was nauseous as hell; my mouth tasted like snake spit and my back was killing me.

Daylight was just starting to filter through the closed shutters as I squinted through swollen eyelids to see what was going on around me. I was in the stern of the ship. There were two slim blondes, one on either side of me, each wearing only a bikini. I looked at them and felt better straight away. Richard was sprawled on the floor a short distance away, covered by a sarong. The shallow movements of his chest as he breathed were the only indication that he was alive. There were wet towels, magazines and various pieces of clothing scattered about the cabin and the four of us were lying in a mixture of water, food and vomit. I was, as Gerhard later put it, curled up in full survival position when he came into the cabin. He rummaged through the chaos and eventually retrieved his binoculars from underneath me. This cured my backache, but I kept my eyes shut tightly until he went away. I was still too miserable to contemplate facing the world. We must have had a hell of a party: no drink had ever made me feel this terrible before. By comparison, my worst hangover seemed like a spot of mild indigestion.

Slowly the events of the previous evening started to filter through to my throbbing brain, aided by some clues from my surroundings. There were no empty beer bottles or wine glasses lying around and no streamers draped over the furniture. This had not been one helluva New Year’s Eve party; in fact, it was April and even though we were on board the most romantic looking ship in Padang, Richard and I had not been seducing the lovely ladies by candle light on the high seas. We had just experienced our first night on the Indian Ocean and it had not been fun at all. I turned over and retched.

I became gradually more disappointed as I recalled how I came to share a berth for a night with two sparsely dressed girls. Shortly after our departure from Padang, the Indian Ocean had welcomed us with a concentrated little storm. Out here they call these mini cyclones “Sumatran black eyes”. You see the dark fist of clouds coming at you from the horizon and before you know it, it hits you hard, very hard. Rain pours down like it can only do in the tropics and the wind howls, first from one direction and minutes later from the opposite. These pocket-sized storms have given many an unsuspecting ship a severe battering and must have sunk quite a few over the years. To escape the weather, Gerhard decided to head for open water, away from the squall and from dangerous reefs. Often the storm passes quickly and it is over as suddenly as it had started – the sky clears, the winds die and all is peaceful again. But not that time.

We left the protection of the islands and found ourselves in an angry ocean with daylight fading fast. The water’s surface had been churned into powerful waves, which were coming at the ship from various angles. Rain and sea spray soaked the ship and water started dripping into the cabins. In the galley crockery and cutlery slid around noisily in the cupboards. We were being lifted up and slammed down repeatedly by the waves. The ship rolled from side to side like a pig in mud and you had to really hang on to stay upright. We greenhorns weren’t handling this very well. Soon almost all the new arrivals on board were seasick; we became a useless, apathetic bunch. The wind howled and the sea crashed onto the deck. The straining ship creaked and the struggling engine roared, creating an unearthly noise – the sound of doom. Through the murk in front of the wheelhouse I could make out Francois’ outline, as he struggled around the deck, trying to save clothes and other items of value from being washed overboard. From where I was crouched down, I watched the bow of the ship gradually rise into the air as we struggled up an approaching wave and then suddenly dip towards the ocean floor again, as we lurched down into the trough between the swells. After every second or third wave another one would hit us side-on and everything that wasn’t tied down would be flung into the air. The process repeated itself relentlessly, as if we had been abandoned on a funfair ride in hell. With each sickening downward dip, my stomach tore upwards into my chest. Acidic fluid collected in my gills and the most unbearable nausea took hold of me. Each movement of the ship sapped my energy and made me feel even worse than before.

Everybody who’s been to sea knows the cliché about getting properly seasick for the first time: At first you feel so bad that you worry you might die; later on you worry that you might not. It’s true. The only thing for me to do was to seek shelter and eventually I struggled into the cabin, where some of the others were already huddled together. Up at the helm Gerhard and Gavin were somehow managing to prevent the ship from sinking, keeping the bow facing more or less into the wind. I hunkered down as the ship floundered into the night, my stomach heaving uncontrollably until I passed out.

I wonder whether I would still be surfing at all if we had perfect waves to ride every day. I think I would have become bored with it all ages ago. 

What keeps me interested is the scarcity of really good waves here in Cape Town. 

I surf every day that I can, rain or shine, big waves or small and I can’t seem to get enough of it. But that is because I never quite get everything right when I ride a wave. Maybe I could have hit the lip harder; I would have made that tube if I had only dropped my shoulder a fraction more; I should have paddled harder for that last wave. The problem though, is that I can’t go back and ride the same wave again to correct my mistakes. The next wave will be very different to the one before it, even at spots that have “perfect” surf. 

Many things are appealing because they are difficult to attain. Their inaccessibility make them sought after and valuable, like diamonds, limited edition sports cars, beautiful women… or good waves. 

Surfing is fun even when the swell is weak or when the shape of the walls we ride is below par, but those conditions merely keep us going until the next good swell. What makes us come back for more on cold, rainy days, when the onshore is howling and when we’d rather be doing something else is that we want to be ready when that magic wave comes along one day. We live for the feeling of bliss that only a wave can produce, that incredible sensation that we can’t describe, so fleeting, but so absolutely mesmerizing and compelling that we have no choice but to return for more as soon as our tired bodies allow us to paddle out again. And then we try to catch another magic wave. Unfortunately this does not happen very often, even to the best of us. The better you get, the higher your expectations – the goal posts have merely been moved. 

But a strange thing happens to me when I get to surf good J-Bay for a few days on end. After a while, I become demotivated. Even though there are still brilliant rides out there with my name on them, I just don’t feel like paddling out as badly as before. Those never ending walls for carving and speeding barrels that repeat themselves ceaselessly are so plentiful that they have lost some of their appeal. I’ve consumed my quota. As the petrol attendants say, I’m full up. It will take a week or so of flatness to restore the desire for stoke. 

Enter the wave pool, the newest hype in the surfing world. I assume that if the machine settings are kept the same, that the waves would all be identical to each other. That means that you can go back again and again to work on your technique, timing and so forth. You could get really good. But wouldn’t it become boring?

I know that skate and snowboarders have half pipes that never change and that there are thousands of adherents to those sports who don’t seem to get bored. (No pun intended!) I suppose that you can vary your trajectory down the slope to change your ride completely, but somehow it all seems to get a little stale after a few repetitions.

Will wave pools change the kind of person who surfs? Will we get more perfectionists emerging from wave pools? People who don’t like the ever changing sea, with all it’s imperfections? Will wave pools train up surfers who are technically proficient, but unable to handle rough ocean conditions? Or, will we simply see more Slaters and less Wilbur Kookmeyers? 

Over the last two or three decades surfing has changed from a frowned upon counter culture lifestyle to a clean, acceptable sport. The Hippies have had to move their rusted Kombi’s and camper vans away to accommodate the flashy cars of high flying overachievers who now also surf. The whole sport has become much more regulated. I no longer feel very comfortable surfing at certain beaches that are now policed by life guards and municipal employees. A different kind of surfer goes there: the kind of guy who feels reassured by the safety officials and who prefers to shower off afterwards in a sterile changing room without getting sand on his feet. The dude who likes to show off his flashy new clothes while sipping cappuccino’s at the trendy beach cafe after the session. 

Will we now see another shift towards super athletes who surf perfectly? I have visions of ranks of sleekly toned surfers emerging from the wave pool factories and marching down the beach in step, paddling out in unison and taking turns to methodically rip each wave from the backline to the beach. 

I’m sure that this newest innovation in surfing will increase performance levels: the sport will become accessible to many more people and that alone will bring more talent to the sport. Add the opportunity to practice in perfect conditions whenever you want and you have a recipe for success. 

But will it still be fun?